Weekend reading

Alfred Hermida offers his advice and links to resources on ”How to be a multimedia journalist.”

Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words has ”7 Eye-popping interactives (and 3 ways to create one)”

Difficult week? Check out the very funny ”Stuff Journalists Like” site. (Thanks to Digidave for the pointer.)

On the other side of the burning bridge

On the ”NewsHour” Wednesday night, Christian Science Monitor Editor John Yemma looked tired. Very tired. But his smile was the smile of a winner and rightly so—Yemma, a longtime print journalist, gets to march toward a media future without a ton of newsprint strapped to his ankles.

The Monitor announced earlier this week that it would drop daily print publication starting in April, build up its Web site and publish a weekend edition. Rick Edmonds of Poynter Online details the changes here and here. My own initial thoughts are here.

Editors may focus on why the Christian Science Monitor’s plans are not immediately relevant to their world regional or daily newspapers. There are big differences. The Monitor doesn’t draw much advertising. It has expensive national distribution. It gets a multimillion-dollar subsidy from the Christian Science church ($12 million this year to be reduced with the shift to digital).

I would focus instead on this key difference: More than any traditional print news organization I am aware of, Yemma and the Monitor crew have a chance to envision a Monitor (dot com) that could be viable five or 10 years from now and make it so.

Howard Weaver, the Vice President News for the McClatchy Company, once drew on the image of a bridge afire separating traditional news organizations from their future:

“My current metaphor for our business is this: We have to move, and we can see a secure spot for ourselves right across the river. The good news is, there’s a bridge; the bad news is, it’s on fire. There’s time to get across, but not to [screw] around. I intend to get to the other side before the bridge burns up. Who’s coming with me?”

Reading this now, I see the flames rising and I wonder whether Weaver or anyone else can really see a “secure spot right across the river.” It has been more an article of faith than a proven business model that the future—that is, the future revenue to pay for future journalism—resides online.

Liberated from print, journalists at the Christian Science Monitor have a chance to define that ground across the river.

I fear, increasingly, that able and dedicated editors in many newsrooms are not getting that chance. Instead, their job seems to be propping up the flaming bridge for one day, one week or a few months at a time while the future races farther ahead.

Consider:
-- Buyouts in 2006 and 2007 cost newsrooms valuable experience and institutional memory. Bad enough. Now layoffs increasingly take the new hires—predominantly the young, digitally saavy journalists newsrooms need to shape a viable future. In Spokane, innovative leaders Steve Smith and Carla Savalli saw this non-future very clearly and left. Just today, I scratched my head when I saw several online producers would be part of the latest round of layoffs at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.
-- Tribune’s much publicized newspaper redesign efforts have a decidedly 1998 feel to them. They may slow readership losses but they are unlikely to staunch the bleed of advertising. How much does tinkering with print take away from moving more aggressively online?
-- Progressive editors talk about a goal of 50-50 effort for print and online effort in their newsrooms. But even in 2008, they’re hard-pressed to tell you even 25 percent of their staff time goes beyond print.

Mindy McAdams recently reported: “Yesterday a journalist who (still) works at a big Florida newspaper told me, ‘Last year we were trying to shoot as much video as possible. This year, we’re trying to save the paper.’ “

That is sad. And scary. It heightens my fear that we are at or close to a tipping point where demoralized news organizations will stop trying to innovate and will simply man the waterhoses while their owners stoke the fires of the burning bridge.

Update: Here’s an interview with Yemma about plans for the Monitor.

Monitor: Daily “paper” no more

The venerable Christian Science Monitor is going to drop daily print publication beginning in April. The Monitor will publish a print weekend edition.

This sounds like an inevitable (and thus smart) move for a newspaper that, as Poynter’s Rick Edmonds points out, bears significant printing and national distribution costs while attracting little advertising. The Monitor relies on subscription payments and it receives a hefty subsidy from the Christian Science Church ($12 million this year).

