News Tools 2008

I am heading for News Tools 2008, a conference in California where organizers hope “Journalism’s ideals meet Silicon Valley’s tools in a three-day, conceptual mashup.” It is hosted by the Journalism That Matters Collaborative, the Media Giraffe Project, the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and Yahoo! Inc.” I am looking forward to talking to non-journalists (and a few journalists too!) about their perspectives on the opportunities of digital media and I will blog from the conference, which continues through Saturday. The official conference blog can be found here.

In Miami, a Reader Exchange Editor

The job title caught my eye right away. Reader Exchange Editor, Miami Herald. Exchange Editor. Exchange. It’s the first time I’ve heard a reader-related job title at a major news organization that captures the idea that digital interaction is a two-way, even multiple-way street. (Please let me know if there are others.)
The new Reader Exchange Editor, Shelley Acoca, got my attention quickly too. The challenge of user content and comments often induces eye-rolls, forlorn sighs or frustrated shrugs from those who have to manage it. Two minutes into a phone conversation with Acoca, I thought: She’s up to her eyeballs in this stuff and she’s loving it!
This is the second of two posts on the Miami Herald. As I explained here, Miami participated in Knight Digital Media Center’s Leadership Conference in 2007 and has implemented a number of organizational changes since then.
Like many news organizations, the Herald is learning an important new dance with readers. Rick Hirsch, Managing Editor/Multimedia, said creating the position was a recognition of the importance of user interaction to the future of the news organization.
“We feel pretty strongly here that the whole area of user content and comments and sharing of our our content, the desire people have to interact with our news is a really important part of our future. It’s an undeniable way things work now. We were moving into that space enthusiastically but randomly.” Hirsch said. So the Herald decided “We ought to have a really smart journalist engage with this content, interacting with people, studying how this develops, and really developing a strategy for us for this whole aspect of news and information in the digital space.”
Enter Acoca, who had shown her enthusiasm for developing user content in print and online with efforts including an art contest and a Hispanic cartoon contest as features editor.
Since taking over as Exchange Editor late last year, Acoca has focused on:
- Bloggers. Hirsch said the idea was to elevate the quality of the Herald’s blogs, challenging bloggers the same way editors challenge other journalists. Acoca edits bloggers, as well as columnist Leonard Pitts. Her responsibilities include how-to coaching (what’s a widget?), working with journalists to develop concepts for successful blogs, and coordinating live chats. With the help of Mindy McAdams, Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Florida, Acoca developed these guidelines for bloggers.
Acoca’s advice for new bloggers?
“Shout about your blog from the rooftops. Email your sources, other bloggers, bloggers you don’t know. Getting the word out is critical in insuring long-term success.
“And, oh yeah, have fun—this is *your* space in a way a traditional newspaper can’t be—the words, the pictures, the videos, the widgets. It offers a broad range of ways to express yourself. Experiment. Learn. Enjoy.”
- User comments. Under Acoca’s guidance, MiamiHerald.com recently began requiring commenters to register, a switch that has mostly cleaned up offensive commenting and cut the total number of comments in about half. Based on the experience of other McClatchy newspapers, Acoca hopes that the number will slowly increase over time. “Mostly people have gotten it or they’ve gone elsewhere. It was very few people who were posting lots of bad comments all day long,” Acoca said. Since registration began in mid-March, Acoca said she has had to deny access to about one commenter per week for using offensive language after being warned.
Acoca is very enthusiastic about the value of commenting. Comments, she says, are a way for the public to get information that journalists might not be able to get.
- Online traffic. Acoca is trying to provide MiamiHerald.com with a more sophisticated view of its online traffic, particularly tracking readers of different content seem to go onto the site so the Web site can serve up updates at times that make the most sense for different topics and readers.

