Six Months Is Too Long to Wait for Newspaper CEOs

Like millions of other people around the country this morning, I got up, made a cup of coffee, turned on my computer and hooked up to the Internet to check the news.

After reading about death threats against President-Elect Barack Obama, his mother-in-law's move to Washington and the most expensive cities to buy groceries, I turned to another topic of interest -- the newspaper industry's struggle to survive in the new media landscape.

I clicked on a story by Editor and Publisher about a summit for newspaper CEOs held by the American Press Institute. (Click here for summary of the event.) The topic of the conference was the saving the newspaper industry.

(Let's forget that the conference was closed -- although someone in the room was twittering about it, God love them. I'll come back to this later.)

Interesting points from the story include:

1. All but one of the public companies at the event "were below the safe range" for bankruptcy, according to James Shein, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

2. The group was told by Steve Miller, the executive chairman of auto-parts maker Delphi Corp, "Cutting staffs will reduce costs, but it won't happen fast enough, and will erode the product."

3. "The biggest hurdles to progress [is] the industry's senior leadership, including some people in this room," Shein said. "I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes."

4. The group plans to meet again in six months to talk about the problems.

So here's my question: If an expert in business turnarounds walked into your office today and told you that your company was in financial trouble and your effort to cut costs by cutting staff was eroding your product's quality and you -- as the top dog -- were part of the problem because you're doing the same old, same old and it isn't working, would you wait six more months to talk about it again?

No, you wouldn't.

But that's what the group of newspaper CEOs plans to do. In all fairness, the executives who attended did get some homework for the next class. The list includes:

1. Act -- and think -- like an entrepreneur.
2. Create new initiatives and kill them quickly if they fail.
3. Don't wait for all the data. Take action.
4. Downsize to achieve larger goals, not as a cost-cutting tool.
5. Leverage core competencies into new areas.
6. Be honest with workers. Get ideas from them.
7. Don't whine. Inspire.
8. Bring in experts with a different view to see if they can help.
9. Leverage your brand.

It's a good list, to be sure. Given the number of journalists who have lost their jobs in the last year, (Journalists whose personal stories I haven't read because no one wants to write about their own industry's toubles), I especially like item number four. As the crisis worsens, companies keep resorting to cutting staff and quality with no real long-term solutions.

In addition, I'm keen on number six, although I must say it's kind of hard to get ideas from the front lines if 1. The meetings are closed. 2. The folks sitting in those meetings are the same ones who failed to see the changing market conditions that have now devastated our newsrooms.

Most importantly, I think a good dose of number eight might heal what ails us. If we can use crowd sourcing to examine how Cape Coral, Fla., financed the expansion of its water and sewer project, (costing $20,000 or more to some of us who lived there) I'm pretty sure we could find experts in other fields who would be interested in helping save The Fourth Estate for our children.

At least I hope we can.

What's SEO?

In the last few days, as the newspaper industry continues to implode, I've been invited by a former newspaper colleague to join a facebook group called "Newspaper Escape Plan." The description starts out like this: "Escape from newspapers while you can! At this rate, everyone will be laid off." I think you get the picture.

The backdrop to the invitation has been e-mails, phone conversations and text messages from friends -- some who still work in the industry and others who have been laid off -- who want to know what they need to learn to jump from the print game to the web world.

Note: I'm not an expert. What I've learned, I've learned -- as I did in print -- by doing. Yes, I was in charge of managing online projects and database reports for my last newspaper. But that doesn't make me an online expert by any stretch of the imagination.

At my job as editor at an Internet startup company, they asked me to come up with content for a reference web site, kind of a no-brainer for me. In return, I got a job that allows me to learn as I go, and I've done it by using my journalistic skill for adapting to change. As much as I miss traditional newspapers, this job allows me to do what I've been doing all week -- explaining some aspects of the web to former colleagues who are eager to learn, particularly now.

In the last few weeks, I've had a number of conversations about search engine optimization. They followed after I noted on several social networking sites in my "status" that I'm working on a project to improve seo on our web site, divorce360.com. Most of the conversations began like this: "What's seo?"