Ken Doctor argues that the math for this transition still doesn’t work without a subsidy. Doctor captures the Catch 22 in which most traditional print organizations find themselves:

“Today, dailies can look at similar arithmetic to the Monitor’s: How much do I save in physical and distribution costs in greatly reducing the print product (Monday?; Tuesday? and more)? How much do I forsake in print revenue? How much can I really gain in online ad revenue how quickly?

“Written on the back of the envelope or large on a whiteboard, the answer is the same: it doesn’t come close to working. Last year, about 92% of all newspaper revenues came from print. That number is declining some, as print ad revenues tank, but no US publisher can claim more than 13% digitally-based revenues today. Newspaper companies have simply failed to make a transition fast enough.

“Within the arithmetic, publishers cannot maintain anything close to the size of newsrooms (vital content creation going forward) or size of their ad staffs (vital sales connections as local online-only revenue becomes big and real). What would be needed to flip the switch: subsidy.

“Sure, we can call it investment, deferment of profits, whatever. But really, what we’re saying is stopgap funding is needed to let journalism companies get from here to there, from this mainly print today to the mainly digital tomorrow. The conversation, amid the rising newsroom toll, has got to move to where that funding can come from. Otherwise, the circulation declines we saw yesterday will gain even more velocity.”

It remains to be seen whether news companies will make that investment. Certainly, debt-sadddled companies such as Media News, Tribune and McClatchy may not be able to afford the reinvest limited revenues. Even independent news companies (The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, for example) and the privately-held (note the Newhouse retrenchment in Newark) are pulling back.

Our newsrooms will be even smaller. The leadership challenge then is daunting. Newsrooms have become largely reactive —managing layoffs, reorganizing staff and cutting journalism and product in cycles. That may get a news organization to the next round, but how much farther? The Monitor shift may signal a more strategic approach that envisions the news operation of five years from now and builds towards it -- builds down the cost of the operation and builds up its digital capacity. While the Monitor has a subsidy to fall back on, other newsrooms may have to look to their corporate bosses for more room to envision and build a realistic future.

Let’s hear it for the virtual team

My friend Tim Porter responded to my thoughts about copy desks (”The debate over outsourcing vs. quality needs a reality check”) by reminding me, among other things, that he and I wrote a book together a couple ago while he was on the West Coast and I was in Chicago. We rarely met. Come to think of it, our editors did their part from St. Petersburg, Florida; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, D.C.

Tim now works on a number of photography, writing, and editing projects (be sure to catch his stunning new book ) while rarely meeting face to face with any of his partners.

His conclusion:

“Newsroom traditionalists might argue that proximity contributes to quality. They are wrong. The prodigious amount of so-so writing and editing seen in many newspapers is testament to that. Commitment to excellence, responsibility and, most importantly these days, personal growth lead to quality - and those values are highly portable.

“First the doors came off newspapers, then the walls blew out. In the next couple of years, we’ll see the floors drop away. Knowledge work - which is what journalism consists of, i.e., literary and creative skill applied to principles of public information, access and transparency - doesn’t need an address. It just needs a platform.”

Here’s the full post.

Weekend reading

Amy Gahran offers Twitter Basics, an easy-to-follow guide to the micro blogging tool that many journalists are using in their reporting (either to gather news or to disseminate it).

Reporters Cookbook is a great resource for journalists, with special emphasis on computer-assisted reporting. (via Gahran and Notes from a Teacher.)

For entertainment, this takeoff on this week’s print redesign by The Los Angeles Times is a lot more interesting than the actual redesign.

Whither the copy desk?

Dean Singleton says MediaNews Group might consolidate copy editing functions across its more than four dozen newspapers, perhaps even moving a general copy desk offshore. “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter,” Singleton says.

In response, the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) says such a move is guaranteed to kill credibility. ACES put up on its Web site a photo of Singleton with the blaring headline: “Will this idea never die? It’s time to look out for readers and credibility, not save a buck.”

I’m not fan of Dean Singleton. MediaNews debt alone suggests the CEO is a poor business steward whose cost-cutting moves are reacting to payment deadlines rather than building a long term future. His comments about copy desks reflect as much nuance as a buzz saw.

Still, I’ve got to challenge ACES and others who rest on the credibility/quality argument. You’re right, folks. But you’ve got to do better. That argument won’t take you where you need to go, which is to update your role and re-invent your value (like virtually every other journalist in the room).