Acoca is on the frontline of the changing role of news organizations in the digital age. “Part of it is community building. We aren’t the ones who are going to do that. We’re the facilitators. We should let other people take that ball and run with it. It’s worth reading the stuff that people put up there. they have some really good ideas. Newspapers lost ground for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons might be that we were victims of our own arrogance. we served up the same menu every day. The food we liked as opposed to the food they liked. Now we’re giving readers choices.”

Acoca also has a good vantage point for seeing change in the culture of the Miami newsroom. “We’re all learning together. That’s created a more collegial situation. It’s all learning from each other. There’s not big expert who can teach you everything any more. It’s a much more egalitarian thing.”

First, the leadership emphasized that she didn’t need to have all the answers right away. Rick Hirsch told her “ ‘Don’t worry if you have days when you don’t know what to do with yourself,’ “ Acoca recalls. I did have a lot of those days. There’s no map.”

If I were starting a new and challenging job, I think that’s one of the most helpful things the boss could say.

What are your strategies for engaging with the public online? Please join the conversation.

Patrick Hogan offered this comment when I mentioned the Reader Exchange Editor in an earlier post:
“The Reader Exchange Editor position is intriguing, although it’s something smaller papers (which you’ll find frequently have the same volume of comments or more), can’t afford”

That’s a very good point. At the same time, your newsroom might consider allocating even a few hours a week of a journalist’s time to reader issues that are a priority. For example, someone might be able to spend a few hours each week analyzing online traffic. Or developing resources on blogging and training bloggers. Try to identify the activity that will help your organization the most, right now. Set realistic goals and tease out a little time each week. I think you’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish.

Location-based media: Take the survey

Paul Lamb points to a survey that Medill graduate students are conducting to find out more about how newsrooms are using location-based technologies such as GPS-enabled devices, mobile phones, interactive maps and audio tours. If you’re in a newsroom, you can help by filling out the quick survey here. I wrote more about the Medill project here.

Editorial independence: Let’s get real

The tussling over ownership—and now direction—of The Wall Street Journal has created a lot of headlines. I do not know enough to have an opinion about Rupert Murdoch’s plans to add more non-business content to the Journal. What bothers me right now is the way the phrase “editorial independence” is being thrown around in blog posts like this one that seem to suggest that editors can ignore the business environment in which the news organization operates and the business strategies of the larger organization.
I wish that were true. But I define editorial independence more narrowly: Journalists must make decisions on what to cover and publish independent of factors such as whether it involves advertisers (think “Why is that store opening on Page One?”, friends of the publisher (think: “Does that person’s obituary really warrant a prominent teaser?"), might embarrass the news organization or its staff (think corrections or that DUI arrest) or even prevailing community opinion (think brave newspapers during the Civil Rights era).
At the same time, editors in real life make those decisions within the context of a business strategy. For example, if the business strategy of a newspaper in Community A is to be highly local, editorial independence does not allow the editor to routinely expend significant news gathering resources on reporting outside the circulation area. If the business strategy is to build audience on the Web, editorial independence does not allow the editor to drag her feet on developing and staffing a good Web site.
I confess, I am cynical about the phrase “editorial independence.” In my years as a consultant to newsrooms, I have been in more than a few where more than a few people used phrases like “editorial independence” when they were thinking “I don’t want to change.”
As Forbes reported last week, editors are spending more time than before on business strategy and have to be keenly aware of the business context in which they make editorial decisions. Last night, I asked a few editors for a reality check on this development and its effect on editorial independence, Here are a couple of quick-turnaround responses to share. (I’ll post more as I get them and please join the discussion in comments.)

Bob Zaltsberg, Editor, Herald-Times, Bloomington, Ind.

Editorial independence can and should be the same in 2008 as it was in 1998 or 1988 or 1978. But an editor must be aware of the business issues that are facing our industry and be willing to have the newsroom participate in covering legitimate topics that also have appeal to the business side. What I mean is, an editor must defend the newsroom standards and principles regarding playing favorites or pursuing (or not pursuing) stories that will benefit an individual or business, just as we always have. But an editor must also understand that good stories for a section (or Web site) targeting young readers or wine drinkers or moms or people interested in health issues are not that much different from having a whole department that covers sports and creates special section content for NCAA tournaments or high school sports previews.

