Gannett's Asheville editor is frank about the changes

With all the turmoil at Gannett this week, Columbia Journalism Review's Corey Hutchins has landed a rather frank interview with Joshua Awtry, editor overseeing the Asheville Citizen-Times in North Carolina and The Greenville News in South Carolina.

Among some of Awtry's lines:

• "I will not hire a digital producer who doesn’t have a strong grasp of editing."
• "The Carolinas will have a full-time beer reporter. Right now, both Asheville and Greenville have beer reporters in different fashions. Asheville has a reporter who does a lot of beer coverage but has to pick up other things too. In Greenville the beer reporter also covers the nuclear energy plant.
  "When layoffs have happened in the past, it was, 'This position is gone and we need you to do these jobs,' and peoples’ lives have gotten, I think, needlessly hectic. And this is a chance to set up reporters around really, really deep coverage areas. Having a reporter who covers beer and the nuclear energy industry, I don’t know which of those two halves he’s reporting on."
• "The public has gotten so good at detecting when they’re being fed something."

That last line is refreshing -- and intriguing. There's no reason to believe Awtry is not being straightforward. On the other hand, Gannett's record can easily make one feel like a Missourian -- "Show me."

So we'll wait and see. But I'd recommend you read the interview.

Good for newspapers, maybe, but for journalism?

Thanks to Lou Phelps of the Savannah Daily News in a column this week for making brutally clear that newspapering is a business - a cutthroat one - that's not necessarily good for journalism.

 Phelps, a media consultant whose company also publishes the Daily News, seeks to make the point that, when looked at from a cash-flow perspective, newspapering is still a pretty decent business and that "we are far from dead," especially smaller community papers:

For smaller publishers still operating their own presses who need to spend $150,000 for computer-to-plate equipment, or $250,000 on press improvements, these incentives will help them cut their payrolls and newsprint waste, helping to make their companies even stronger in future years.

I agree with Phelps, who also looks at Lee, McClatchy and Gannett and finds that they would be in decent shape if it weren't for their crushing debt and depreciation payments. Traditional media companies are going to have to move earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization (EBITDA) closer to bottom-line earnings.

This month's Common Sense Journalism column is going to use an example out of Iowa to argue that if trad media companies want to thrive among the nimblest of new-media companies, they are going to have to write down and throw off more of the real estate, "big iron" and "big silicon" they find themselves writing down and tied to. They have become storefronts on the information highway, and, frankly, they probably ought to be operating out of storefronts, or close to it.

Phelps, however, takes it a step further, nicely drawing the distinction between newspapering as a business and journalism:

Unlike many business sectors, our expenses are tied very tightly to revenue. And, our industry, generally, is not burdened with significant research and development costs or patent attorneys, such as those in the drug or manufacturing sectors.

Take a restaurant, for example. It has to have employees standing there to cook and serve, and has to purchase the food items listed on the menu whether customers come in the door on Friday night or not.

Not so with the newspaper business. If our ad revenues decline, we cut newsprint/ink usage, we buy fewer stories and photographs, and we don't pay sales commissions (particularly optimum if sales reps are on straight commission.) Well-run newspaper companies have controlled all of their overhead and operating expenses, and changed their staffing strategies to be able to adjust to these vagaries.

Granted, some companies were late to that party and paid dearly in 2008 and 2009 as they struggled to believe that advertising revenues would not rebound - and took too long to cut.

But by 2010, most newspaper companies came to grips with the future, and began to admit to each other ... "It's amazing how few people it actually takes to run a newspaper company, isn't it?" as one distinguished newspaper owner in Georgia said to me last year.

And, we all began to cut like crazy.

 Exactly. Newspapering doesn't take (relatively) a lot of resources. Journalism does.


To keep things in perspective, The Savannah Daily News is not the traditionally dominant paper (the Savannah Morning News, daily circulation about 35,000, is). It's a free, low-staff operation (perhaps it's significant that the paper's "about us" page is blank, though this is on the subscription form: Welcome to readership of Savannah Daily News, locally owned and edited by professional journals. Be sure to sign up your family members...and we how you will consider recommending us to your friend and associates. ---Founded in 2004, Savannah Daily News is the region's FREE daily news source. SDN is locally owned, with news stories written daily by respected journalists who live in and love the Savannah, Coastal Georgia and the Lowcountry.)

I couldn't readily find any circulation figures, but it doesn't matter, because I think the sentiments Phelps expresses are shared by many others in the industry looking for low-cost, turn key solutions to what ails them (which Phelps will happily supply through her Community Daily News LLC).

As Phelps notes, newspaper companies are "not burdened with significant research and development costs." Which goes a long way to explaining why newspaper companies are finding it so hard to merge onto the new information - and journalism - highway.

Dear Gannett, about the video resurrection ...

Please read Wasim Ahmad's wonderfully reasoned post dissecting Gannett's sudden rediscovery of video.

"Newspaper video" remains an unsettled (at best, still controversial at worst) area of unclear ROI, debates about quality vs. run-and-gun, etc.

But the way NOT to do video is to try to force it on every person in the newsroom. Yes, every journalist should be aware of video and every one should be able to know when to take out a smartphone, hit the record button and take wide, medium and closeup shots.

But that's far different from what Gannett's usual pattern is.

RIP Gannett's 'Moms Like Me'

At one time not too long ago, niche sites like Gannett's "Mom's Like Me" were being touted as one of the ways to pump needed life, and revenue, into traditional newsrooms' flagging online efforts.

Such sites, not branded to the paper or TV station, were a core part of the Newspaper Next initiative from the American Press Institute. Now, word that Moms Like Me is being shuttered shows the strong headwinds both inside the industry and outside that continue to make such initiatives difficult.

Steve Buttry, one of the people tasked by API with trying to spread the "N2" gospel (and one of those I respect for trying to effect real change), put it this way in a recent blog post:

As someone who spent most of two years trying spread the N2 message and issuing the N2 call for transformation, it pains me to look back five years later and say that we didn’t bring about any significant lasting change.

N2 was a worthy effort that delivered what the newspaper business needed. We presented tools and concepts for newspaper companies to focus more clearly on meeting the needs of their communities with multiple products doing valuable jobs for businesses and communities. We spurred development of some niche products, some of them still in operation. We guided some innovative projects. But the default settings of the newspaper industry were too strong for anyone to embrace the thorough organizational transformation that N2 championed.