Consider:

1. In newsrooms in transition, the copy desk often look like the last bastion of print culture, and that’s a traditionally change-averse culture the bosses have decided must change. I have talked to editors who have put their newsrooms on promising tracks to create more online content. They invariably scratch their heads about a “print-centric” copy desk that plays little or no role on the Web. The value of copy editing is clear, but the role and shape and culture of the copy desk may have to change.

2. Some functions of the copy desk might be contracted out (domestically, one hopes) without damage to the quality of the product. Copy editors have been complaining for years about coding and other production chores that came their way with pagination and more labor-intensive page design. Some editors went as far as to say they’d largely been stripped of meaningful editing time. As newsroom staff size falls to a level that the market will support, shedding incidentals in order to focus on the core (quality editing) is a must.

3. Good copy editors have long helped news organizations maintain their authority in their communities, as ACES notes. But the role and definition of authority in news is changing, and more and more of it is shifting to readers and users who can decide what news they want to see, when they want to see it and can easily check other sources. The vetting role of the copy editors will be critical, but it may not be applied to all content and more and more print content may well be vetted by users on the Web.

4. Newsroom jobs will continue to disappear. Just about every journalist in a newsroom contributes to quality. The new question is: What else have you done for me lately? Smaller, more nimble organizations tend to value priorities over absolutes. For example: Absolutely perfect style is a wonderful goal. Increasing interactivity may trump 100 percent adherence style on the priority list.

I worked in newsrooms for nearly 30 years (including on the copy desk).  I cannot count the times a smart copy editor improved on my work or made a good save in a story I wrote or edited. (And I’m scared of making a mistake every time I post directly to this blog.) I wish I could offer some solace to beleaguered copy desks.

I do have this advice for copy editors: Learn some new skills. Learn some new online skills—Search engine optimization in headlines, tagging, a little html, shoot and upload audio or video, create a photo gallery with captions, read comments on news stories and respond to them, figure out Web analytics. Learn. Grow. That’s what your newsroom needs to do. It’ll get there faster with you on board.

Has the role of the copy editor changed in your newsroom? What skills should your copy editors learn? Have you reorganized your copy desk? Please share your experiences and ideas in the comments.

Dance of change

The Carnival of Journalism—a loose consortium of online journalists who blog about a common topic each month—is taking up this important question:
“What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?”

Change, like innovation, often is imagined as a big, sweeping wave that washes over the room and carries everyone along. Far from it. Change is mostly made up of small steps by individuals. The small steps create critical mass within the organization and tip it towards a different future.

I offer three small ideas that could lead to something big:

1. Move some furniture.
You may not be able to remodel your newsroom right now, and that’s fine. But consider moving a few curmudgeons closer to the cutting edge. In the name of efficiency, you may be tempted to put your most Web receptive reporters within shouting distance of the 24/7 news desk. Why not move a few of the least-receptive closer as well? They either will either catch on and post more often—maybe even multmedia—or they’ll feel uncomfortable, which is a step in the right direction. That’s just one example. Look for ways to put unlike folks together and then encourage conversation. If you’re ready for a bigger move, put your online desk in the middle of the newsroom, as the Miami Herald and St. Louis Post-Dispatch have done.

2. Cancel a few meetings. The meeting schedule in many newsrooms still reflects the print newspaper—and the all-important daily news meetings may well be sending the wrong message to a newsroom that needs to move online. When senior editors convene the desks and spend much of their time talking about Page One and print section covers, it’s time to re-invent the schedule. Imagine the meetings your newsroom needs—and doesn’t—to be an online news provider. Implement that schedule and add short, light attendance print-focused sessions around it. While you’re at it, gather any online news meetings in front of a big monitor on the newsroom wall and leave off posting print tear sheets for a while. (Adding the monitor prompted big changes in the news meeting conversation at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution a couple of years ago.) You don’t want to abandon print. But the best way to let the online discussion flourish is to minimize the print conversation until new priorities take hold.