If you're going to make the jump to online, it's important to know what it is. So here's the layman (or woman's) version from a former print person.

Search engine optimization involves examining urls and headlines in web content to make certain that the Google bots (robots or spiders) that come to the web site find enough of the right words in all those things to push your content up to the top of the search pages.

So when someone searches on google for a term, let's say...divorce laws... or parental alienation syndrome...the stories on your site that include those words will pop up at the top of the first page of the search engine results.

You can also improve search engine optimization by doing what's called metatagging. It sounds really exciting, but for a journalist, it can feel like watching paint peel. Essentially, it means you pick key words from the story and tag the story with them. The purpose is the same -- so that the bots, which crawl around web sites, can examine your content, decide it's worthy of improved seo and then spit them out closer to the top of the search that a user does. You can do the same thing with key words in the stories.

Why would you do all that? Because if you improve seo, you can improve traffic. Simply put, if your content is higher up on the searches, users are more likely to click on it -- more often.

It's a lengthy process, to be sure. And it's not an exact science. Google has patented the way it calculates search engine optimization. So there's a whole industry of seo specialists who say they know the secret code to seo, but it's really trial and error.

It isn't exactly the kick you get when you're breaking a good news story. But once you publish the seo changes and see your content move up the ranks, it does feel similar to something else we used to do in print -- deliver the news to the readers who want it.

Things that Make You Laugh about Newspapers

On the way to work, I'm listening to an NPR story about CNN taking the mojo-approach to journalism. If you don't know, that's the one-man band, mo(bile) jo(urnalist) who does everything from video to reporting. It's a concept introduced to the media by the newspaper industry, which has been fighting cutbacks and is looking for ways to compete with the immediacy of Internet news. (Here's a note or confession, depending on your perspective: In the interest of full disclosure, I worked for the Gannett editor who created the concept.)

Anyway, a few hours later, I get an e-mail link to a story on wired.com about the same topic. After I read it, I couldn't help but laugh.

The funny of the day: The writer who wrote the story apparently didn't know that Fort Myers, Fla., the home of the original mojo, has only one "e." (IE: Myers, not Meyers.) My e-mail tip of the day for wired? A mojo still needs a good editor.

Redesign Isn't Just for Newspapers

Everyone needs a new look sometimes. That applies to publications as well.

As a former editor for the largest newspaper company in the United States, I've done my fair share of redesigns. After 20 years in the industry, it was almost a given. Early in my career, it happened when new editors came into the room and decided their newspaper looked a little dated. Later, as circulation dropped steadily as readers moved online, it seemed they came with more frequency.

The big newspaper redesign news this week: an updated look at the Orlando, Fla., Sentinel, with another in September to follow at its sister paper, The Chicago Tribune. The idea is to re-engage readers in the print product as a way to maintain readership at a time when the industry is struggling nationwide.

In my career, I've helped or directed redesigns at newspapers like The Venice, Fla., Gondolier, The Tribune in Coshocton, Ohio, The Times Recorder in Zanesville, Ohio, and the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla.

In the last year as an editor at an Internet startup, I've realized that similar redesign principles apply online. The only thing that's different is that you can use traffic as an indicator for what works for readers -- and what doesn't.

Since launching the web site in December, we have listened to reader comments about usability and watched the traffic ebb and flow and come up with ways to address any issues along the way. On Friday, after weeks of work behind the scenes, we relaunched with a new look for the home page.

It's cleaner, simpler and easier to understand. And finally, it's here, so I share. I'd love to hear your comments. So feel free to e-mail me at marisa@smallponds.com and let me know what you think.

What Works at a Startup

You gotta love working at an Internet startup. Some weeks -- no matter how many newspapers , hometown or otherwise, are laying off employees -- you wonder why you left the corporate bandwagon. And then there are weeks like this one, where you wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

This week what worked at a startup?

1. The Mice Played.
Waiting until the office coffee runs out and the boss is on vacation to order -- ohmygawd -- completely NEW coffee flavors like "Timothy's German Chocolate Cake" or "Gloria Jean's Swiss Chocolate Almond."

