April 8, 2006

By CURT CHANDLER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
and BILL OSTENDORF, Creative Circle Media

Of all the challenges newspaper editors face, perhaps the most difficult is managing the accelerating pace of change, especially amid steady budget cuts.

With print circulation withering and Web traffic growing, journalists who struggled to conquer personal computers, pagination systems and digital cameras are being asked to collect audio, appear in video or file multiple versions of their stories.

Meanwhile, the next person to be laid off could be working just a cubicle away.

Caught in the middle are newsroom managers. Asked to produce more in an environment of shrinking resources, editors must provide comfort and support for others even as they struggle with incredible new demands themselves.

The cutbacks are insane. Our industry should be investing now to assure our success online and in print. But in our world of publicly traded media companies, how can we cut and still succeed?

First, managers must step back and imagine what the industry will become. We need to get our heads out of the newspaper business and into the information business.

Print circulation is falling. Younger readers prefer to get their news on demand. They can't comprehend why their parents are willing to wait 18 hours for a newspaper to arrive on the driveway with headlines trumpeting what happened yesterday. If you doubt this, ask a class of journalism students – people paying money to learn how to work at a newspaper – whether they read the print version or get their information online.

But the money is still in print and the daily print product is a monster that must not only be fed but nurtured.

Taken to its logical evolution, we believe the newsroom of the not-too-distant future will be divided into two fluid teams. The largest group will be covering events – from spot news to symphony concerts to baseball games. Events stories will be published wire-style to the web. First a bulletin, then a story fleshed out with more information and the addition of pictures, audio, video and graphics. A second group in the newsroom will produce enterprise. These packages will be crafted with a more traditional editing and rewrite process but a strong focus on looking forward, not backward. Their work may debut first in print, or simultaneously across many platforms. The online versions of their coverage may also be layered, with the main package appearing in the morning and expanded coverage added later in the day.

Editors should be adopting that kind of structure and workflow now even if their web sites are not well developed enough to make use of them. With every hire and every cut and every change, newsroom managers need to keep one eye clearly on what the newsroom will be like in five years. And it simply can't look anything like what you have now.

Newspapers that resist this change leave themselves vulnerable to a competitor – such as a television station, a college publication or a classified shopper – that gets serious about local online news. The price of market access no longer involves a multi-million dollar printing plant. For long-term viability, newspapers can't afford to lose the Internet battle. And if you think that battle is tough now, wait to you see what competitors you will face five years from now. This is going to be a street fight newspapers haven't seen in decades.

An added challenge will be to focus energy on succeeding in the online environment, while not making the print product look like an afterthought. To retain traditional readers, good design and thoughtful reporting must continue to make the print product an attractive buy.

A full commitment to the Web will completely reverse the flow of events coverage at the typical newspaper. Instead of content being produced for print and being re-used online, it will be created for the Web and reappear in print. Many, if not most, journalists now working in the print environment will have to unlearn the rhythm of the morning news cycle. For content producers, this means news gathering doesn't have to slow down as a print edition fills up. Reporters used to working day shifts may feel more pressure to work at night or earlier in the morning.

On the editing and production side, the assumption that a piece is a first-day print story must be tempered by how long it has been available online and over the air. Communication that is strained by the transition from daytime reporters to night makeup desks will now have to adapt to material appearing in multiple versions across several platforms. Story structure and design will have to be adapted for the vastly different design landscapes of the printed page and the flickering screen.

Not only do humans have to adapt as content flows from Web to print, the pagination system, libraries and archives must change, too. For example, multiple versions of a story will appear online as different layers are added in. Which version should be archived, a longer story that appears on the Web, a piece edited for space in print or the version adapted to be read as an audio podcast? Most likely, all three.

In the midst of all this, newsroom managers will have to continue making everyday decisions such as which stories to pursue, how to staff them and how to adapt them for display on cell phones and in news racks.

The natural inclination is to look to the big online news sites for inspiration. National sites such as nytimes.com, and washingtonpost.com have established successful continuous news desks and helped set the standard for multimedia reporting. But the barrier that caused them to be some of the last papers to make the transition from black and white to color printing may also stand in the way of fully integrating their print and Web operations. These papers have immense bureaucracies in which managers derive their power from what they do in print. This entrenched structure is threatened by shifting power to online managers who today work in operations separated from the print newsrooms by several city blocks (The New York Times) or by a river and a state border (The Washington Post). Because the ratio of enterprise reporting to events coverage is relatively higher in these newsrooms, there is less incentive to reverse the flow from Web to print and it will be easier for the bureaucracies to resist change.

The same smaller newspapers that succeeded in pioneering offset color may have a better chance of successfully combining online and print newsrooms and getting them to work as one, especially if the online operation already works out of the newsroom. Even if online and print operations are separate now, simple math works in favor of a visionary editor at the top of a small operation who has to change fewer minds for success to occur.

Some examples of emerging innovation at smaller news organizations can be found in Westchester County, New York, and in Delaware, where Gannett papers are producing video that is being fashioned into on-demand daily newscasts by television producers and anchors. Quality daily video reporting is also on the upswing at The Dallas Morning News, although the Texas version emphasizes standalone stories over an integrated newscast. Increasingly sophisticated slide shows that combine still photography with audio can be found from Denver to Detroit, and from Fort Lauderdale to Rochester, where they are becoming a routine part of the online reporting mix, as well as the occasional home for major projects.

Perhaps most importantly, editors at smaller sites seem to be leaning less on packaged home page wire feeds (which have difficulty competing with news aggregators such as Yahoo and more toward posting breaking local news stories, which plays to the strength of their superior reporting resources in their local markets. It is an important step down the road to reinventing the newsroom.

The information industry is clearly in a period of radical evolution. The good news is that capable editors who can manage their newsrooms through the emotion of change while remaining committed to the core value of good local reporting have a chance to reinvent the news business online, in print and maybe on the Xbox, too.

Curt Chandler is the editor for online innovation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and www.post-gazette.com. He collaborates with Creative Circle Media Consulting (www.creativecirclemedia.com), which advises papers on print and web design, content and management. He can be contacted at cchandler@post-gazette.com.

Bill Ostendorf is president of Creative Circle and has led more than 200 print and web redesigns and more than 400 industry seminars on a wide range of topics. He has also developed software to provide newspapers with effective web-based classifieds and user-contributed content (see www.adqic.com). He can be reached at bill@creativecirclemedia.com.