3. Reward people who try something new. Stop noticing mistakes for while and focus your newsroom on fresh approaches. Talk about them this way: ”Let’s pretend we love this story and talk about why we love it.” (Inexact quote from Roy Peter Clark, who was talking about storytelling.) Lead your newsroom in thinking about why something new is good and build from there. Make it a weekly contest: The person who comes up with the best new practice and the person who makes the best suggestion for improving it wins the editor’s parking space for a day.

Will Sullivan at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch launched the change question this month with his own list of 10 steps. He’s also rounded up ideas from others here. Their practicality and simplicity resonate with me. I think they are particularly instructive for newsroom leaders because they come mostly from folks in the digital trenches inside and outside newsrooms.

What steps has your newsroom taken toward change? Please share ideas in the comments.

What if you threw a ‘comment’ party and nobody came?

Rich Gordon and a Medill student team are at it again, this time offering great insights to any news site that would like its users—especially young ones --- to engage more fully. Gordon summarizes the team’s research so far into participation at gazetteonline, the Web site of The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The student team has been surveying young people in Eastern Iowa to find out why they don’t comment more often on the Gazette site. At the Mediashift Idea Lab, Gordon offers a preliminary cut: ”The Five Biggest Barriers to Participation—And What to Do About Them.” And take hope. In the full post, Gordon offers several possible solutions for each obstacle.
Here is Team Crunchberry’s list of the barriers:
- Don’t think existing comments are valuable
- Lack of payoff or gratification from participating in online discussions
- Lack of interest in communicating with strangers
- Participation is intimidating
- Don’t think comments are believable

What have you learned about attracting good comments to your online site? Please comment!

Weekend reading

- If you’re playing catch up, check out Mindy McAdams presentation, ”Current Practices in Online Journalism.”

- Paul Bradshaw describes the user-magnet appeal of cartoons and infographics at Poynter Online.

- Ryan Sholin reviews micro-blogging tools including Yammer, Prologue and Backpack Journal.

Goodbye ombudsman, hello network?

I wrote recently that the gatekeeper role of traditional journalism was fading as news consumers find abundant sources of news. But news organizations (or others) could revive the role on the Web by becoming aggregators who point users to the best links and put them in context and point users to the worst links and debunk them.

That got me thinking about another traditional newsroom job -- the ombudsman. Judging by the numbers, the role of ombudsman is in decline in the U.S. as well. Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist sums up the situation:

“Editor & Publisher picks up on a trend that’s an outgrowth of the overall cutbacks in newspapers: newsroom ombudsmen (and women) are a vanishing breed. At least 10 ombudsmen have lost their jobs in the past year to buyouts or layoffs at U.S. newspapers, leaving just 27 of the readers’ representatives in place, according to the Organization of News Ombudsmen (which also has international members, but at this rate may have trouble reaching a quorum at its next convention).

“As Gina Lubrano, executive secretary of the organization, points out to E&P, the readers’ representative position has been an easy target for cost-cutters for years. So it’s probably not surprising that we’re seeing a bunch of ombudsmen cuts amid the current avalanche of newspaper cutbacks.

“But I’d argue that these days, the ombudsman - like many things in the newspaper business - is something of an anachronism, anyway. It’s another thing that technology has rendered essentially irrelevant. There are just so many other ways for readers to talk back to newspapers these days.”

Let’s face it. There never were that many U.S. ombudsmen. In 1999, I counted fewer than 40 for this speech I gave in Istanbul. (Yes, I was an ombudsman once—Public Editor at The Oregonian in the late 1990’s.)

Still, the ombudsman position embodies an ideal that the press can operate transparently and be accountable for mistakes. If surveys are any indication, the U.S. press routinely fails to deliver on that promise.

Potts is right, the Web does offer readers lots of ways to talk back to news organizations. But the real question—before the Web and since—is whether news organizaions are listening and responding. The traditional ombudsman fields questions and complaints, offers an opinion and explains the organization’s playbook, but is not empowered to change it.

The Web will demand more from the organization, with or without the ombudsman. It is critical that newsrooms listen to and learn from readers (or whatever you call Jay Rosen’s “people formerly known as the audience”) who challenge not only their accuracy and credibility, but pose questions and complaints that suggest an entirely different master narrative. What might this look like?