And then expanding into a whole new realm --- tea. My afternoons are now spent drinking "Timothy's Cranberry Twist Green Tea," or "Celestial Seasonings Mandarin Orange Spice" while some cranky guy with a Southern drawl stomps around in the background complaining, "It smells like a Baaa-k-ree in here."

2. Willie. Willie. Willie.
There's something about walking into a room every morning and having someone -- ok some dog -- so excited to see you that he almost knocks you to the floor. It's just plain good for the soul -- even if he is a trash picker.

3. Getting a Little Help from my (Old) Friends.
Signing a contract with McClatchy-Tribune (good old-fashioned newspaper companies) that allows your stories on the wire service and, within days, getting some play on newspaper sites all the way across the country.

Now, that's what I call the power of the press.

A Positive about Newspapers

With all the bad news about the declining newspaper industry, it's tough to find something positive to say when you're wrapped up in it. Declining profits, buyouts, newsroom cutbacks. You name it, the industry has seen it all in the last few years.

But after about a decade as a Gannett newspaper editor, I've spent almost a year on the other side of that fence -- working for an Internet startup company, developing a Web site and assessing the content's connection to the readership.

Part of the job is to search for partnerships with other news organizations interested in offering our stories on their sites. The more partners, the more they use your content. The more they use your content, the more the traffic builds. It's a pretty basic way to build online readers.

While our stories routinely get picked up by msn.com (Yesterday, our content was on the home page.) and other online sites, we've been searching for another way to increase traffic online -- through a partnership with newspapers.

Why? The CEO of our company, Cotter Cunningham, explains it by using his previous experience at bankrate.com, which built its traffic not just through its online partnerships but also through its partnerships with traditional print products. The more newspapers picked up the content, the more the online traffic increased.

This week, we signed a contract with McClatchy-Tribune to provide relationship content on its wire service to newspapers around the country. For me, it's an interesting twist. After spending years in the newspaper industry moving from print to online, I now work for an organization that's moving from online to print.

Funny how the world works. For all the bad news about the newspaper industry's decline, it's still offers something of importance to other mediums. Newspapers provide readers. It's just that simple.

Behind the Scenes in Newsrooms

What's happening behind the scenes in newsrooms around the country?

I can't speak to every one of them. But here's a snippet of a conversation from a recent meeting with several newspaper colleagues I used to work with several years ago.

"The newspaper just isn't what it used to be," said one woman, a mid-level editor at a metro, who went on to describe the uncertainties of working in a newsroom that's been decimated by a bad economy and a slow draining of resources over time.

Another person sitting at the table said he was returning to school to get a master's degree to "keep my options open."

A third person at the table thought I was smart to jump off the newspaper bandwagon and into an Internet startup, regardless of the risk. She'd recently been assigned another position in the newsroom because the beat she'd been covering simply wasn't important anymore to the paper.

Seems like a recurring theme.

Fascinated by Facebook

A few days ago, a journalism editor and friend asked if I knew anything about facebook. His question -- how is it useful?

I must admit, I'm a facebook newbie. Several years ago, I set up a profile I rarely used and then, finally, got rid of it. I just wasn't certain I wanted to share that much personal information with the world. Besides, very few people I knew actually used it. At 40-something, I'm not exactly the facebook demographic.

Shortly afterward, I joined linkedin.com, a professional networking site, and became slightly addicted. The thing that struck me was how easy it would make my life. Now, instead of looking up numbers or e-mails for friends, family or colleagues, everything was right there at my fingertips.

It was like an online Rolodex, if you will. It helped me reconnect with some folks, connect for the first time with a few others and maintain contact with everyone else. Plus, my bio is attached, which means I never have to go searching for a copy when I need one.

Since then, I've decided to give other social networking sites a try. I failed miserably on myspace.com. I was befuddled by the site, which required too much thought to use. But my second go-round at facebook turned out to be so easy that I may soon become a pro. When my friend e-mailed me to ask what I thought about its uses for a non-facebook-using journalist, I came up with a list -- so I share.

1. I discovered young people.
And they've all hooked up to me on facebook. Between kids of cousins, kids of friends and my former stepdaughter, I apparently know quite a few people under the age of 25. Who knew? And really, why did it escape me that prom season was here -- until I began looking at their photos?