It’s also important for all sorts of reasons that we participate in our company’s strategic planning process. In a strong, serious media company, the strategic goals are going to include attracting and retaining readers/audience. We have to lead that effort, whether its in print or online. We can have editorial independence AND work with our colleagues on the business side. In fact, we must.

Caesar Andrews, Executive Editor, Detroit Free Press
The day-to-day direction of newsrooms works best if decisions are made based on the top priority of serving readers. So tactical matters - which individual stories to cover, what angles and sources to pursue, where to place stories - ought to be driven by journalists making choices they can defend based on the journalism involved. Without ignoring ideas and thoughts and concerns from outside the newsroom, these choices should be independent-minded.

The larger role of divining a workable big-picture strategy for covering the community is more complex. It extends well beyond the newsroom. It has to make business sense. Others get to weigh in. Newsrooms cannot afford to wall themselves off. In fact, they should want the perspective of smart people from different non-news corners of the company. In an era of tighter resources and more competing sources of information, there’s just a greater need for more precision in targeting audiences. Strategies have to do double-duty. They have to result in credible news coverage that attracts and satisfies a changing pool of readers. And they have to at the same time attract advertisers who find unique value in our news products, so much so that they are willing to bankroll a significant part of our overall enterprise. Creating that reality demands less rigid departmental independence in shaping business strategy. But done the right way, heavy coordination should not taint the daily decision-making best left to newsrooms.

UPDATE: Here’s an additional response from Carlos Sanchez, Editor, Waco Tribune-Herald:

From my perspective, editorial independence means that I have the freedom to go where ever the news takes me in my community and beyond—if it affects my community. It means that I can take on the sacred cows if, by taking them on, our readers are illuminated in some way. It does not mean taking on the sacred cows simply for the sake of taking them on.

It is not only foolish, but irresponsible not to weigh the implications of any story that we are pursuing against the impact it will have on our community. That should extend to the impact on business that a story may have on our institution. I’m not saying we should be dissuaded against taking on stories that might impact our bottom line; I am saying that I feel a keen responsibility to understand the implications any story might have on our bottom line and inform my publisher of those implications.

The Miami Herald: Moving furniture, people and attitudes

Organizational change in newsrooms is a major topic for this blog and I will report on changes in structure, processes or job descriptions, that are fueling digital transitions. For starters, I’m checking in with 10 major metro news organizations whose top editors participated in last year’s KDMC Leadership Conference: Transforming Newsrooms for the Digital Future. When that session convened in January 2007, participating newsrooms were either in the midst of big changes or poised for them. They came to KDMC to test and refine their plans. Judging from follow up interviews so far, these newsrooms have changed a lot in the past 15 months.

Today’s case in point is The Miami Herald, where Rick Hirsch, Managing Editor/Multimedia cites three major changes that have reshaped how the newsroom does its work.

- Creating a Continuous News Desk “as focal point of newsroom decision making. It’s in the middle of the room, and from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. each day, the hands-on leaders for Metro news gathering, Web design, print design, photo, video, copy editing do their jobs. It’s part of bringing on the ongoing decision making from the corners of our newsroom to the middle where we can work swiftly on immediate news (for the web, radio, text messages, e-mail alerts), executing on video and multimedia components, and developing enterprise content and presentation for the newspaper that provides its readers with context and depth they didn’t get the day before on the web.”

- Seeding multimedia experts around the newsroom. “Within each news department (metro, business, features, sports, world), there is a multimedia team that includes a high-ranking editor and reporters and researchers with key multimedia skills to oversee that department’s content on our Web sites. We want each department to have the same ownership of (and passion for) their Web channel as they have for the print section.”