Start with comments and blogs:

Does your organization allow comments on news stories as well as blogs?
Does your organization solicit story ideas and leads in the comments (Example: How is the economic crisis affecting your family?)
Who monitors the comments for story leads? How does the newsroom follow up?
Who responds to complaints about the coverage?
Does a senior editor blog about news decisions and field questions? Every day?
How are comments about coverage shared with the staff? Do they have significant impact on the coverage? Why? Why not?

If your organization has attempted some of these practices, or found better ones for listening to users, please share your experience in the comments.

Rebuilding the news

Jeff Jarvis has suggested news providers must come up with new building blocks for news that replace the article.

Jarvis instead would organize news and information around topics and take full advantage of the Web to create spaces that pull together news, history and context, discussion and other contributions by users and experts alike. It’s a promising take on the power of aggregation—a power most news organizations have yet to tap.

Here’s Jarvis:

“I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.

“Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

“Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room—and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding.

“This is the way to cover stories and life.”

This is a very smart idea. It’s got great utility and information value. It needn’t rely on sophisticated Web tools. It holds great potential in the realm of local news.

To explore that potential, I have tried to envision an online space devoted to a local news classic—Street Repairs in Your Town. Here’s what the site could include:

-- A searcheable database that shows what streets have been repaved and when, what streets are scheduled to be repaved and when, or what streets are not on any schedule.

-- A map created from the database.

-- A feature that allows users (journalists too) to post comments and upload photos on the state of their neighborhood streets. Bonus points: This material is integrated into the map.

-- A short article (yes, still) that frames the issue, gives key history (say, citizens have voted down the last three street levies and why), and links to the most important resources.

-- Links to recent news articles about the issue on your news site and others.

-- An archive of relevant city resolutions and ordinances and city council and any local board meetings. Bonus points: Organize or tag material for easy search. Perhaps this is a wiki to which all users can contribute links and other footnotes.

-- Featured links to information on Web sites that describe how other localities keep their streets paved.

I’m not a Web producer. But none of this is Web rocket science. Pretty much all of this material could feed the print newspaper. So the “too busy putting out the paper” rationale doesn’t seem to apply. Think about it. A repository for news and understanding that just keeps giving. Bonus points: Transparency helps make the process of street-paving more fair and better understood. That would be journalism.

Of course, street paving may not be a burning issue in your community, but there must be others. Perhaps it’s time for a page on gasoline prices and ways to save gas. Or information how to live on a budget in a tough economy—generic and readily available links combined with local journalistic effort and user discussion?

What do you think of this model? What issues in your community might benefit from this approach and how would you address them? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Link: Innovation lessons for newspapers?

I suggested recently that newsroom executives look, among other things, at whether their organizations were investing in R&D and in staff time to innovate.

Now comes Chris O’Brien with an interesting post on the role of innovation in business success. O’Brien cites a piece on the rivalry between Amazon and eBay— ”Amid the Gloom, an E-Commerce War,” by Brad Stone in the New York Times on Saturday.

Says O’Brien:

“As I read the piece, I was struck by some of the ways eBay’s problems mirror those of newspapers: They had a legacy business (auctions) that once made them dominant, but was now falling out of favor among consumers. Despite the obvious warning signs, executives repeatedly refused to fundamentally re-examine their core business model.’’

Meanwhile, as Amazon boss Jeff Bezos explains in an interview with Stone:

“Mr. Bezos credits Amazon’s tolerance for risky, expensive bets like the Kindle electronic reading device. “Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible,” he said.

Is your organization an eBay or an Amazon? What experiments look promising right now?

Should I stay or should I go?

The resignation of Steven A. Smith as editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. last week doubtless got other top newsroom editors asking whether leaving was the best course while firming up the resolve of others to stay. Smith, whose newsroom faced major layoffs, said he left to free his voice and to look for other ways to fight for journalism. One of his top deputies also resigned, saying she had lost heart.