2. My high school classmates are alive and well and on facebook.
And, oddly, some are using it more routinely than I. They send me funwalls and superpokes and all kinds of stuff I still haven't figured out. Given that we're the same age, there's hope for me yet.

3. People at work are hooked up.
I don't just mean the people at the Internet startup where I work. I mean folks from linkedin are on facebook, too. And folks who aren't on linkedin are there. And when their birthday or their newest photo is posted, I know right away on facebook -- which I can even get on my Blackberry. It helps me keep in touch with more people, more often, something I really didn't think was possible.

4. The place is chatty, chatty, chatty.
If I have facebook open during the workday, I often get e-mail from there -- rather than my e-mail address. Sometimes writers will ask me questions about their stories for the web site. Or friends will give me the latest news about layoffs or cutbacks in the print industry. Several times I have had instant messages from journalists asking for professional advice -- right now -- as part of real time.

5. There's even professional networking.
Since signing up for facebook, I have talked someone into doing some work for the site. In another case, I convinced an editor who runs a fledgling non-profit journalism organization to put up some information on facebook. And I've reconnected with other journalists I've lost track of over the years through the Poynter Institute project, which has connected more than 7,000 journalists around the world.

Recently, I came across an article in venturebeat.com with statistics for social networking sites. Myspace, the leader, had dropped one percent earlier this year. Facebook had increased 77 percent. Linkedin -- number eighth on the list -- had increased 729 percent. With those numbers, the question isn't how useful they are, but which one works better for you.

Will Internet Portals Invest in Newspapers?

The most interesting thing I've seen in a long time about newspapers was a video on Yahoo! Finance. In it, Todd Harrison, CEO of Minyanville.com, who suggested that online portals buy large print companies like Gannett, my former employer. The idea of "Content as King," isn't news to a veteran newspaper editor like myself. Nice to see someone in the financial world with the same understanding.

I e-mailed the video to a number of newspaper friends, one of whom asked me what I thought would happen if such a deal emerged. As the editor of a startup company for a niche product, I think there's a real possibility in the idea. Given the media partnerships that emerge online, (msn.com, for example, using content from our site and links to it), it seems like a sound idea to maintain a steady stream of content that could be reused online from the original source -- the newspaper.

Until newspapers don't have any readers anymore, there's still income -- albeit much less of a profit margin than in the past -- that comes from the print product and the traffic from its online publications. So an online portal could maintain the newspaper's circulation until it becomes a financial liability and still get the benefit of great journalism.

These days, given the state of the struggling newspaper industry, the idea looks appealing indeed.

Functionality, Not Form, in Newspaper Content

Leon Levitt, vice president of digital media for Cox Newspapers Inc, was quoted in editorsweblog.org as saying newspapers can boost online advertising revenue by "slicing and dicing" content to suit reader needs.

I couldn't agree more.

Since I jumped off the newspaper bandwagon and into a job as editor of an Internet startup site, it's become clearer to me that what newspapers aren't doing is making their content functional beyond the stories they produce.

I've had several conversations about this with newspaper editors in the last few months, including one this weekend with a friend who was visiting from Ohio. One of the keys to the puzzle of finding ways to make money off traditional newspaper content, I explained to her, was finding a way to improve the long-term functionality of the news that's produced daily.

What do I mean?

About two months ago, I began to re-examine the content on my site, not just for quantity but also for utility. While we've done a solid job of news-related content, the functionality of the site from an encyclopedic standpoint needed some improvement. After a discussion with our CEO, Cotter Cunningham, formerly of bankrate.com, it occurred to me that the encyclopedic information is in the news content -- just not organized in a way that makes it easy for users to find it again once the news content was archived.

Obviously, my news background was affecting how I focused the web site -- not a bad thing. But I what about users coming to the site for a specific topic on a day when it wasn't a top story? Yes, we have archives, but is that really enough?

When I examined our bounce rate (the rate that's given to site after users come to the site searching for a topic and leave without finding it), I discovered it's better than the average web site. But I realized it was still an area that needed more attention from me. So I began working on a project that will improve the long-term functionality of site's content.