- Creating a new Reader Exchange Editor position “to manage reader interaction on the web—everything from user generated content to commenting on stories. In addition, this editor has worked to develop goals, training and standards for our bloggers as we try to lift blogging as a journalistic form.”

Hirsch talks about the “corners” and the “middle” of the newsroom and I think that’s a very apt way of thinking about smart organizational and culture change. In the old newsroom, most of the action was in the “corners” or pockets of individuals or teams or departments that operated fairly independently as long as they fed material to production in assembly line fashion at the end of the day. This offered efficiency: Stories got covered and the newspaper came out. Over time, in most newsrooms, it also fostered internal competition, weakened accountability to the overall product, and focused people on details at the expense of the big picture. The Web is forcing people in newsrooms to collaborate early and often, to know their audiences and to think strategically. As we see in Miami, changing the physical layout of the newsroom is driving change in how the staff develops and displays content.

“It’s really starting to make a difference. It’s really starting to be the center of gravity for the newsroom,” Hirsch says of the continuous news desk. “Instead of having the center of gravity be the executive editor’s office or the city editor’s office, you want it to be in the middle of the room. It’s helped drive the change that we publish first online.”

And here’s some symbolism: The desk is not only in middle of the newsroom, it’s on a raised platform.

I am intrigued by the Reader Exchange Editor position, especially with all the debate and turmoil news organizations, including MiamiHerald.com, face in dealing with offensive reader comments. I interviewed the enthusiastic and savvy Reader Exchange Editor Shelley Acoca and later this week I’ll post more about how that’s working out in Miami.

A roadmap to blogging

Mindy McAdams offers a link-studded outline of her blogging training for newsrooms. Looks like a great training resource.

Mobilizing for mobile: Consumers go mobile, will the news follow?

Much buzz this week about delivery of news and advertising to mobile devices. Poynter’s Rick Edmunds says it was the hot topic among people with dollar signs in their eyes at the NAA-ASNE Captial Conference. The Associated Press announced it is developing Mobile News Network that will deliver news to Apple’s iPhone—and allow AP member news organizations to sell advertising to mobile users.

What does this mean for the newsroom? The opportunity to reach more people (and perhaps more of those younger folks) is exciting. The challenges go well beyond learning to apply new technology.

Here’s a caution from Paul Lamb:

“Unfortunately, most media still view mobile as only a way to shrink down their existing print, broadcast, and online offerings and re-format them for a smaller screen. And that’s one important reason why they are not having much success to date. It’s time to start thinking outside newsprint-wrapped boxes and to imagine what can be done altogether differently via emerging platforms.”

Medill’s Rich Gordon is thinking along the same lines. Gordon points to a Guardian article, ”Why mobile Japan leads the world.”

“… journalists and media companies would be wise to start thinking about the threats and opportunities presented by a world where cellular phones and other portable devices have pervasive, high-speed Internet connections. The Guardian article illustrates clearly why this world is likely to arrive: the business and revenue possibilities are enormous,” Gordon says.

Like Lamb, Gordon says the challenge will be to quickly create new forms of content that take advantage of mobile technology and its users.

“There also seem to be some interesting parallels between the evolution of the “desktop Web” and the “mobile Web.” The early years of the Web featured “repurposed” content originally created for other media and the growth of new e-commerce businesses such as Amazon and eBay. It took some time before content creators and media companies started figuring out what kinds of content were most appropriate for the Web, and the most valuable for consumers. The same pattern seems to be playing out in Japan: repurposed content and “m-commerce” first, with original content created for mobile devices lagging behind.

“What kinds of content will be most successful for mobile devices? As with the Web, there will be some value to using these devices to deliver the same content (say, video or news headlines) created for another medium. But it also seems reasonable to assume that winning mobile content must take advantage of either or both of these two important attributes of mobile devices: first, that they are portable (and therefore, always in easy reach); and second, that their geographic location can be known (so content can be customized based on the user’s location).”