Roger Plothow, editor and publisher of the Post Register in Idaho Falls, offered one response—urging top editors to stay because their talents are needed more than ever in newsrooms. Plothow may have meant well, but I thought his response offered a “one-size” solution to a resignation question that has more than one answer—an answer that, as Smith said last week, “is always personal.”

I want to examine a couple of phrases that Plothow used (for context, read the full post here)—“the good fight” and “easy way out.” We use them a lot in different contexts, but I’m not sure we agree on what they mean when we talk about today’s newsrooms and traditional news organizations.

1. Plothow urged editors to stay in the newsroom “to fight the good fight.”

The “good fight,” I think, is for the pre-digital values of journalism that will help citizens understand their world in the digital era. It is not necessarily for all of journalism of the late 20th century. Some news organizations may be worth fighting for, but the good fight most certainly not is for news organizations that want to cut themselves out of the future.

When I hear the phrase, I think of all the editors who steadfastly fought a version of “the good fight” that helped lead the news industry to its current state. I am talking about those who ignored or resisted the Internet well into this decade, those who scoffed at efforts to make journalism more relevant (remember how the traditionalists pounded civic journalism in the 1990’s?), those who simply rejected change out of hand as bad for journalism they know, love and recognize.

Hindsight is 20-20 and other factors have brought the industry low. But it’s impossible for me to hear the phrase “good fight” without asking “whose good fight?” and “which one?” In one high-profile case, John Carroll and Dean Baquet epitomized the “good fight” during their tenures at The Los Angeles Times—They fought for staff numbers they wanted to produce prize-winning national journalism. But they arguably failed to pay enough attention to fundamentals (local news) and innovations (the Web) that might have prolonged the tenures of the journalists who lost their jobs this summer. Whose “good fight” was that?

2. Plothow’s letter fails to recognize that the “good fight” is taking place outside newsrooms as well as inside them. Walking away from the newsroom does not mean walking away from the “good fight” for journalism. The “good fight” is to deliver important and relevant news and information to citizens and their communities. That is happening all over the world and all over the Web. The idea that news will come only from traditional newsrooms is an arrogance we cannot afford. That is not to say print newsroom have not and are not still important sources. But the model is evolving. Many experiments are in play. Many people are taking risks. Journalists and news organizations should be part of this, and many journalists who have left their newsrooms are. News organizations that favor draconian cuts for short-term profitability risk taking themselves out of the future news game.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has recognized this by shifting considerable funding to programs and individuals that stress innovation in gathering and delivering news and information. The Knight News Challenge and the Knight Community Information Challenge recognize that individual innovators and entrepreneurs are a likely (or perhaps more likely) than a hunkered-down, slow-to-change news industry to serve critical information needs in a democratic society.

That doesn’t mean everyone should leave. I applaud the many newspaper editors who are pushing to innovate quickly across platforms—even when they take grief from all sides for doing so.

3. Plothow says: “In a way, resignation is the easy way out.” Easy? It is never easy to acknowledge that you can no longer contribute to an organization you love.

Here’s my experience: I left The Oregonian in 2003 after 19 years. (Economic problems were just beginning, buyouts had not been considered so there was no pressure to help the organization financially.) I simply no longer felt I could contribute as significantly to the journalism that newsroom was producing as I had in the past. I needed to contribute in a different way, in a different place. I left behind a great news organization and people I loved. Easy? It might have been easier to stay in my comfort zone, collect my six-figure salary, build my job seniority, enjoy the gorgeous Pacific Northwest and hope that my motivation returned. But what about my colleagues who would have to dig deeper because I was contributing less? What about the editors who were ready to do my job better than I could? Easy to leave? No. But it was fair and right.

Carla Savalli, the Spokesman assistant managing editor who resigned shortly after Smith last week, expressed a similar loss of passion following the latest cuts (about 25 percent of the newsroom staff for a total of 50 percent since 2000). Savalli had led many of the newsroom’s innovation efforts that were part of a push to develop new revenue streams that would save journalists’ jobs. In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review., Savalli said:

“I didn’t resign to send a message. I resigned because it was the right time given the volatility of the industry and of the cuts in this newsroom. It’s a devastating cut and I didn’t feel like I had as much heart as I used to to keep going.”

