Happy Holidays!

Weekend reading

Mark Glaser offers “Your Guide to Alternative Business Models for Newspapers” on PBS MediaShift.
Martin Langeveld looks at “Nuts and bolts: maximizing online ad sales on newspaper sites.”

What does ‘online first’ mean in your newsroom?

Chris O’Brien is business columnist for the San Jose Mercury-News and is wrapping up The Next Newsroom Project. While working on that project, Chris frequently offered insightful comments about news organizations and how their practices and attitudes must change if they want to thrive online. So I’ve asked Chris to write an occasional guest post for this blog and I’m please to offer the first one today. Here’s Chris:

Thanks to Michele for inviting me to join the discussion here. I hope some of the lessons I’ve learned, and continue to learn, at The Next Newsroom Project will be valuable to this community.
In getting started here, I wanted to pick up on a thread that Michele has been talking about lately involving the relationship between print and online in the newsrooms. I couldn’t agree more with her sentiment that it’s time to “shove the print newspaper off center stage.” While I think print will have a long future, it needs to be one of many platforms, rather than the primary one. Digital is the future, and it’s well past time for newsrooms to be thinking online first.
But here’s the next question: What does being an online first newsroom actually mean? It seems that everyone now claims their newsroom is online first. In reality, for most newsrooms that means they post their content online first. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. The newsroom, the conversations, the planning, the jobs, and the culture are all still organized around a legacy designed to create the print edition of the paper.
Being online first requires far more change. If you’re wondering whether your newsroom is online first, ask yourself how you measure up against the following criteria:
Planning and Workflow: Are the morning budget meetings and planning decisions still being driven by the need to create centerpieces and fill this section or that section? Are your critiques still driven by hanging the morning paper on the wall and discussing story placement? If these are the central conversations that are driving newsroom planning, then you’re not online first.
Instead, the discussions about content creation should start with the subject and then explore whether to tell that with text, audio, video, or some data product. The critiques should be a continual process throughout the day of evaluating traffic, comments, and updates. There should be a team dedicated to taking all this content and turning it into a print version, but they shouldn’t be driving the process.

Deadlines: If someone asks when deadlines are, do you still say 5 p.m.? Time to turn that on its head. For most folks, their Web traffic peaks around 9 a.m. or so, when their community wanders into work, powers on their computers, and browse the news before getting on with their day. What they find on your Web site has to be more than the articles your staff filed the previous afternoon. To change that, there needs to be a big push early in the morning to get more folks in creating fresh stuff and then updating throughout the day. According this post from Shannon Bowen, an online journalist at the Wilmington Star in North Carolina, the newsroom there has adopted the mentality of an afternoon paper, requiring the bulk of the staff to be in early and file in the morning by 11 a.m. It’s a good start. But it needs to be even earlier to hit that traffic peak, which means getting more folks in even earlier.
Jobs: Are the type of jobs in the newsroom much different than they were 10 years ago? If you’re an online first newsroom, they should be. To optimize the online experience, it takes a whole different set of jobs. Get a community manager to moderate comments, solicit the best contributions from community members, and generate a lot of conversation. Get a multimedia editor who can really build the audio and video contributions from the whole staff. Get a couple of programmer journalists in the newsroom to build everything from news widgets to Flash presentations to data-rich products like this Campaign Tracker that The Washington Post created for the recent election season. These types of information products are great journalism and they fit the way people like to consume information online by allowing them to click around and discover things.
And remember that it’s not about getting folks to come to your Web site. You have to get your content out into other people’s networks. Get a network manager whose role is to promote content using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, building relationships with bloggers, and in general thinking past the Web site and finding ways to get content into streams where the potential audience resides.
Linking: Are journalists able to create links in the stories they file? Does your content management system even allow reporters to create links? If not, it’s time to get a new content management system. And looking at this from the other end, can the audience link to your content? Are your archives free? This seems to be a harder change for many newsrooms, which in some cases have contracts with third parties to operate paid archives. Even worse, many news sites intentionally break their links every few days in order to drive folks to these paid archives. Which means that essentially they’re not letting other people link to their content. 
I’ll end with this thought: In truth, we all should be thinking about moving toward multiplatform newsrooms: print, radio, online, mobile. Wherever your community is, you need to be there. And be prepared to embrace new platforms that are bound to emerge over time.
But first things first. Let’s get the transition to online right, and then go from there. These are my criteria. What are your criteria for an online newsroom? And are there any newsrooms out there that folks believe have really, truly become online first?

