The new Tampa Trib - a front page and 'charticles'?

UPDATE: This has been slightly edited to clarify a few points.

The Tampa Tribune made some history back in the "early days" of the digital upheaval, when "convergence" was the buzzword and everyone was talking about how to bring together print and TV operations.

It never really quite came off as envisioned -- the cultural gulf between broadcast and print seemed too wide. But that was then, and this is now, and as reported this summer, the economics have revived the continuous central news desk and given it new legs. (Just last week, the paper named the six people who will be its "audience editors," given the task of figuring out what the audience wants and needs and how to get it and deliver it.)

Now, the Tampa Trib apparently is poised to do something else that we are likely to reference in future years as possibly another milestone along the path of the redefinition (if not necessarily the reinvention) of "the newspaper" -- a one-section broadsheet with a few front page articles and almost nothing but briefs after that.

St. Pete Times media critic Eric Deggans says that on Friday his e-mail began to fill with rumors the Trib was looking at "a one-section broadsheet newspaper weekdays, with very few stories "jumping" or continued off the front page."

It's more than rumor. From contacts inside the Newscenter: They've been prototyping a one section paper with a few longer stories on front (even fewer of which jump) and nothing much longer than a few inches inside.

As described by eyes that have seen it: One section for everything, though business and sports have separate covers inside the main section. An all-local front, with only two stories jumping. Inside, are what are described as "charticles" and briefs, with few stand-alones more than a few inches. Reporters will write longer versions for TBO.com.

Saturdays and Sundays will have stand-alone sections, with feature sections only on weekends as the Home and Flavor sections are combined into a Sunday tab. Oh, and the width gets trimmed again, too.

There's also an expectation of more layoffs, though not among the reporter ranks this time. Three photographers were recently laid off, including one of the paper's better sports photographers, and the WFLA and Tribune photo departments are being merged.

Janet Coats, the paper's exec ed, pretty much dodged Deggans' questions, as he tells it, with one of these "everybody's looking at paging" responses and a rather curt "when we come to a final decision, I'll be talking my readers and not yours first." (Ouch. OK, so St. Pete and the Trib are mortal enemies.)

But I didn't spend all those years in the business not to know that when they start hauling out the prototypes for the hoi polloi of the newsroom, it's a lot more than just "we're thinking about it." Coats is right -- the folks at Media General HQ in Virginia have to have their say, but I'm willing to bet it, or something close to it, happens.

So why is it significant beyond what will be bemoaned in more than a few places as more evidence of the crumbling of the American newspaper? I think we are beginning the path down to what was predicted a couple of years ago -- the paper version really becomes a reverse-publish index of the Web.

There are really two dynamics at work here: the absolutely crappy economics of the traditional ink-on-paper business (Crappy as measured by traditional industry and investor metrics, OK? Let's save the debate on whether those are good, bad or indifferent for another day.) and the expansion, after much hype and promise, of mobile as a viable information appliance.

I expect we will see a lot more initiatives similar to what seems to be brewing in Tampa. But we are far from knowing what the final equilibrium will be. Yes, the iPhone has made a solid beachhead in establishing the idea of mobile appliance. But it has far more to go -- I expect a sort of Moore's Law in mobile, that the capacity of mobile devices will double about every two years.

Right now, much of our digital strategy -- and this includes companies far beyond media -- is of necessity tied to a multi-pound chunk of silicon and plastic. It's still basically a 9-5, desktop world online (even if the "desktop" is a laptop). As small, powerful information appliances and readers emerge, that single-hump graph of usage will smooth out or maybe become multi-humped. In any case, it will be another pressure point on the traditional newspaper.

The bottom line is that five years, and definitely a decade, from now we don't know what we'll be using to get our news and information. With usage patterns as they are now, a niche can be argued for the paper as we know it, delivered in the morning and serving as a quick scan that the world hasn't collapsed before the world gets to work and goes online. But as the digital audience flows outward past those current daypart constrictions, then the idea of a paper reverse-published as a sort of top index to the Internet becomes more intriguing.