I don’t assume Smith or Savalli or any other editor is taking the “easy way out.” And there is no shame for any editor (or any journalist for that matter) who does not feel he can lead to step away and make room for someone who will bring more passion to the task.

In 2007, Eric Newton, vice president/journalism programs for the Knight Foundation, offered this advice to journalists in his introduction to ”News, Improved,” a book I coauthored with Tim Porter:

“If you are a good journalist, stuck at a news organization that doesn’t seem to believe in its own future, what should you do? Leave? Yes, actually. If reasonable efforts - such as those described in this book - are not being tried, train yourself as best you can and go. The 20th century killed 1,000 daily newspaper newsrooms and 1,000 radio newsrooms. Media evolution doesn’t favor the big or strong. It favors the nimble. Be nimble.”

Newton was talking about professional development for journalists. Today, I would apply his words to larger questions that newsrooms and their leaders face. Here are questions I would ask myself:

1. Is the ownership of my organization looking forward, investing in the future? Can I see this in an R&D budget, in staff time devoted to innovations, in rewards for successful new ideas?

2. As a leader, am I moving the organization forward in spite of the business reality my organization faces? Am I a skilled enough leader or am I willing to learn to be one? Am I open to innovation or am I willing to be more open?

3. Can I bring passion to the job every day and move my newsroom into the future with fewer staff and other resources?

I hope as many committed journalists as possible stay in newsrooms and bring the best values of yesterday’s journalism into day’s world. I hope your answers are: 1. Yes. 2. Yes. 3. Yes.

If not? You can find better places to “fight the good fight” for journalism.

Should you (not the other guy) stay or should you go? What factors do you (not the other guy) consider in making this choice? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Update: David Westphal, who recently left McClatchy for USC, offers his take on this topic in post at OJR.

Westphal asks:

“Do newspaper editors have a special obligation to stay in their depleted newsrooms and continue the fight, even as staff cuts threaten to shrink legacy news-gathering operations? Or will newspapers and their Web sites be better served by new leadership that’s less wedded to the past and more inclined to see the future as hopeful?”

Here’s the full post.

Weekend reading: Beyond AP

Gahran’s “what if’s” challenge existing models and suggest alternative paths. A taste:

“What if a coalition of news orgs within a state teamed up with talented technologists, database architects, librarians, search optimization experts, ad networks, and maybe even print-on-demand pros to create a new type of news where packaged stories are but one resulting product?

“What if this kind of team built a replicable, open-source, customizable infrastructure that would make it easy for people to track any issue in the state—regardless of the sources of information (such as public utility commissions, local governments, transit organizations, sports leagues, school boards, citizen groups, or even those notoriously tortuous legislative information systems), and regardless of whether their topics of interest would traditionally make it into the paper?

“What if the core of a news org wasn’t only a staff of trained journalists and editors gathering information primarily to produce packaged stories based on just a small fraction of available info? What if librarians and technologists also were on the job, getting as much info as possible into useful, modular, searchable formats that could be easily searched and mixed according to relevance to particular communities, interest groups, or even individuals?

“What if news orgs’ core offering was not a basically one-size-fits-all newspaper, but rather a statewide or regional “relevance window” service that could be tailored to meet the needs of lawyers, businesses, property owners, schools, activists, healthcare providers, parents, teens, etc.? What if news orgs became very, very structured and flexible about how they collect, collate, and distribute information? What if, as a result, citizens, organizations, and communities could easily stay better informed than was ever before possible?”

Here’s the full post, and it’s worth a read. 

An editor stands down to stand up

Steven A. Smith just resigned as editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. Smith’s departure was part of a 25 percent cut in the newsroom staff announced this week. With those cuts, Smith said, the newsroom will number about 85, just over half the number in 2000.

Smith told me today that after six years as editor, 36 years in journalism, and the last year relentlessly trying to develop revenue streams that would save newsroom jobs, it was time for him to go.

Two reasons:
1. Smith no longer he could sustain journalism that met his standards of quality in a newsroom wracked by deep cuts and uncertainty about the future.
“The journalism that’s important to me is no longer possible,” he said.