Tampa’s audience editors

When Janet Coats, the executive editor of The Tampa Tribune, announced plans to appoint “audience editors,” I was intrigued by the role as a potential way to put users and readers at the front end of the news process - where they belong. In essence, the audience editors are newsroom floor managers with a key improvement: They keep pace with platforms and how people use them, knowledge that informs communication with the staff and decisions about what the newsroom covers and how it covers it.

When Coats first described the audience editor plan last summer, I wrote that I especially liked the promising idea of formalizing an audience focus and the fact that the audience editors had authority to shift resources to back up that focus. (Note: While Tampa is aggressively merging separate print, broadcast and online newsrooms, Tribune officials have dismissed a recent rumor that the print newspaper was going to cease publication.)

As with all organizational departures, I wondered how Coats and other senior editors would determine how the jobs would work in a newsroom that produces content for broadcast, online and print and is working to join together separate newsrooms that used to produce for a single platform. As much as the jobs may hold interest for other newsrooms, I think the process of defining the jobs will be useful in thinking about how to implement newsroom change.

As the audience editors took up their jobs in November, Coats explained in an interview that the Tribune’s six editors—two from broadcast background, two from online, and two from print—had worked together to define the jobs. Instead of issuing detailed instructions, Coats handed the editors Tampa’s six goals for their new role, each with a series of questions to help them frame their discussions. Here is the full list of the audience editor goals and questions.

Examples of the goals and questions Tampa considered:

(GOAL:) Audience advocacy. The AEs (Audience Editors) lead the newsroom in thinking about how best to serve the audience. The AEs have a deep knowledge of our audience metrics and research across all platforms, and they use that knowledge to guide them in setting priorities for story coverage. They educate and inform the rest of the newsroom about what works for the audience, and they track which stories are moving audience within the news cycle.

(QUESTIONS:) How will you educate yourselves about audience metrics? What tracking/reporting systems will you put in place to educate and guide the newsroom about audience on all platforms?

—-

(GOAL:) Promoting interactivity. The AEs understand that the core of the news mission is to create content readers can interact with. The AEs identify stories with high potential for interaction, be it through user comments, databases, the potential for user-generated content or by appealing to highly motivated niche audiences. The AEs work with the content circles and the finishing group to apply the best interactive strategies to the stories they have identified as having high audience interest.

(QUESTIONS:) What systems will you use to identify stories with high potential for audience interaction? How will you recognize stories that are generating interaction and shift resources/focus? What methods will you use to build on successful instances of interaction, to create models that can be replicated?

Guided by questions like these, the new audience editors met over a period of a couple of weeks before settling into their jobs right after the November election.  Coats said changes already are apparent: “They’re teaching each other a lot. They’re incredible model for newsroom, for asking about what you don’t know and teaching your neighbor,” Coats said. “They’ve already done a lot to change sense of urgency. The room is more energized earlier in the day…. and we’re starting see a difference in the way reporters plan their work, a more deliberate, thoughtful approach because they know they’ve got to post first thing in the morning.”

This process illustrates the difference between teaching and telling. Most newsroom leaders are well schooled in the process of telling. Whether its directing troops on a breaking story or mediating newsroom turf wars, senior editors become well schooled in giving orders that quickly remove an obstacle. Sort of like snipping apart a tangle, rather than slowly teasing out the knots.