Gordon has a team of Medill master’s students looking at the issue. In June, they will deliver “a report about the state of U.S. mobile technology and content (intended as a resource for journalists and media companies), and at least one example of a journalistic story or service that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile media.” Meanwhile, Gordon’s students are blogging their project here.

Is your newsroom working on mobile? Please share insights and links.

In the Either/Or newsroom, why not Both?

One common newsroom approach that blocks change is Either/Or framing.

John Robinson pointed to (and challenged) a classic example of journalism Either/Or think: The notion that journalists sacrifice credibility to meet the expectations of their online audiences.

I’m not here to revive that shopworn premise. Thankfully, many news organizations have moved on. But I think it stands as a clear example of the way Either/Or thinking holds back journalists and news organizations.

The workforce culture gurus call this “oppositional’’ thinking. It’s the tendency to see two ideas as being in conflict or mutually exclusive rather than approaching them as being potentially compatible.

So it’s EITHER credibility OR satisfying readers but never BOTH. It’s EITHER an offensive, anonymous free-for-all in reader comments OR it’s no comments allowed at all. It’s EITHER “Do it the way we’ve always done it” OR “Get complaints from readers.” EITHER journalists OR bloggers. That the last one raged long after journalists were blogging and bloggers were creating journalism is testament to the power of oppositional thinking.

The problem is that this way of thinking swiftly closes the door on alternative possibilities just when journalists and their newsrooms need to be more open to them.

As I said in a comment to Robinson: As long as journalists think they have to sacrifice credibility to meet reader expectations, they will not embrace abundant opportunities to do both.

Even worse, in the Either/Or universe, one of the two alternatives usually feels more familiar and comfortable to the journalists (Be credible. Keep offensive comments out.). The old is always going to feel more familiar than the new, so the decision between two alternatives usually favors the tried and true.

How do you encourage your colleagues to move smartly from Either/Or to Both?

I’d start by borrowing from Bob Steele at Poynter, who advises journalists to avoid making important ethical decisions when they’ve only considered two alternatives. Editors who consistently ask for and offer multiple alternatives can change Either/Or mindsets that are limiting their newsrooms.

What Either/Or examples have you seen? What alternatives have you found? I would love to see comments that explore other newsroom examples of this mindset and tips how you’ve led your staff past it.

Links: NAA-ASNE convention presentations

ASNE and NAA are posting slides from presentations at their joint Capital Conference (Sunday through Wednesday in D.C.).
Link to the main directory here.
Two Sunday presentations caught my eye:
- David Stoeffler has a good basic overview of online tactices in ”Dynamic Web Strategies for Small Newspapers.”
- A panel including Gannett’s Jennifer Carroll, Placeblogger founder Lisa Williams and Media Management Center’s Mike Smith, explores ”Building Audience in a Fragmented Media World.”

Newsroom change: Forget the crowd, find the change agent(s)

Ryan Sholin has terrific advice for pushing change in the newsroom: Don’t waste your time trying to change the whole newsroom at once. Cultivate the early adopters.

I’ve seen this approach work in newsroom after newsroom, as Tim Porter and I described in ”News, Improved.” Once the early adopters go to work, the discussion can move from the abstract (and fear-inducing) notions of change to concrete examples of new forms of journalism. Conversely, I have been in many newsrooms where executives thought that merely telling their staffs en masse to change meant they would. That’s a formula for frustration.

As Sholin says: “.. you can’t mandate mindset.  But you can grow culture.”

What approach has worked for your newsroom? Do you have a way to identify and foster early adopters?

Training for change: Don’t forget the leadership

In my work advising newsrooms over the past few years, I’ve been struck by the need for significant changes in leadership attitudes and styles of top news executives and newsroom managers. Amid the challenges and excitement of making sure their staffs learn new skills and new ways of thinking about their mission and their audiences, newsroom leaders often have to learn new skills and attitudes as well.