2. By resigning, Smith says, “I regain my voice.” Smith said he has not felt free to speak out about the journalistic decline that comes from cuts in an industry environment that promises more with less. “I simply wasn’t willing to stand up and tell people things would be better or even OK. And our publisher needs someone who can do that.”

“It is time to stop standing behind our salaries, our bonuses and our pensions and stand up and say what needs to be said”—that short-term thinking and cutbacks are “dooming our organizations to irrelevance and causing irreparable harm to our systems and society without consideration of the larger loss,” Smith said.

For Smith, resignation punctuates this thought: “It is no longer my job or our job to save newspapers. Our job is to save journalism and the values that underlie newspaper journalism,” such as the free flow of information and aggressive coverage of government.

If you think Smith has been a newsroom curmudgeon who resisted change or championed principal without regard for pragmatic implications, think again. Smith’s Transparent Newsroom brought readers into news meetings and other newsroom decision-making. Smith has made it his mission to push the local journalism of his newsroom across as many platforms as possible—Web, radio, print, even a little television—as a way to create revenue and hold off staff cuts.

In July,during an intensive conference at Knight Digital Media Center, Smith reflected on the challenges:

“If we don’t change more dramatically and faster, there will not be an industry to support the sort of value-driven journalism that is at the heart of our craft.

“The encouraging news is that the tools we need to make the needed changes are readily available to us and that our ability to deliver quality news and information can only be enhanced...if we make the bold leaps.

“And there is the rub. Are we willing to make the bold moves.

“In the SR newsroom, we MUST understand and then embrace the notion that print is no longer our primary focus. As advanced as we are in the digital delivery of news (and this conference confirms for me that we are ahead of the industry curve, as innovative and progressive as any newsroom ), we are still too print focused.

“We need to devote FEWER resources to print. Our editors need to spend far less time worrying about print. And all of us need to be focusing on how to improve and expand the scope and quality of our digital news and information (and that includes radio).

“This is a huge cultural leap. The push back will be extreme. Work schedules will have to change. Skills will have to be refined or re-taught or learned for the first time. Many of us will have to fundamentally question what we do, why we do it and how it must be done differently.

“The editors who push this cultural change forward will not earn many friends in the newsroom. I think that understanding has been sobering for all of us.

“My hope is that our journalists will understand that we must change our practices, while holding true to our news values.

“That will be our only chance and only hope.”

Smith returned from the conference to Spokane and called a staff meeting to underscore the urgency of transformation as the only way the newsroom could fend off job cuts. In the ensuing two months, the newsroom has developed a reorganization plan that would make the organization more online-centric. (I hope to learn more about the reorganization plan next week.) Smith said it was unclear whether that would be implemented with the smaller staff.

Given his commitment to avoiding job losses, I asked Smith whether the idea that his departure (his replacement will come from within) would spare others layoffs was a factor. Smith acknowledged that his job might be equivalent to three reporting positions but said it did not affect his decision. “If I thought there was good reason to stay, I would have. I decided there’s no good reason.”

Update: Late Thursday afternoon, Carla Savalli, assistant managing editor, resigned, according to The Spokesman-Review newsroom blog. Savalli, seen by many as a future editor of the Spokesman, is a Spokane native who has overseen many of the newsroom’s efforts to bring news to new platforms, including the launch of radio programming earlier this year. Savalli wrote ”The Future of the Newsroom,” which explored challenges and opportunities for journalism in the digital age.

Update: Roger Plothow, editor and publisher, Post Register, Idaho Falls, commenting on Romenesko:

“As the tumult in the newspaper business deepens, it’s becoming increasingly popular for journalists—particularly those, like me, who participated in the comparative heydays—to express their objections to job cuts and reduced spending by resigning their positions.

“The respected editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, Steve Smith, is the latest. While I understand this inclination—I’ve thought about falling on my sword from time to time myself—it’s an impulse we should resist. Print/online journalism has never needed passionate, experienced, committed and intelligent journalists more than now.”

More of Plothow’s letter here.