The lessons here are many for newsroom leaders who want to change newsroom culture and attitudes. Tampa offers a process that may work for other change intiatives in other newsrooms. The key is to build a mission and launch a process that allows key staff members—and eventually the rest of the newsroom—some space to learn and develop a game plan they own.

Has a question process worked for you in making newsroom change? Could it help you going foward? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Atlanta: A new vision for the Sunday newspaper

With feedback from thousands of readers, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution believes many people who get their news online during the week still want to hold a newspaper in their hands on Sunday. That’s the premise behind a Sunday remake that will launch early next year.

I’ve been writing about the need in many newsrooms to shove the print newspaper off center stage in order to intensify a transition to digital. But I don’t think that means the newspaper goes away entirely, at least just yet. Atlanta (and others such as the Christian Science Monitor) are betting that print may have a life journalistically-engaging and revenue-producing life on the weekend.

In Atlanta, Journal-Constitution Editor Julia D.Wallace sees an opportunity to add readers to a core already devoted to the Sunday print newspaper. That core, Wallace says, is made up of people who simply like print newspapers and local news and probably will pay for the daily newspaper for some time. Wallace believes AJC can create a Sunday newspaper that will draw members of a somewhat younger group—“people who read us only online during the week and will come to us on Sunday because they appreciate that experience” of print news and advertising.

The experience promises to be different than a typical Sunday newspaper as well.  A key finding of the research—and a surprising one—said Wallace, is that readers in Atlanta want a newsier Sunday newspaper than newsroom planners might have envisioned on their own. In contrast to a magazine-like feel many Sunday newspapers aim for, the new Sunday AJC will focus on news, hard enterprise and high story counts.

AJC also has changed it’s circulation pricing—allowing Sunday-only subscriptions for the first time at the same time the daily single-copy prices has increased to 75 cents. Elements of the new Sunday newspaper already are being introduced and the full redesign is expected to take hold when AJC starts operating new presses early next year.

To create content for the new Sunday newspaper, the AJC newsroom has formed a team of 30 journalists who will focus entirely on Sunday. They will produce investigations, Sunday cover stories and standing features such as the week in review feature. That’s a big commitment—nearly 10 percent of a staff of 325 (down from 500 a few years ago). Wallace says the staffing assures strong enterprise for every section cover on Sunday. Beat reporters also will contribute. (I think a separate Sunday-focused staff should help avoid situations in which beat reporters coming off a hard breaking news week are forced to contrive a long Sunday story that don’t plow much new ground.)

Wallace doesn’t foresee print exclusives for Sunday enterprise stories but may try publishing a few simultaneously. For now, she said, the newsroom is discussing a “Five Easy Pieces” idea that allows editors to hold from the Web until Saturday up to five pieces developed primarily for the Sunday print newspaper.

AJC’s experience may offer lessons for other newspapers down the road. The news organization has conducted exhaustive research and it is putting resources behind the effort to do it right. That promises an experiment both well conceived and well executed, a true demonstration of the potential value of the idea. Also, establishing the role and scope of a Sunday or weekend newspaper may help Atlanta figure out what print products it does—or does not—need to create during the week.

Wichita: Letting go and moving on(line)

Last week, I wrote that the printed newspaper isn’t going to vanish right away. But I suggested smart newsroom leaders shove the newspaper from the newsroom’s center stage as they move their shrinking resources across an ever-expanding array of platforms for news.

That may mean discarding one or another print product while focusing on still another as a very specific opportunity to reach a very specific audience with a product that pays. Today and tomorrow, I will describe a couple of efforts that reflect these ideas, one at The Wichita Eagle and another at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Leaders from each of these newsrooms participated in Knight Digital Media Center leadership conferences. (Here is our latest leadership report.)

Sherry Chisenhall, editor of The Wichita Eagle and kansas.com attended the Leadership Conference last July.

One thing that stuck with her from the conference was an admonition by consultant Stacy Lynch to “beware the sucking sound of print.” Lynch was referring to the intensive demands of the print product and their grip on the attention of traditional newsrooms that must cross the digital divide.