It wasn't just the industry, of course. Social media, like Facebook, has moved in on at least part of the space these sites hoped to occupy.

It highlights, for me, trad news orgs' continuing struggle with the "community" part of the three-legged stool necessary for success online (content, utility and community) Many of these sites were put up more in an "if you build it, they will come" mode without significant input from the hosting newsrooms.

It's not all Facebook. It's also a lesson that it's tough to pick niches that can work on the scale that a lot of chains feel is needed to generate acceptable ROI. (And if you think about it, there's a bit of an oxymoron there - a "scalable niche"?)

High school sports appears to be viable, and for now at least Gannett is keeping its HighSchoolSports.net.

But is this best done on the national scale Gannett is trying? Or more on a local scale as the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News has done admirably with its Pigskin Review? We'll see ...

Hyperlocal: InJersey autopsy

With Gannett closing its InJersey hyperlocal sites this week, there is a good autopsy in StreetFight that you should read.

Written by Ted Mann, Gannett's New Jersey digital development director, it's one of those rare assessments that is neither shrouded in black nor shaded by rose-colored glasses. It's pretty much just the cold, hard facts (OK, with a little hopefulness thrown in).

Some of the things I thought were interesting:

• News maps are eye-candy, not much else. As Mann says, that might change as geolocative and mobile are more integrated, but for now, no one seems to be clicking on them. I still think such visual representations might be the best way to present some individual stories especially when location is a key (I still go back to my July Fourth map of parades, fireworks, etc., instead of a river of text), but this does add a dose of reality to the mix.
• Aggregation and syndication are NOT the way to build viable hyperlocal sites. I and others have said it, but let's let Mann say it: It was almost immediately apparent that we’d ripped the soul out of the sites, and they quickly became ghost towns.
•  Flashy content management systems don't matter. You can build a good site on the cheap. But it has to have content and features people want. InJersey used WordPress and BuddyPress. (This is reinforced from my own experience with Hartsville Today. The CMS doesn't matter, but the features and ease of use do. When Media General ditched Drupal and moved the site to Expression Engine, but without using any of the EE plug-ins so that it became just a glorified message board without the ease of associating pictures with posts, an online calendar, a list of recent posts and comments, etc., the site lost users in droves, and they said that was exactly why. (To the credit of a developer at one of MG's papers, some of that functionality was restored, but too late and not the calendar, which effectively migrated to Facebook.).)
• Modesty is the best quality when it comes to expectations of growing audience (which is why - my comment here - hyperlocal sites and large media chains simply may not mix). Mann says the 17 sites had 2,259 members and 90 regular contributors. One of the sites had 65,000 pageviews in a month (he doesn't break out others, though in a Poynter piece he says some others had only a few thousand). Those of us in the trenches might rejoice at some of those numbers, but they are not enough inside a big organization that is looking for profitability and cash flow and measures audience in numbers far larger.
• Banner ads couldn't support the site. No surprise there, but the debate will continue. Mann references Howard Owens, a friend of mine, who does seem to have success with The Batavian.
• If you build it, they won't come - at least if it means doing any work. We all know this, but Mann's postmortem reflects it. See the 90 regular contributors above out of 2,259 members, or 4%. And, yes, there was a self-serve ad platform, but as Mann notes: [T]here was definitely an appetite among local advertisers to support the kind of reporting and coverage we were providing. Still loved using Flyerboard, we just had to sell them, create the ads, and schedule it all ourselves.
• People staffing the sites need to live in the communities. Many of the Gannett journalists did not.

There are some other good points, too. As I said, well worth reading. There are holes to be poked and points to be debated and, as they say, your results may differ, but overall it's a good assessment that should be useful going forward.

Newseum and Freedom Forum troubles

Former Gannett employee Jim Hopkins is known for his pointed work to cut through the corporate spin at his former employer through his Gannett Blog.

But Hopkins also is a good reporter - and he has delved into the finances of the Freedom Forum and Newseum in Washington and come up with some serious questions. Among them, what kind of financial controls have been in place at a time when spending on the Newseum soared over initial estimates and the Freedom Forum's endowment dropped by half during the past decade?

The Newseum, the glass-and-concrete, $450 million paean to the news industry on pricey Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and White House has had its share of criticism, including almost ignoring copy editors and their roles in the nation's newsrooms.

Now, it looks like a ripe target for some more enterprising reporting. I have my doubt's though, that this and the multimillion dollar Freedom Forum will get the same scrutiny as, say, the United Way did almost two decades ago, from the Washington Post and ABC.

Anyone want to suggest their own morning line on that?

Gannett's paywalls

A low-key announcement buried in the business briefs of my local (McClatchy) paper this weekend alerted me to the impending pay wall going up at Gannett's Greenville News beginning Thursday.

It's an interesting experiment by Gannett that hasn't gotten the play I think it probably deserves -- and that's probably because everyone has long since tired of the pay wall debate. But this is one of the world's top media companies, and I suspect the paywalls going up in Greenville, Tallahassee and St. George, Utah. portend an experiment that not only Gannett, but also the entire industry, will be watching closely. (The announcement was followed in St. George by promises of a lot more great material in print online.)

As Steve Buttry rather acerbically points out - and right on target - each announcement buried the lede, telling people how much their paper spends to do great things for them instead of getting to the point that they would now have to pay a minimum of about $120 a year for basic online access. (I also find myself dryly wondering if the papers will leave those announcements up and out from behind the paywall.)

The Salt Lake City Tribune article that Buttry points to at least gets the important news in the lede - this is an experiment by Gannett, a seemingly desperate one from the sound of it, to figure out if some - any - kind of pay wall will work.

That Greenville was chosen makes sense to me. It's a midsized paper of nearly 100,000 circulation in a middle-class city with a stronger economy than most these days, an economy that also has an international flavor with the likes of BMW and Michelin.  Tallahassee, being a state capital town, has a similar if slightly different profile. I don't know enough about St. George to comment other than that it is a smaller paper in an isolated area, but from what I read it seem to have an above-average income and high online use.

Greenville allows Gannett to test this in a somewhat more competitive market. Along with two TV stations with robust news departments (a third station is in Asheville, N.C.), there is the nearby daily Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, a smaller but nonetheless substantial alternative source of news. It is a N.Y. Times regional paper that also has a smaller paper under its wing in Hendersonville, N.C. (about halfway to Asheville). While the Herald-Journal does not normally cover Greenville (25 miles to the east) regularly, it could conceivably look at doing more regional news. There also is the Greer Citizen, a smaller twice-weekly paper between the two cities that covers Greenville County.

