Story Review

I was talking about movies with my wife and a friend the other day and the subject of good films getting dumbed down after test screening came up. We were, of course, indignant. It is a topic that I have noticed appears relatively often in conversations about Hollywood and is a practice that is generally frowned upon. But why?
Test screening is a way for film-makers to get customer feedback and tailor the product so as to suit most consumers’ needs. I have been campaigning for news organisations to involve their audiences in the process of making news, of writing stories; why shouldn’t film studios do the same?
I guess we all have an audience in mind when creating our stories and we just cannot believe that our audience may want anything different than we want.
Say you are a big financial daily and you run a survey of your audience and people tell you that they want a page-three girl. Will you have one if that helps your bottom line? Most All big financial dailies will be outraged at the idea that their readers may request such a thing. And that is, to be sure, an extreme example.
But the question remains: when do people stop being valued customers giving us crucial feedback and cross the line over to morons who want stupid things? If the morons vastly outnumber our preferred type of reader (just check the comments on your company’s YouTube page), shouldn’t we, as service providers, cater for their needs?
I have no answer to this. My instinctive reaction is to say that we shouldn’t, but does that not suggest that a degree of arrogance must always remain part of journalism?