Chisenhall returned to Wichita and quickly looked a features tab the newspaper that she created a few years ago (and one that her publisher really liked). Chisenhall decided that wasn’t good enough. After all, the tab sucked in several shifts of editing and design time but did not attract enough advertising.

She decided “I’m going to give it up. It’s too much. There’s not enough payoff. We’re not making any money on it. There’s so much time involved. We just kept tweaking and tweaking trying to get advertising there.”

That’s another way of saying “the sucking sound of print” .... Tweaking and tweaking something that just isn’t good enough to keep.

Chisenhall quickly consolidated features sections. That move freed one young editor to move to online and focus on interactivity of kansas.com. “You’ve got to find those people and you have to put them where you need them most,” said Chisenhall, whose moves came amidst newsroom layoffs.

Chisenhall started thinking about stakes in the ground—the most important work. “I think developing interactive is one of them.”

On the most-valuable end of the spectrum as well, said Chisenhall, was the practice of doing background investigations on all major political candidates in Wichita’s area, which yielded findings of candidates who had not paid taxes and been involved in domestic violence complaints. “That is the most basic public service. It’s an enormous effort. That is a stake in the ground.”

“We try to be great at 12 to 15 to 20 things,” Chisenhall said, when perhaps only a few really matter.

Chisenhall drew a parallel with a friend fighting from a serious disease. “You sort of have permission to not try to do everything. You say ‘Let’s just do what’s most important.’”

Wise words from Wichita.

Tomorrow: Atlanta re-examines its Sunday newspaper.

Our new leadership report is out today!

The Leadership Conference is a highlight of Knight Digital Media Center’s annual training calendar. Newsroom leaders come to the center to hear from experts in digital media, innovation and newsroom change. They return to their newsrooms with strategies and ideas for moving online.

Today, KDMC is pleased to release a report compiled from the July 2008 Leadership Conference and an earlier leadership gathering in 2007. The report is organized as a series of lists and bullet points—tools, takeaways, quotes and action steps, for example—designed to spark new thinking among newsroom leaders and link them to resources that will help them develop their ideas.

I hope you’ll take a look at the KDMC Leadership Report. Here’s a sampling:

From Takeaways:

Stacy Lynch, a consultant and project manager for the Media Management Center, warns traditional news organizations against “the sucking sound of print” as they transition to online while attempting to maintain the newspaper.

“Print will take over every ounce of energy you have,” Lynch said.  The brutal truth is there’s nothing in print that has no value. Everything has a little bit a value. Every cut hurts. You just have to figure out what hurts less.”

From Tools:

Key performance indicators provide more meaningful information on site traffic than simple counts of visits or visitors. Dana Chinn, a faculty member at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, details KPIs and their uses:

Often, that KPI is not a simple number such as time on site or unique monthly visitors. Instead, the most meaningful information may be from a ratio or comparison of two different numbers.

From Culture changers:

Change will only come from the bottom up. Command-and-control hierarchical systems of management have worked well for getting the daily paper out on time, but executive pronouncements do little to build long term change. The old structure burdens top editors with making too many small decisions instead of working on long term strategy. Perhaps more significantly, it discourages initiative - and possible innovation - from the ranks.

Also see Quotes, Reading, Action Steps

We envision a report that can grow and evolve as the challenges of newsroom leadership change. Please add your ideas in the comments.

Weekend reading

Resource-strapped news organizations must get smarter about how they use their resources:
- Daniel Victor looks at how newsrooms can get help from the crowd (sources) in “Crowdsourcing can lead newspapers through buyout blues”
- McClatchy and The Christian Science Monitor share stories.
- Three South Florida newspapers experiment with sharing stories, including student work. (Link via Poynter Online.)

Mark Luckie at 10000words offers “What is…?” a guide for new media novices, complete with a pdf you can hand out in your newsroom and links to more good stuff for newbies.

Matt Thompson at Newsless.org offers a good discussion of the challenges of engaging comments on news sites along with some suggested solutions.