In other words, there are plenty of alternative sources, but it's a smaller market so Gannett does not have to risk the potential of a "failure" that could bring more unwanted publicity it done at one of its larger papers, such as Indianapolis, Rochester or Phoenix (or in a major media area like White Plains, N.Y.).

(Greenville also has been a good place to experiment with other things. It was one of the first of Gannett's bigger papers to be almost entirely copy edited and designed elsewhere - Louisville, Ky.)

When he left Gannett earlier this year, the company's chief digital officer, Chris Saridakis, warned against paywalls implemented in the traditional ways, as this seems to be. He pushed for charging, but for specialized packaged delivered how the user wanted them.

Gannett is not known for being loquacious about its business, but I hope some information on the results of this do come out and with a bit more publicity than I've seen about the initial announcements. If these are successful, they could have a major impact on newspaper sites throughout the country because, as we know, other chains have never followed Gannett's lead ...

I thought this was an interesting observation from "Partisan62" in the comments to the Greenville story:

This so called business model is like charging us to enter the store to browse. How about charging for access to GN original content (like those wonderful sotries on the symphony or the phony writeups of local homes) and leaving the comments and forums free? We post our thoughts and generate that content (not GN) while we look over those great rollover ads and banners.

(Update 7/2): Checking the Greenville site, it appears the comments are remaining under free access.

A lot of the comments on all three sites basically come down to this - we're willing to put up with the ads to read what is there because it isn't all that compelling. Start charging, however, and the content doesn't measure up to the value.

Update thought: In recent years, AP bureaus have come to rely on newspaper and broadcast Web sites as a quick way to pick up stories throughout the day, instead of having to rely on the old, weirdly named "electronic carbons," which were direct feeds into AP's system from member computers. I wonder if Gannett will grant AP continued free access to the sites.
Update 7/2: Bill Mitchell's Poynter column on the experiment.

Convergnce Conference: Michigan as ground zero

Dennis Jeffers, Carol McGinnis, Lori Brost, Sean Baker, Central Michigan

Wide variations, but one commonality – online, radio sites are a dead zone.

Why Michigan? Diverse media. Among worst economies in the nation, so media having to take more drastic steps.

Urban Dailies – canaries I the coal mine? Jeffers thinks so to some extent.
Gannett went to the Thursday/Friday/Sunday home delivery; seven-day e-edition; 24/7 Web site model.
Both (Newhouse) Made Ann Arbor Web only, is following the Gannett model in places like Flint and Saginaw, and is restructuring others.
• The focus has shifted to product, not delivery
• Trying to change people's behavior.
• There is some evidenced of cultural shift in newsrooms, living rooms, ad agency board rooms. In Detroit News newsroom definite evidence, matter of necessity.
But he sees this more as a stopgap model. E-edition is shunned by younger readers. So it keeps your older readers but does not attract new ones.

Uses/gratifications theory may be among the more useful of the theoretical models.

McGinnis looked at community papers. Generally have been defined by geography but more are being defined by community of interest.

Wide range of sites, from some that do almost nothing to full-featured sites. Only one Michigan county does not have a community paper. Ad revenue down 28.8 percent for larger papers and 18.7 percent for community papers. Michigan Press Association found recently that 54 percent questions read weekly papers and 58 percent read daily papers.

This leads in to Brose, who looked at online only sites. Many are new and there is no definitive list.
Lots of sites springing up in Michigan.

Ann Arbor is drawing the most interest
• Loved or hated
• A "river of news"
• Trying to be responsive to reader suggestions and complaints

• Used to have active discussions for past month or two, but users said they just wanted past couple of weeks. Changed.
• New, usable online calendar
  
• Working on hierarchy of stories
• Bloggers fill in the cracks, especially with things like parenting tips, etc.
  

Contrast with Ann Arbor Chronicle
Started by former Ann Arbor news writer about a year ago. More traditional news site. Little citizen journalism. Now reportedly self-supporting.

She is pretty sure we can say sites like this are the future of local journalism in Michigan.

(UPDATE: Adds broadcast sites)

Baker looked at 75 broadcast online sites across the state, limited to first news page. Used agenda setting and framing.

(Doug note: I think this research was important because it comes when, with newspaper cutbacks and now with talk of paywalls, TV and other news sites may be where the public increasingly turns for news.) Baker found wide variations, even in the same market.

Detroit: One station has a site that is well-constructed and indexed. Lots of RSS, text-based newsletters and interactives. Content has more local focus. Some new video. But two stations much less.

Grand Rapids: All stations very interactive. Lots of invitations to become part of the community. One has "publish yourself" tools, with blogging, photo galleries, etc.
Flint area- abysmal.

Radio: Sites have little local at all. Link to national news sources common. Seem to be more promotional vehicles than news sites.

Gannett earnings

If you want abject numbers on the woe in the newspaper business, here they are from this morning's Gannett release:

2nd quarter 2008

• Profit down 36% to $233 million, $1.02/share from $366 million, $1.56/share
  
• Revenue down 10% to $1.72 billion
• Advertising overall down 14% -- 8% retail and a staggering 9% classified (staggering, but not surprising)
• Advertising down 17% at USA Today

For the year, earnings down 26% to $424.5 million, or $1.85 per share.

Those are astounding, though as noted, not surprising numbers.

More from Gannett Blog.

Stupid newspaper video tricks

Kathy Gill, a senior lecturer at the University of Washington reams Gannett for the way it handled video playback of what was supposed to be a stream from a recent editorial board meeting with Barack Obama. (The post is a couple of weeks old, but I just discovered it through a list I'm on.)

Newspapers still keep proving they can do stupid video tricks -- the kind that send viewers/readers clicking for the exits. Among them Gill cites, some of which now seem to have been corrected on the Indy Star video site:

• Poor linkage to the videos and poor visibility. (Indy, for instance, has a little "multimedia" tag in its top navigation. You have to scroll down almost a page to see the larger display area that explains multimedia includes video. But Poynter's Eyetrack III study showed that below the first screen, readers start searching for headlines to catch their fancy, with clicks dropping off. Put another way, a compact home page that does not require vertical scrolling tends to lead people into the site more, which is where the multimedia is. So if you have to scroll down to learn what "multimedia" is, it might not be very effective.)
  
