After four days of intense discussions and brainstorming, ten major takeaways emerged from the group. These ideas formed the foundation of the participants’ plans for the next six months, after which we said we would check in with them and follow up on their progress towards transforming their news organizations for the digital future.
- Newspapers must capture local online spending in a meaningful way to survive.
- The web is for taking action, not reading text.
- Editors must create organizations focused on innovation that offer protection from daily production needs for creative groups.
- People are building communities online around geography and interests, and newspapers should take advantage of the trend by working to be aggregators of information about their communities.
- Train for core skills, not new technology, since it is too hard to keep up. Make employees responsible for their own technology training since it part of their careers.
- Newspapers need to break away from page view models of measuring success and focus instead on the breadth of sources referenced and the depth of community contributions.
- Newspapers should encourage user-generated content, but recognize it is not just a source of free content to monetize.
- Newspapers are competing in a landscape where a growing number of people are “un-newsed” and believe they can get enough news from their networks through word-of-mouth, so they must fight to stay relevant.
- Most journalists got into the business to serve the audience with investigative and watchdog journalism. This mission cannot be lost in the race to stay relevant online.
- Newspapers are still the most trusted source of information in their communities. They must learn how to harness this power online and with changing audiences.
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