In the assembly-line world of the daily newspaper, the traditional top-down organizational model for the newsroom worked pretty well. But in a digital environment that requires collaboration and seeks constant adaptation and innovation, the cohesiveness of the top editors and their ability to communicate a shared vision consistently becomes a force in pushing the organization forward.

Jill Geisler at the Poynter Institute says a key role of a leader is to “Communicate a unifying vision for the team, but also deliver it personally to individuals, framed so they can clearly see and feel it. Use every opportunity to reinforce your message so it becomes part of the daily language and life of the organization.”

To do that most effectively, the leadership team has to be on message, not walking and talking in lock step, but showing how all the parts of the newsroom fit into a whole that shares values and wants to move in the same direction.

Carolyn Washburn, editor of the The Des Moines Register, is addressing the need for her editors to become change leaders with a Leadership Institute.

The Register was one of the first newspapers to convert to the Gannett Information Center model, which means everyone has print and online responsibilities. By early 2007, the newsroom had been reorganized.

“We had put new structure, new staff and lots of new tools in place - video gear, databases, etc. I decided that the next step was to more fully develop the editors as leaders. We would only be successful with new tools and structure if our editors fully engaged as continuous learners, as innovators, as strong managers and as leaders. We needed their leadership and smarts and creativity to DO something with all of that new stuff. Some of them already got that; others were good assembly line editors but not stepping up as leaders.”

With $25,000 from her publisher and the help of a consulting professor from nearby Drake University, Washburn put together a six-month training program that she describes as “a wonderful balance of practical and inspiring.” Washburn enrolled 18 people—about a dozen top editors from the newsroom and colleagues from other departments who work closely with the newsroom.

The program addressed topics including leadership and management (and the difference between the two), when to draw on different leadership styles, negotiating and holding staff accountable, dealing with conflict. You can read a summary of the curriculum, created by Dr. Tom Westbrook, of Learn Associates and a professor at Drake University, here.
The program wrapped up in March, and Washburn is seeing results.

“It has been excellent, giving everyone common vocabulary, prompting discussions about our personal and organizational values, learning to identify how “ready” our folks are to take on different kinds of work and how to manage to their level of readiness, how to lead for accountability,’’ Washburn said in an e-mail.

What a great list of competencies for today’s newsroom leaders (whatever their formal rank). I especially like the idea of instruction in how to assess and manage the readiness of the staff.

Of course, it doesn’t all end with one training program, even one as ambitious as Washburn’s. Washburn is already planning a similar program for the next tier of editors in her newsroom and looking for ways to keep the recently trained leadership group talking - and learning.

Are your expectations changing for your newsroom leaders? How? And how are you helping them learn to change?

Resources: Poynter’s Geisler effectively summarizes the role of the leader in a change environment in the handout ”Rules of Change.” If you are thinking about new ways to understand the dynamic role of leadership in your newsroom, it’s a good place to start.

Credibility study: It’s the engagement, stupid

A new survey on the credibility of online news brings into focus some old school vs new school tensions that news executives, other journalists—and the people who rely on them for news—face.

“The Online Credibility Gap,” sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the Associated Press Managing Editors, was released Tuesday via a Poynter News University Webinar. For all the details, read the full report package here.

This morning, I sat in on a Webinar exploring the survey hosted by Poynter’s NewsU and led by by John Bartosek, editor of The Palm Beach Post and chairman of APME’s Credibility Committee.

One top takeaway was the finding that a half the 161 readers surveyed thought it would be beneficial to have “journalists joining the conversation online and giving personal views.” In contrast, only about one fourth of the 1,200 editors surveyed felt that way, and nearly 60 percent thought it would be harmful. I suspect some of the editors on the “harmful” side had visions as they answered that question of journalists ranting and taking sides. My mental response to that thought was “Still?”