Hearing that the longer versions will go to TBO.com is interesting, since in some respects that is old school - again, tied to the model of computing and information gathering as a chunk of silicon and plastic with a big monitor. But is the idea of putting longer stuff online counterintuitive if mobile devices become a primary way to access the Internet?

Eventually, I suspect these things will not only upend newspapers but all this stuff we've come to "know" about our Web sites, which might not really be sites at all but various digital streams.

Beyond upheaval

It's really impossible to understate how much fear, loathing, upheaval and [name your basest emotion here] there is in the newspaper business this week.

Last week came the waves of layoffs. Then came the OC Register's outsourcing announcement. And the latest to touch it off was Tampa Trib Exec Editor Janet Coats' meeting announcing upheaval at that newsroom.

Intern Jessica DeSilva's record of that meeting has prompted a long string of comments and reactions. The money quote from Coats that everyone is focusing on:

"People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” she said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Mindy McAdams and Eric Deggans have more details. Interesting is the new setup outlined on Mindy's blog from an e-mail she got from inside the newsroom:

• Managing editors
• 5-6 audience editors — keep in touch with what the print, TV, online audiences want/need
• 5 sections of reporting (all the reporters for print, TV and Web are mashed up together in these groups):
  1. Deadline — for breaking/daily news
  2. Data — specifically for database stuff
  3. Watchdog — for investigative reporting
  4. Personal journalism — stuff for people’s every day lives like weather, health, entertainment
  5. Grassroots — citizen journalism

Outside of these groups are three “finishing” groups for print, TV and online to determine what stories should be covered and with what medium.

All the reporters will be trained in gathering news for online in case there’s a need for it. They’ll be training them on the go. The focus will now be on immediacy and using mediums appropriately. The print product is going to be more enterprise and in-depth, the Web is for breaking news, etc.

This is a lot like the Atlanta model announced a year ago -- the idea of a core newsgathering operation with specialty groups taking it to each medium. It's what we've been talking about in Newsplex for more than six years. It still will be interesting to see if it works. (One of the posters to DeSilva's piece says that in Atlanta many of the reporters have gone back to tried and true beats. I don't have any independent confirmation of that -- anyone with insight, chime in .)

It's a bit ironic, perhaps, that the Trib and WFLA were one of the original "convergence" hotspots, yet much of that convergence was lip service (I can say that because I have two very good sources who have been deeply embedded in those newsrooms; I've been there at off hours when the suits aren't around and have talked to those doing the work). It has finally taken an economic crisis to force them together (as a result, for instance, all the photographers will have to shoot for all media and will have to reapply for their jobs).

(Update: And not to forget that the L.A. Times said it would cut 250 jobs -- 150 in its newsroom -- while merging print and online (a good result coming out of a bad situation), and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel launched another surprise round of cuts. Allen Abbey, writing on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits about the L.A. cuts, may have summed it all up best: This is remarkable only in that it is unremarkable.)

There really aren't a lot of deep thoughts here, other than that we are just beginning what will be a long process of readjustment. There will be vitriol and hatred and shouting (online and in person) and pleas to a higher, noble sense of democracy and community - most likely to fall on deaf ears. We are hearing the thunder now because it is happening in the metro markets. We are unlikely to hear the anguish as it seeps ever so certainly down the ranks.

Read the comments on DeSilva's post and on another here if you really want to get a sense of the disconnect -- both generational and of newsrooms from their audiences. Or look at the comments to Timothy Egan's plea at the New York Times to "Save the Press."

Robb Montgomery has a good roundup of all that has been happening.

We are entering the maudlin. "Death of Newspaper" blogs are springing up by the day. Some of the "older" ones on which you can track what's happening: Fading to Black and Newspaper Death Watch. I used to get the RSS feeds, but it depresses me, and besides, with all the traffic floating around, I seem to eventually end up there anyway.

But this is economic reality. It is the same reality many of your neighbors may have had to go through if they worked in autos or steel, on the docks or in the meat processing plants.

Unfortunately, as it always seems, there will be a lot of cruelty in the process.