Reporter Ellen Sung offers an interesting contradiction for newspapers. She says she craves a news diet full of deep, rich context. She wants a newspaper to have tough investigative journalism, probing public policy analysis and insightful foreign coverage. "But when those hard-nosed, critical articles appear in print," she says, "I don't even read them."

Give a reader exactly what she demands and she rejects it?

This, the King might say, is indeed a puzzlement.

Sung's rejection actually has little to do with content and much to do with newspapers' delivery system.

"Frankly, the thing intimidates me," says Sung, a reporter for Poynter.org. "It is unwieldy, even when printed on the 50-inh web. It brims with articles and advertisements and listings, all of varying relevance to my life - but there's no index! I have to wade through all the pages that don't interest me to find the ones that do (of course, this is why newspapers are able to sell advertising.) If I wanted to read a major metro Sunday paper cover to cover, it would take my whole day."

Sung says she prefers reading news online because it is browseable, searchable, free and almost universally accessible. Sung's seemingly contradictory position makes an important point for newspapers wrestling with the explosion of competing news sources. She does not give her age, but does identify herself as being in the 18-34-year-old range, which may explain the disposition toward an electronic version of a print news outlet.

But the real point is bigger than any single demographic. Any organization marketing anything to people - news included - must understand the audience if it is to be successful. Give audiences exactly what they want, and they still may not buy it if the content even appears to be inaccessible.

Now, imagine how this concept applies to the messages your organization hopes to share with its audiences through the news media. Do your spokespersons speak to reporters in technical jargon? Do they even attempt to simplify complex issues and pose them in ways that reporters can understand and actually use in news stories?

For many organizations courting the attention of the news media, the answer is a disappointing "no."

It may be helpful to think of a reporter as the front end of a long information pipeline that reaches directly to the people who most need to understand your organization. If you overload the pipeline, will anything get through?