Nieman Journalism Lab offers a take on the scarcity of outward links from stories on major newspaper sites—and the notable exception of columnist Frank Rich.

The newspaper is a means to transition. But it’s no longer an end unto itself

I confess I am befuddled when I hear suggestions that print newspapers should simply stop printing and build a new business online. I think a lot of editors would love the idea of a fresh start. But walking away form 90 percent of revenue—and the employees and reporting it still pays for—seems like a harsh course.
Still, the fundamental attitude in newsrooms about the print newspaper needs to change, and indications are it has not happened—is not happening—quickly enough.
What should that attitude be? Steve Outing offered a good compendium of action steps for newspapers (good ideas that have been aired before and, unfortunately, not vigorously followed). Here are Outing’s key points about print:

- Print edition: Don’t bother chasing young people
- Print edition: Focus on the core demographic
- Guide older print loyalists to a life online
- Reduce the number of print editions

As this list suggests, the place of the print product in the hearts and minds of established news organizations has to change radically—from one of where the printed newspaper is at the forefront to a model in which any print product serves an important but more limited role.

Here are my standards for a print newspaper:
1. Niche: It has a very specific role for a very specific audience.
2. Unique: It engages key audiences in ways that other platforms cannot, at least for the time being.
3. Resources: It pays for itself and then some so it helps fuel the transition.
4. Transition: It is a means to a new end, not an end it itself.

The last point may be the key for thinking in the newsroom: The print newspaper is a smaller and smaller piece of the action. Decisions about resources for the newspaper become less about how to make the product perfect and more about the effectiveness of the product either in driving revenue or transitioning the newsroom and the audience online. (Please don’t take this as suggesting the print product can be crappy. But it can be less labored.)

That attitudinal shift—fostered by smart leadership—could be a game-changer in newsrooms that are still more intensively focused on print than they are on the very different future that is already here for media consumers.

I’ve had conversations recently with newspaper editors who are testing different approaches to print that fit the new paradigm. One is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is experimenting with a new approach to its Sunday newspaper. The other is The Wichita Eagle, where the editor decided moving online was more important than a beloved daily print section. A third is The Tampa Tribune, where “audience editors” put platforms on an equal footing at the front end of the journalism. I’ll post about those approaches in the coming days.

As the past contracts, the future may grow

The weekend brought several thoughtful posts about the print industry in crisis. I’ll look at them as a tableau of dealing with the past to tapping the opportunities of the present and then envisioning a future.

First, dealing with the past. Alan Mutter reports that “Newspapers eye extreme cuts as crisis grows,” Specifically, Mutter says, people inside print organizations are telling him 2009 will be the year when whole daily editions of print newspapers vanish.

“In the best of cases, publishers will continue aggressively nipping and tucking at staffing, benefits, newshole, and the footprint of their circulation areas. In the worst cases, some newspapers will be shut down - or endure only as skeleton-staffed online operations.

“In one of the most startling of the potential initiatives, an amazing number of publishers of all sizes are giving serious consideration to eliminating print editions on certain days of the week, according to private conversations with operators who requested anonymity.

“Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday editions, which typically carry the least amount of advertising, appear to be at the most risk.”

(Update: Also see Mutter’s additional post “Where extreme cuts may come at papers.”)

It is unlikely that dropping editions—and the resulting cost savings—will forestall significant staff reductions next year. As Mutter reports, quietly released NAA figures show news revenues dropped like a rock in the third quarter of 2008 and the final quarter promises be worse. Growth in online revenue that many organizations have banked on seems unlikely in the current economy and unless news organizations radically improve the way they sell advertising and deliver it to their Web users.

What a conundrum. Still, a print only or even a “print mostly” organization can simply watch itself shrink into oblivion as Web access and usage grows while environmental concerns about paper, plastic covers and energy costs grow. Better to focus online—the opportunities of the present. Mark Potts argues established news organizations still are not committed to online with the focus and scope that is necessary.