• Proprietary players that do funky things. (For instance, it seems almost every time I try to watch a video on Gannett's player from Maven, it stops inexplicably in the middle. Just happened again as I was trying to watch the Obama video. It's still frozen 10 minutes later as I write this, with the Pause button, not Play, still showing.)
• Page header tabs that tell you nothing, The Indy Star's for instance, just says "immersiveplayer."
• URL's so long that not even a mother could love them. (As Gill notes in a post earlier this year, other companies, such as Boeing, for which she worked, learned to link these ASP and other database monstrosities to human readable URLs a decade ago. The point of it all is that if people can mouse over and read the URL, they might actually want to go to your site, but if it's gibberish, not so much.)

A few things she complains about seem to have been fixed:

• More than the opening and closing clips from the editorial board meeting are up (though I just clicked on another and no response. All it gives me is a black screen and "transferring data from "release.theplatform.com").
• No ability to spread virally. There is now an embed code, as well as e-mail, link and share with social networks.
• Search for other related videos seems to work OK.

Hey the video's up now - only took four minutes.

Oops. it just stopped again, 3:47 left into a 6:14 piece on Obama's views on China.

If newspapers want to play in the big leagues on this stuff, they've got to stop frustrating the user experience. Maven's big front-page splash on its site is that it delivers more advertising inventory. Doesn't mean squat if Gill and others can't watch it (the player also apparently does not work in Linux - see the link from Gill's site) or can't find it. (Maybe now that Yahoo has bought Maven, the kinks will be ironed out.)

Hey, finally got through that China video. Third time's a charm.

Newspapers need to meet these criteria:

1. Video has to be as consistent in playback as YouTube or some of the other similar sites. I can't think of a time I've had a YouTube video stall while I was on broadband. Maybe it's happened, but I've never seen it.
2. Video has to be enabled to be easily embedded, linked to or otherwise shared.
3. But also disable the auto-start. The whole point of the Web is to leave the user in control. I'll decide when I want to start something. And can the automatic rollover to the next video. Maybe I want to look at this one again.
4. Along those same lines, when the video is ended, don't disable the scroll bar. Maybe I want to go back and review something I didn't quite catch.
5. Use links that real people can read.
   

Pullback in Florida

Word comes via the Association of Capital Reporters and Editors that the Tallahassee Democrat is pulling its reporters back from their Statehouse digs and moving them back into the main office Apparently Gannett, which owns the Democrat, is moving its entire Florida Statehouse bureau back to the Democrat, too.

Of course, it's not like the Democrat or Gannett are pulling out of covering the Capitol. Still, there's a bit of symbolism. And even though there will be a small satellite office as a work station, at statehouses, where symbolism is important, this sends an interesting message.

A little insight

One of those small insightful moments came today as I was reading a blog post forwarded through Facebook. It was by Shel Israel commenting on Twitter and a presentation by co-founder Biz Stone.

Israel talks about how, after a small San Francisco earthquake, he and dozens of others were sharing info about it on Twitter.

45 minutes later, SFGate, the official site of the ailing San Francisco Chronicle reported on the quake. As far as I could tell, that was the first quake news report through an officil channel and it was more detailed than what w had learned on Twitter. But by then, those of us using Twitter, knew most of the facts we needed and so did our friends all over the world. In fact, the incident marks the largest and most collaborative US-based example of Citizen Journalism that I know and it happened because of this simple little SMS program.

And then came that little insight -- But by then, those of us using Twitter, knew most of the facts we needed.

And that, I think, encapsulates Big-J "Journalism's" problems. As news media have increasingly turned to the easier and less-costly info-bits, be it the incessant stream of cable-style "breaking news" with little depth or the more reviled "infotainment," those media have made themselves less and less relevant to their readers and viewers. Most of us need very little "information" to carry on our daily lives. Absent the control of distribution, which is long gone, this financial well is not very deep.

Which then raises another question in my mind: With the headlong rush to create "information centers," a la Gannett, and digitize everything that moves, I wonder if this is long term likely to be productive. If our information needs aren't that deep, is there an economic model here? Do people come, nibble a bit, and leave, and can a revenue stream be built from that?

It's a similar time in print and online, I think, to the late 1960s when radio was transitioning from what is known as "quarter-hour per person" to "cume" as a way of attracting advertising. KYW, where I had the pleasure of working for a summer, was a good example. That pioneering all-news operation was fighting uphill against long tradition among advertisers of buying "quarter-hour." That measure was not concerned so much with the size of your audience, but with how long each person listened. It was a throwback to the days before TV when radio was filled with "shows," and people would gather 'round the set to listen.

KYW knew it wasn't going to get the quarter-hour with a fast-paced all-news format; in fact its slogan was and still is "you give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world." So it had to sell total audience, the "cume." The nice byproduct was that while it promised to deliver a bigger overall audience, advertisers would have to buy more ads to reach that audience because of the churn. (I'll tell you at the end how KYW managed to overcome that and become, along with most other all-news stations, quite profitable.)

How does this apply to newspapers? Well, it seems to me that while papers have on the surface sold circulation, or cume, they've really been selling quarter-hour -- the idea that their readers spent significant time with the paper. Now, with the idea of the information center, they are being asked to truly sell cume, and that's going to be a tough sell in an era when advertisers more and more are looking for quarter-hour attributes (the idea of getting my message to those exact people inclined to buy and willing to spend more time viewing or listening to my pitch).

As evidenced by Israel's post, if all we are really providing is information, then the readers are likely to be easily satiated and move on.

This argues, of course, for journalism -- the more nuanced, contextually full treatment of information that puts it in perspective and gives it special value. But that can be expensive, and expensive is not particularly on the lips of a lot of news executives right now. This makes it even more important that we find new ways to preserve some of those old values, and that will be the challenge, especially for those of us training young journalists.

And really, it argues for both strategies -- the information that they can assemble and reassemble as it meets their needs to get them in your door, but the journalism to keep them there. I fear we forget it likely is a two-sided equation.

But then again, maybe you think I'm daft and that my analysis is backward. Feel free to chime in with comments.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, how did KYW pull it off? Well, the story (perhaps apocryphal, but I think there is at least a grain of truth to it because I heard it several times with almost no deviation) was that a smart but desperate salesman knew he had to get the auto dealers on board. If they started advertising, others would follow.