I think the public answer is less about wanting opinions and more about wanting engagement and transparency to be part of the information package. Years ago (pre digital revolution), as ombudsman at The Oregonian, I spoke or e-mailed with thousands of readers and worked on a newspaper credibility project. Even then it was clear that the same people who might distrust the motives of journalists they had never met were perfectly willing to trust a journalist they met or spoke with on the telephone. The Web has increased both the expectation—and the opportunity—to engage more fully. I would like to see some comments on how newsrooms are meeting this challenge.

In his NewsU presentation, Bartosek some practical steps editors may want to consider:
-- Does your news organization have a clear policy for making online corrections and is it applied consistently?
-- Do staff and readers understand the terms and conditions of using the Web site, particularly as it pertains to standards for comments? Do users know that they can report offensive or inappropriate comments and that the site will take action to remove them?

The survey also points to a divide between online news users and editors about whether anonymous comments should be allowed. More on that soon.

A new venue for digital news leadership

Welcome to News Leadership 3.0, a place where newsroom leaders discuss the challenges and opportunities of transforming their news organizations and their staffs into adaptive, multi-platform engines of journalism and information.

This blog will focus on the leadership, newsroom culture and ways of organizing newsrooms to create engaging and relevant journalism across multiple platforms. We’ll report on the opportunities and challenges that newsroom executives and online news leaders face as they chart new strategies and foster innovation in a digital news era.

In the newsroom, what are newsroom leaders doing to increase awareness, change attitudes, articulate the vision and prepare people to implement it? What tools and expertise do leaders themselves need to become effective change agents? What new structures and processes are helping newsrooms become more productive and more creative? How are leaders encouraging their staffs to adopt and adapt to new technologies for gathering and distributing news? How are they navigating a growing range of demands in print and multimedia against a backdrop of flat or declining resources?

This blog and these areas of focus are in response to discussions with 20 top editors and online news leaders from 10 major regional metro newspapers who participated in the KDMC’s inaugural Leadership Conference: “Transforming News Organizations for the Digital Future” in January 2007.

Like their peers around the country, these editors were asking their newsrooms to embrace a 24/7 news cycle, to learn new skills, to adopt new attitudes and to find ways to balance the demands of print and online.

The goal of the conference was to give the editors both innovative and practical ideas for changing the culture and the operational focus of their newsrooms to embrace change in the new media landscape.

Now, a year later, we’re seeing tremendous gains of those news organizations and many others as well as their paths forward in 2008. We hope this conversation benefits other newsroom leaders struggling to make sure journalism and good journalists survive what is no longer the Digital Future, but the Digital Now.

If the forecasters are right, 2008 may be more difficult on the legacy news business than the year before. Still, news leaders we heard from recently emphasized a sense of progress, a sense that there is work to be done and it’s doable. 

For example, John Yemma at The Boston Globe/Boston.com, has a long list of accomplishments as well as a long list of challenges ahead. His comment typified an attitude that has come through in follow up conversations:

“While new media have disrupted the traditional newspaper business as nothing before, causing major restructuring, downsizing, and scrambling on our part, we have also been given the tools to enter media we have not been dominant in before—broadcasting, for instance, via web video and podcasting. We still have a critical mass of journalistic resources ... and we can establish our brand in new media as we have in print by following the same standards but using different story-telling techniques. I don’t just say that, I’m convinced of that. And while I know there is nervousness over the future, I also think that our staff—and journalists everywhere—have moved well beyond denial and are just asking for the right tools and training to do what they do in new media. That is what I am working toward.”

John Yemma’s comments suggest a guiding tone for this space: Let’s be practical. Let’s be optimistic. And let’s get on with it.

After all, pessimism has no future. Even in these challenging times, optimism just might.

So tell us your stories. That is what this space is for: Your successes, your challenges, your ideas and your questions for fellow editors who are transforming their newsrooms and their journalism.

Coming up: Later this week, a look at a leadership initiative at The Des Moines Register.