Here’s Potts in “What It Takes”:

“How many newspapers have a sizable staff responsible for managing print circulation? All of them of course. Now, how many have even one staff member responsible for managing online distribution via RSS, e-mail or Facebook? Damn few.

“How many newspapers have a department devoted to fixing and painting news boxes? Just about all newspapers of any size. Now, how many have any staff devoted to thinking about how to optimize their site’s placement in Web searches? Not many.

“How many newspapers have an advertising production staff that can churn out a good-looking ad for any advertiser? It’s essential, of course. Now, how many have anybody thinking about new forms of Web advertising that take advantage of tools like search, widgets, Flash, interactivity, data-mining, etc.? Very few.

“How many newspapers have copy desks that work hard at presenting news to readers in a clear, understandable form? 100 percent. Now, how many have even one staff member whose job it is to find ways to place the newspaper’s content on other Web sites, for maximum visibility and to create incoming links? Or to aggregate content from multiple sources into a one-stop local news portal? Almost none.

My own conversations with newsroom editors confirms what Potts is saying. Many top editors don’t recognize how quickly Web dynamics are changing, much less what they might do to respond. Other editors do recognize new requirements but are slow to shift resources amid cutbacks and protracted discussions of what print to let go of.

Potts’ post suggests an important question for news organizations that are going to drop the print newspaper one or more days per week. You cannot stop there. Assuming these organizations do not also cut staff, do they have a strategy and a plan for effectively using those resources to make their online operation more successful? Are they ready to take the news to users rather than relying on those who happen to stop by? Are they ready to fully exploit Web developments on the horizon including mobile locative media and the semantic Web?

Potts outlines some ways to get there. Now.

A third post, from Charles M. Peters offers a vision of a future. Peters, President and CEO of The Gazette Co., is making the effort to become a true denizen of the Web and his Complete Community Connection blog reflects a willingness to put thinking out for comment rather than standard corporate practice of huddling behind closed doors before announcing a plan.

Peters argues that he and the rest of the news industry need to develop a new mindset:

Newspaper executives from around the world are trying to implement new business models. However, it is hard to implement a new model with an old mindset. Many are trying to arrange the concepts for a new ecosystem of local information. What I hope to do here is share my thoughts, and connections, as we explore these new frontiers.

Peters also offers one of the most astute descriptions I have seen of the awkward state of the culture of news organizations:

As we work to develop this new game, or business model, within our own company, conflicts arise.  Those who see the future, but can’t articulate it, are frustrated.  Those who see the future and want to make it happen quickly are very frustrated by those who don’t even perceive the need for a new game.  Those who don’t perceive the need for a new game are frustrated by all the commotion.

Key to Peters’ thinking is the idea that news organizations must move away from a product focus.

“We cannot continue to focus on products. Products are just nodes on the network, promotional flags to local intelligence, in context.

“So, the game is changing from a reliable cash-generating franchise focused on broadcasting authoritative snapshots reflecting the community to an entrepreneurial “elegant organization” to provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together.

“And, we cannot define these communities.  As an individual, my interests are not easily discerned by my geographical location or demographics.  So, I am looking for a way to keep up with friends, neighbors, certain local organizations, and certain local issues, while getting the overview of key issues that an editor thinks I should know.  We need an elegant organization of information to make that happen.”

Peters doesn’t stop there. He has begun to envision the new tasks to be performed within news organizations to shape and carry out this mission. The Community Liaison tops his list, and, guess what? It’s the CEO.

He closes with a list of questions that each person in the organization can ask him or herself going forward.

1.  Do I understand that I am a participant in an organization trying to create tools to be used “with and by” the communities we serve, to allow the individuals in those communities to know what they want to know so that they can have the power to do what they want to do?

2.  Do I acknowledge that I will get to participate in the creative evolution of my job, key tasks, reporting relationships and organizational mindset as we evolve into a new C3 organization?

3.  Do I want to?

What a great list for the conversations about change in your organization. It’s a piece of the future you can start on today.