He kept pressing one Ford dealer in Philadelphia's "mainline" suburbs. Finally, this salesman supposedly made a $20 bet with the dealer -- show up at your repair shop at 8 a.m., grab some keys at random and we'll go into the parking lot and see where your customers have their radios tuned. (It was a pretty safe bet, since all-news is very drive-time oriented and people taking their cars into the shop were not likely to have had enough time to get their fill of news and then tune over to their favorite music station. In addition, KYW at 1060 had a nice place on the center of the AM dial.) Sure enough, something like eight of the 10 cars they checked had the radio tuned to KYW.

The rest, as they say, was simply pouring green ink into the printing press.

More advice than a body can stand

And if you're a pending j-school graduate, all of it good and something to consider -- and much better than that 20-minute graduation speech you're going to have to sit through.

Mindy McAdams, dame de multimedia at the University of Florida, began this round of pre-graduation funsies (aka: how to scare the bejeezus out of pending j-school grads -- for their own good, mind you) with a post on "5 things to tell students." The first two:

1. You don’t have to be a programmer. But you need to have more than one skill. Another way to say that is, You need to have more than only print skills.
2. If you have not taken any online skills courses at all, and spring is your final semester, and the intro online course conflicts with one of your required courses that you waited until now to take — sign up for the online course, and delay your graduation. Do you want to graduate? Or do you want a job?

Ryan Sholin adds to the conversation with some good common-sense advice to a student wondering whether he has the skills, even with the multimedia training and internships he's had.

And Deborah Potter at the NewsLab has been on fire with some great posts that "broadcasters" need to pay attention to.

Try this one, for starters about the "Future of News Jobs":

At WLS-TV in Chicago, says producer Don Villar, writers are editing video. At the McClatchy News Service, journalists are programming robots to surf and gather news from sites that McClatchy has the rights to republish. Jane Scholtz of McClatchy says the company thought they’d have programmers do the job, but it turned out to be easier to teach journalists to program than to teach programmers about news. Jonathan Krim of WashingtonPost.com says he needs technical journalists who already know how to create maps and mash-ups, “people who can write code with a journalism perspective.”

The message for students may seem a little mixed. If you hope to work for USA Today and you’re a photographer, learn video, says Foster-Simeon. If you’re a designer, learn Flash. And you should have experience beyond just writing print stories. But what’s most important, he said, is potential. “We’re looking for teachability and openness, and and an understanding of how this this [the news business today] works.”

Or this one:

Michelle Hord, director of off-air recruiting for ABC News, says the answer to the question–where are the journalism jobs–is just one word: Digital. “We have new terms like predators, producers who can also shoot and edit,” she told the Future of Journalism Jobs conference at the University of Maryland. ” It’s all about being able to do everything.” ...

Holly Neilsen, director of video enterprises for Gannett, says “the jobs are going to be there but they’re going to be really different and you’re going to have to be trained differently to do those jobs.” At Gannett, everything is multimedia. “We are reformatting all of our newsrooms to be multimedia 24/7. Everyone is getting new titles. There won’t be line producers any more.” As for backpack journalism, she says, it isn’t new but it’s going to be a big deal. “It may be unpopular but it’s reality.”

And she points to this lovely little tidbit from one of the anchors at KARE-TV in Minneapolis:

Now TV journalists are faced with a new dilemma: punctuation. We really didn't need to worry about having perfect punctuation in our scripts for many years because no one ever saw them. But now we have to write web scripts, which means YOU get to see our punctuation. It's not always pretty. ...
I'll admit this can be a fast-paced business that forces us to write scripts in a matter of minutes. But that should be no excuse for incredibly poor grammar or punctuation.

See, wasn't that better than some speech?

Will they train?

Some of the first job ads are coming out of Gannett's Information Center initiative.

Florida Today is developing the newsroom of tomorrow. If you're highly motivated, technically savvy, flexible and excited by the potential of new media, then we may have a job for you. We need a couple of copy editors for our Delivery Desk, which publishes content both in print and online. Our operation does have some editors who specialize in editing or design, but the strongest candidates will be able to develop skills in a variety of areas.

Delightfully fuzzy. So what skills are those? Ability to shovel 20 items an hour onto whatever platform, or something more. Details, please? Will Gannett provide training in these new skills? (Because even were we able to produce Super Robo Editor walking out the door today, some of those skills might be obsolete by next week.) That would be refreshingly different for this industry.

Gannett - the video

We've written here several times about Gannett's shift to the Information Center concept of newsroom with its Ditigal, Public Service, Community Conversation, Local, Custom Content, Data and Multimedia desks.

Now, you can watch the video. See how the Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., is implementing it:




Here's the link to the YouTube video as well.

After watching this, I come away with the uneasy interpretation that really what we're just trying to do is push the print model into an online bottle. I have mixed emotions on that -- glad to see a push, any push, in that direction but a vague uneasiness that the "get it" quotient is still a little low. It's still "here's what we're going to do for you" and not enough here's how we bring you into the tent (even the "help us investigate" really seems to be deprecated to "give us tips').

The "we're going to update every 15 minutes from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m." sounds like all-news radio when I began in it in the 1970s (KYW-"You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world.") And what about 7:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.? A bunch of things happen during that time. Doesn't sound like that 24-hour news idea Gannett CEO Craig Dubow suggested. From a management view, I guess you can argue that you need to impose some structure -- making folks update every 15 minutes ensures it stays on the front burner -- yet a lot of this video still smacks of the "production," not the "newsgathering" mentality.

We also now know where the copy editors end up -- on the Multimedia Desk. This should be interesting to digest for ACES, which is finally (about two years too late) grappling with the changes at its annual meeting coming up in April. Lacking in the video is exactly what role those copyeditors will play and what skills they will need.

So I come away intrigued, but still with a bit of unease. Your thoughts?

And does anyone detect a bit of irony that the video ends with a pitch for a print subscription?

Technorati tags convergence, Gannett, journalism

Shaking up the AJC ...

And the dominoes continue to fall ...

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution becomes the latest to reinvent its newsroom for the digital age. It's not totally a surprise. The paper's online editors have co-led the daily news meetings for several months. One of our ACES colleagues, Lynn Orr, has been "manager of print/digital integration," and I've enjoyed hearing some of the details of the struggles to bring things together.

But I think it has tremendous significance for where it puts us on the convergence continuum (PDF version).

