Learning partnerships
| Contents |
| Introduction |
| Key learning |
| Journalism leadership & strategy |
| Learning partnerships |
| News entrepreneurship |
| Knight community information challenge |
SCRIPPS / JOURNAL MEDIA GROUP
In addition to offering foundation-subsidized training programs, KDMC developed a consulting practice to help organizations develop and implement digital strategies.
Between 2012 and 2015, the center facilitated an ambitious and challenging initiative designed to accelerate the digital transformation of 13 highly print-focused newsrooms that were part of Scripps Newspapers and later formed the Journal Media Group.
The Four Platform Newsroom initiative, sought to create “digital leads” news organizations as the company launched an online subscription model. The goal: Produce significantly more high-quality journalism and audience engagement first for the web, smart phones and tablets and then turn to print at the end of the cycle.
Digital tools and skills training would be a big part of the answer. But KDMC knew from its extensive work helping other top editors change their newsrooms that cultural and organizational issues would have to be addressed as well.
To create and foster staff ownership of change, the initiative charged staff teams with making key decisions using research and guidance from KDMC. The center trained the teams to collect, analyze and act on local consumer research in developing unique "franchise" topics that would receive intense journalistic focus in order to engage readers.
.png)
The center's role included multiple on-site training visits to each newsroom, Webinars and other online learning opportunities and ongoing coaching for teams and newsroom leaders, who were asked to step back and let the teams do their work.
Within two years, the newsrooms reported significant progress despite many challenges, including ongoing staff downsizing and a 2015 spinoff from Scripps to the Journal Media Group, which Gannett acquired in 2016.
The newsrooms increased activity on digital and social platforms by developing unique coverage of local topics of high interest to their communities. They embraced new ways of interacting with audiences, including social media, real-time coverage and hosting community forums. They began to regularly produce video, data and other non-narrative story forms. At the same time, they streamlined print production in order to focusing more resources on digital platforms.
By 2015, Stewart reported that nearly every newsroom was on a "digital leads" footing and the others were on track to get there.
“We have clearly moved beyond a print focus. Our competitive focus now is digital. Each day we celebrate or lament how we performed digitally, then we put out a print edition. Print is not exactly an afterthought, but our process has become very mechanized,” said Jack McElroy, editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel and Knoxnews.com in Tennessee.
(For more information on this initiative, see "Digital Leads: 10 Keys to Newsroom Transformation," a KDMC report from which this section of this report is adapted.)
wide.png){kind=small}
wide.png){kind=small}