The nut grafsfrom the memo that came from AJC editor Julia Wallace:

We must make these changes to respond to our readers. They now have more sources than ever for news and information, and we must fundamentally alter the way we operate. Online, we will show that we know Atlanta best, providing superlative news and information and becoming the preferred medium for connecting local communities. In print, we will really listen to our core readers and create a newspaper that offers distinct and valuable content. As we think about this future, we have four clear jobs:

Grow digital
Reinvent print
Create more regular local enterprise (distinctive content) that readers cannot get elsewhere
Improve our news and information gathering

We must organize ourselves to meet these goals. That means a major shift in the way we work. Our current structure is fine for the pace and demands of a printed newspaper, but isn't structured for online's immediacy and evolving needs. Additionally, as we have evolved over time, we have added layers and bureaucracy and have become less nimble. Rather than tinkering with the old newsroom, we need to start over.

The emphasis is mine ... and in general form follows the same path Gannett said it was taking -- the time for tinkering is over. Totally new structures are needed.

In addition, the AJC is"extending a voluntary separation program offer to about 80 employees who are 55 years of age or older and have 10 years of Cox pension vesting service. (Out of a newsroom of 475.) " The company also plans to pull back to 73 counties around metro Atlanta. That may still sound like a lot compared with some of the pullbacks we've seen. But it means you no longer will be able to get a print edition in South Carolina, Alabama, Florida and parts of Georgia. It also means additional job losses in circulation and similar areas. The paper also will close its downtown printing plant in two years and just use its one in Gwinnett County. It will spend $3o million on printing upgrades and $12 million on a classified ad system (likely, I think, to have wide capabilities for people to create and post their own ads).

Why do I think this is so significant? Because, like the earlier announcement from Gannett, it marks some radical restructuring of the news operation. It comes closer to what we have been exploring at Newsplex for several years -- the "unhooking" of the content creation from the publishing platform.

Specifically, here's what Wallace has to say about the revamped newsroom:

• News and Information: Focus, digital. Get it, get it fast. "This department will think online first but will also provide print with a heavy dose of news. Beat reporters, general assignment reporters, full-time columnists and go teams will work in this department. The goal is a fast-paced, fun department, learning and growing digital knowledge, while still serving print in smart ways."
• Enterprise: Focus, print. This is smart because it looks at telling the story the best way in the best medium. In this case, print still remains better for long-form storytelling. "Print will be its focus, but it also will take full advantage of the online platform. Success means stories that offer something truly distinctive for the newspaper, create emotional connections, make us think, teach us something and change our world. The hallmarks of this department’s work will include unrelenting watchdog coverage, deep reporting, great storytelling, interesting profiles and trend stories. The primary goal of the enterprise department is to build more loyalty among regular print readers by providing them a menu of first-rate enterprise every day."
• Digital: Similar to Gannett's digital desk. Think calendars, chats, blogs, interactivity -- especially interactive databases. "Responsible for growing online audience by offering local news and information; providing a platform for interactivity and social networking; and extending our selection beyond news to attract new audiences."
• Print: This is the real kicker for me -- it focuses on print production, pulling as needed from all the other areas. This is the nexus, the separation of content from production. "[W]ill produce the best newspaper possible. Much like the digital department, it will pull from news, enterprise and other sources, including Cox's Washington bureau. This department will focus on issues such as balance, story play, headlines, cutlines, photos and design -- the many factors that determine a reader's experience with the paper. This structure places print and digital on equal footing, each taking what they need to satisfy their specific audiences." (emphasis mine)

I've been thrashing about in my head for several months a piece tentatively titled "Why would I ever want to work for a newsroom that owns printing presses?" The AJC, to my mind, has finished the thought.

Wallace wants it all done by the end of June. To help it along, Shawn McIntosh has been made "director of culture and change." Wallace also says the paper will boost its training, already good through Coxnet and other internal training initiatives, with a focus on "understanding our audiences and how to serve them."

I am a little bothered by the paper's feeling that a bunch of people 55 and older are surplus. I think that's the same kind of compartmentalized thinking papers have been guilty of for years. In fact, some of those folks -- who go back to the era of multiple editions and PM papers, probably could file faster and cleaner for the news desk than some of the newbies. And from what I've heard from online managers, it's the 30- and 40-year-old "print" folks who can be most resistant to change.

Expect to see more of this from more major newspapers. We are entering the fourth phase.

• Phase one was just the realization that you had to have an online presence and it had to have some real content.
  
• Phase two was the acknowledgment that online was more than a repository for shovelware and the establishment of online departments to not only repurpose but also to create content.
• Phase three was the integration of online back into the newsroom and, in some cases, establishment of 24-hour news desks. The emphasis was on flashy projects and breaking some news online
  
• Phase four is the gradual nebulizing of the newsroom that integrates online into all planning and that recognizes there is no one-size-fits-all medium, that every story is better told and every user better reached through a particular medium and style.
• Phase five is the complete uncoupling of print, broadcast, online and whatever production from the news gathering -- the transformation of the idea of story from a siloed chunk of medium to something like the time slice envisioned by Gelernter and where editors and "publications" truly become, as Newhagen and Levy suggested, "guides," not gatekeepers.

I'd love to hear your reactions.

Quick thoughts: Centralcasting, crowdsourcing and silencing gangs

Centralcasting, Telemundo style

With some of the discussion we've had here lately about changes likely coming to copy desks, universal desks, etc., it's worth noting our broadcast bretheren are struggling with some of the same issues. The latest reminder is the word that Telemundo is centralizing much of its newscast production at a studio near Fort Worth. Meg James brings the details in an L.A. Times story:

As part of a companywide, $750-million restructuring by parent NBC Universal, Telemundo TV stations in markets including San Jose, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston will no longer produce their own newscasts.

Instead, beginning early next year, local news for seven Telemundo stations will originate near Fort Worth. There, anchors and editors will produce three live regionalized newscasts using feeds from reporters and camera operators in the field.

Expect to see more of this. TV studios and newsrooms are expensive operations. The more you can keep them running, the better the margins. NBC's also doing it by bringing MSNBC in-house at Rockefeller Center.

Tvtechnology.com has a good archive article on "centralcasting," including the human toll involved when Sinclair centralized its news. And from that article, a thought:

"Until now, centralcasting has been an unqualified failure because most broadcasters went in with the primary motivation to save money. To be successful, centralcasting has to result in a better local on-air product, not just a cheaper one," said Steven L'Heureux, president of Denver-based automation provider Encoda Systems.

Another article, this one originally from American Journalism Review in 1993, touches on the centralcasting experiment tried here in Columbia. That station (WOLO) gave it up about a year ago and now has a small downtown studio and staff. The newscasts from Charlotte were so bad they were painful to watch. On the other hand, the move might have kept that news operation from going dark.

Election Day Crowdsourcing

Gannett followed its announcement of a week ago that it was blowing up its newsrooms, with a new emphasis on "crowdsourcing," with some examples in action on Election Day. I especially like the Cincinnati Enquirer's site for reporting voting problems. Nice Google map mashup, too, to make it easier to interpret. Other big-G papers had similar things, some linked to Gannett's national round-up site.

Yet, as I look at Cincinnati's offering, for instance, I find something missing. I find myself staring at all the blog posts and the neat map and muttering "what does it mean"? And that's the downside of this newfound enthusiasm for crowdsourcing (using the wisdom and expertise of a mass of people outside the newsroom to help ferret out information). The word is drowdsourcing, and we should't forget that. It's not "crowdjournalism," and that's why we have journalists -- to take disparate posts like those on the election-problem site and provide broader meaning and context.

Where is the story that tells me whether all these posts represented a real problem in Cincinnati and surrounding areas, or whether they were a random set of relatively insignificant things (not insignificant to those who had trouble voting, but still ...)? Ask an epidemeologist about the dangers that lurk in drawing conclusions from what appear to be clusters. (Clustering can apply to time as well as geography, and of course the concentrated nature of Election Day would tend to promote that.) And if a story was done, my apologies, but why is it not linked from this page?

While we are all agog about crowdsourcing, let's not lose sight of the journalism that's still needed.

Ganging up on Gangs

One of our local TV stations, a Gannett outfit, is trumpeting the fact that it no longer will "knowingly" show gang symbols or colors or gang members themselves. The station says it doesn't want to glorify gang members and wants to be "part of the solution."

Pardon me. If children are in the room hold their ears. This is a ^&#$%^*&(%*& STUPID MOVE that smacks of trying to grab brownie points rather than do journalism. Sure, gang members may be slimeballs, but you don't cut yourself off from any source in a story that is of central interest to a wide swath of your community. Of course you don't glorify them, but there will be journalistic moments when you simply can't tell a full, accurate story without them. They are a voice -- now silenced on your station, for good or evil. What is the next voice you're willing to ignore when the guv'ment suggests it might not be prudent? Got a mirror ...

The internet hall of mirrors

So if you want to see what Gannett is compiling about those of us who have written about what Gannett is doing with the Infocenter, try this link to its "Timewarp" site. We can go round and round like this all day -- kinda fun.

It's very good one-stop shopping for most of the posts and stories.

Gannett blows up the newsroom

While lots of people have been talking about convergence, Gannett slowly, inexorably, quietly has been imposing it on its newsrooms. Occasional indicators have popped up, such as the Fort Myers mojos.

Now, the big one has hit -- a memo from Gannett chairman and CEO Craig Dubow (posted on Romenesko, of course) that announces the transformation of Gannett newsrooms to the Information Center concept. In Dubnow's words:

The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future. It will fulfill today's needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process. And it will be platform agnostic: News and information will be delivered to the right media - be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented - at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.

The core idea is reshuffling the deck chairs in hopes this isn't the Titanic. No longer will it be called the newsroom, but the Information Center, and it will be built around seven areas: digital; public service; community conversation; local; custom content; data; and multimedia.

This isn't exactly how Tim Porter envisioned exploding up the newsroom (more here), but it's along the same idea. I suspect we'll see a lot of other media organizations paying very close attention -- people like Media General, which already is combining broadcast and print writers. (Gil Thelen, now retired publisher of the Tampa Tribune, was here last week and related how in Tampa the sports reporters for both print and broadcast are now working together in the same department under consolidated managers. While the rest of the much-vaunted and somewhat overhyped "News Center" remains largely separated, watch for more of this on the news side, he said.)

There will be a lot of braying, I'm sure, about how doing away with the "newsroom" and all this emphasis on closer connection with readers is pandering. Get used to it, folks. The palpable arrogance in too many modern newsrooms -- that somehow we are above it all and are indispensible to our readers/viewers/users/customers -- has got to go. We aren't, and they couldn't care less. We squandered much of that public support long ago. We continue to do so. (I am reminded of a recent Wall Street Journal story (sub. req.) about how radio station operators blithely leased time to scam artists fleecing immigrants. The station owners' excuse: They don't speak the language and had no idea. Look, to much of our public it's "the media," and those programs were just as much "information" as are our newspapers and news broadcasts. It's just another black eye all around that causes the public to think "there's no honor among thieves.")

Some other key points from Dubow's memo (the emphases are all mine):

Q. Why is it called the Information Center and not the newsroom?
A. Increasingly, we are realizing that our customers are interested in much more than news from our products. While news remains our preeminent mission, other information – especially local information – is increasingly in demand. Calendars, recommendations, lifestyle topics as well as neighborhood level stories are all new elements that will have ongoing coverage across platforms. We are also embracing community interactivity in our sites with increased involvement. Changing the name acknowledges this additional responsibility and emphasizes that we are gathering news and information for websites, mobile devices and other products as well as for our daily newspapers. ...

Q. Will the Information Center replace newsrooms at all of our properties?
A. The goal is for all Gannett properties to adopt the concept of the Information Center. Every newspaper in the Newspaper Division will be expected to fulfill the seven primary jobs outlined in the Information Center. Larger newspapers in the Division will create actual desks to accomplish these tasks while smaller papers will combine multiple jobs into various areas. For USA TODAY and our TV stations, the concept of the Information Center currently is being studied.

Q. Does that mean jobs will be changing?
A. Many jobs are transforming to allow for immediacy, multi-platform coverage and greater interaction with the community. People will be asked to perform many new and different functions than they are used to. Schedules are changing as the Information Center becomes a 24-hour operation. Some types of jobs, such as reporter and editor, will continue but the way they are done may change to focus on more local news. The role of the copy desk is shifting to reflect the audience expectation of continuous news coverage and strong headline writing needed on mobile devices, for example. Photographers are becoming videographers, reporting stories and creating new storytelling techniques through multimedia projects. Many of the changes will occur as needs arise during the rollout phase of the Information Center. ...

Q. Will there be additional hiring done to fill the Information Center jobs?
A. The Information Center transforms, repurposes and refocuses the resources that exist now. Newspapers are training for new skills in multimedia, assessing needs for library science and archiving expertise and updating job descriptions. Many sites are assessing, updating and training to ensure everyone has the right tools and expertise to transform into Information Center employees.

That last one, of course, is the kicker. Don't expect any more jobs from this. Adapt -- or die. (And for copy editors, please pay special attention to that next-to-last answer. As noted on this blog earlier, copy editors need to come to peace with the reality that their jobs are likely to radically change in the upcoming decade, and they need to get the skills needed to deal with that. Hopefully, ACES will take the lead in this. See Rich Gordon's thoughts on a study of job skills needed in online newsrooms. At South Carolina, for instance, my editing students already must learn how to find relevant links and to create 133-character SMS messages from the stories they edit.)

Sure, the New York Times, to much fanfare, announced it was combining its online and print newsrooms. The Miami Herald did, too, awhile back. Others have, too. But Gannett is the 6,000-pound gorilla. The future has arrived. Welcome to the future.
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Updates
Amy Gahran posts on Poynter's E-media Tidbits:
At the SEJ conference last weekend, I heard rumblings of this from some reporters who work for papers where Gannett has been piloting this strategy. Word is from the front lines is that the idea is to convert newspapers into "local information centers." It's not a completely comfortable fit, said these journalists, and they expressed concerns about how this might affect the quality of Gannett's in-depth reporting efforts.

Wired news has an interesting take on the Gannett changes, specifically looking at "Crowdsourcing," which reporter Jeff Howe helpfully defines as taking functions traditionally performed by employees and using the internet to outsource them to an undefined, generally large group of people. The compensation is usually far less than what an employee might make for performing the same service. Well-known examples include Wikipedia and iStockphoto.
Howe details how the Fort Myers News-Press used the concept earlier this year to enlist engineers, accountants and a whistle-blower to uncover possible bid-rigging in connection fees charged to hook new homes to sewer and water lines. Howe's piece has some helpful links to what he's written before on crowdsourcing, including "5 rules of the new labor pool."

His blog, crowdsourcing.com, should probably a must-read for most newroom types, and he's going to be running a series of documents and insights he has from Gannett staffers, so it should definitely be an interesting read for the next few days.

Dennis Ryerson, editor of the Indianapolis Star, let a little of the cat out of the bag in an Oct. 1 column.

The MoJos are coming

I think the folks at the Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press may have taken a big step toward getting this micro-local/citizen journalism thing right.

The paper has deployed "MoJos" -- mobile journalists with digital cameras, MP3 recorders and wireless laptops -- into the neighborhoods both to gather news and to get people interested and skilled in filing to the newspaper's Web site. Executive Editor Kate Marymont detailed the efforts in a recent Gannett News Watch. Here's a sample neighborhood page and a sample exchange between a poster and reporter.

Marymont says the message from corporate is clear: give more attention to online, but don't expect new resources (or in her coorporate-speak: "make hard, strategic trade-offs." The paper took two reporters out of its Lifestyle section and turned them into MoJos.

Some other key observations from Marymont:

• Reporters have to be willing to redefine news. Many of these stories would never make it into the general-interest daily newspaper but are important to a neighborhood. We have to be willing -- eager, even -- to write about someone's cat in a tree. The cat-in-the-tree story doesn't replace traditional coverage of community issues. It supplements the coverage with an extra layer of ultra-local community news.
• Make it as easy as possible for a new reader of the Web site to understand what's what. This kind of ultra-local news is new to our readers, and we must explain it prominently and in detail on our Web site.
• The most critical need is the ability to file material to online quickly and regularly.
• We believe that most reporters will soon be mojos, producing information seamlessly across platforms.
• As reporters and editors produce journalism for multiple uses, they will have to think about those uses in the front-end editing of stories. A single conversation between editor and reporter should decide deadlines and lengths for a story's online, daily and weekly versions.

There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the future of citizen-journalism lately -- laments about how Backfence in suburban Washington is hardly catching fire, the near-implosion of Bayosphere (Business Week's take, and OJR's. Here is Dan Gillmore's original post and a follow-up. Some of the comments are quite insightful.) Our own Hartsville Today limps along, experiment as it is, slowly attracting contributors but not yet forming the community necessary to become viable. Much of its early success has been due to the support and contributions of Dick Puffer, a professor at Coker College and avid supporter of community and citizen journalism and empowerment. On the ground in Hartsville, he can do things we can't do from 50 miles away and that our newspaper partner is still working to bring to fruition (which, I hasten to add, was the point of that project -- to see what a small newspaper could do with it within its personnel and publishing constraints).

The rethinking of citizen journalism is well under way, departing from any early models of "throw it open and they will come" (although I'm not sure that was ever really the model of most early sites, which appear to have been more the product of a few committed organizers, ala WestportNow). Sites like Northwest Voice, one of the originals and one of the first to assign an editor specifically to look after it, continue on, although not always with the vibrancy I would have hoped by now. Morris has proved with BlufftonToday that it is possible to have a vibrant site -- but it also is investing substantial resources in staff to help keep the operation seeded (although in the process it has built up a vibrant citizen blogging community as an adjunct to its news stories). The (Columbia) State is trying, with its TheColumbiaRecord.com to build a site by using a core of bloggers. So far the results are mixed, with relatively few others joining the conversation.

These are only to suggest the range out there; there clearly are many other successful sites and as many that are limping along. But the consensus clearly is forming that successful citizen journalism sites are like other online communities: "What's necessary for any participatory project is a sense of ownership," said Mini Kahlon, a Bayosphere participant in the BusinessWeek article. There also has to be a sense of reward, not necessarily pecuniary.

And that's what excites me about the Fort Myers idea. Unlike BlufftonToday, which re-formed itself as Web-focused operation (although it also has print), Fort Myers is clearly rooted in print. So the way it deploys resources says a lot about its commitment to getting the community online. Its effort is not half-hearted, yet neither is it whole hog. It's an attempt find a balanced way to integrate the staff more into the community and the community, in turn, into the news operation. It's a recognition that any success will require ongoing, continual community contact and the willingness to take time to explain the technology, time and time again, if necessary, to make it more inviting for many potential contributors.

It promises rewards of a different kind -- a newsroom that listens and responds quickly to residents' postings. That may well be a more powerful reward and attaction for participants than money.

And it's a system that seeks to inject some excitement into the process by "breaking" news, even if it's first word of that traffic light's being out and causing a neighborhood traffic jam. In the process, the paper will also, as Marymount notes, have to be willing to change its own culture.

It bears watching.