Since I'm still a news junkie, it occurred to me during my daily reading of blogs, topic content feeds and stories, that this was also missing in most traditional newspaper operations. While some companies are working on these efforts, no one seems to be doing it very well. Imagine what they could do with all the content they have if, after publishing the traditional newspaper story form, editors considered the encyclopedic functionality of their content.

Thomson, a former newspaper company that sold many of its properties to Gannett some years ago, appears to be building a business model of this type. In its recent $16.6 million merger with Reuters, company officials told The New York Times that it plans to refocus Reuters on business news -- using that content to build a database of targeted content for users who need specific financial content and all its related information.

For traditional newspaper companies to build something similar, however, would require them to stop cutting back on the content-gathering efforts of their news operations and focus, instead, on investing -- in the reimagining of function over form.

Perhaps then we could stop talking about the death of the newspaper industry -- and start focusing on its rebirth.

MSN, Newspapers and Don Moore

When Don Moore began his career, he used a typewriter and a pica pole and processed his own black and white photographs in a darkroom. Today, there is a generation of young people who would not know what any of those things were -- much less how to use them. But they would know about msn.com.

That is why today is a particularly fun day for me.

In January, Mr. Moore -- aka my journalism dad -- was laid off from his job at the Charlotte Sun-Herald, a small, family-owned newspaper in Port Charlotte, Fla. Why? It was hit with the same financial reality that most newspaper companies have been hit with in the last few years. Too many employees, not enough advertising to pay the bills and more people canceling their newspaper subscriptions so they can go online and read what they wanted for free.

Don was just one of the journalists that Poynter Institute's Rick Edmonds wrote about earlier this week -- one of 2,400 newspaper people who had lost their jobs as the industry struggles to find a way in this new media landscape.

When he got his pink slip, Don had no idea how to use PC, what a wireless router was or what he would do without a newspaper job -- an industry he has worked in all of his life. I wrote about his plight in a previous blog.

After stewing about it a while, I asked him if he wanted to freelance for the Web site. After all, he has spent more than 40 years in the business. Writing stories -- regardless of whether they're in print or online -- isn't exactly a new skill for him.

He agreed to do it -- tentatively. Then he spent the next few weeks trying to bring himself into this century from a technology standpoint. In that area, he had some room for improvement. After a few frustrating weeks of technical challenges, his first stories hit the site, and I wrote about him again.

But the best part of this tale is that today, one of his articles, "Is Mortgage Crisis Causing Divorce?" was picked up by msn.com. The news site also shared links to two of his other stories on our site.

When I discovered msn wanted to use his work on Saturday morning, I was so tickled that I called him to share the news. He was sitting with his daughter, Shannon, at a soccer match in North Port, Fla. His granddaughter, Coral, was playing. Amid the shouts from the parents and kids, I broke the news.

"Your story is being picked up," I said.

"Oh yeah?" he said, stopping the conversation long enough to cheer for his granddaughter. "By who? AP?"

"No, no," I said, explaining that The Associated Press did not pick up stories from our site, but national web sites did. "Your story is going to be on msn."

There was a long pause in the conversation. All I could hear was the noise of the game in the background.

"Are you there?" I asked.

"Uh, yeah. What's msn?"

For a few minutes, all I could do was laugh. Then I made him hand the phone to his daughter so I could explain why I had called.

Fortunately for me, she was able to explain it all.

The Fight over Yahoo

Thanks to the Washington Post for its story on Murdoch and AOL fighting for Yahoo. This is the kind of purchase that traditional newspaper companies should angling for. Content folks + an Internet portal = endless possibilities.

Reimagining Newspapers

If newspapers worked the way they did in my brain:

1. Their Web sites would aggregate the news for a big, breaking story so if I went to their sites I wouldn't have to look at other sites in the region for stories on the same topic. I'd get short fat graph-introductions to stories on other news sites. I'd know it was a good read, because you told me so by showing me it was there. And the next time something big happened, I'd come back again -- and again.

2. Newspapers would look at their Web sites as a way to start as many regional or national online niche products as they could handle, given they keep downsizing their newsrooms. A place like Delaware, for example, would have a sister Web site for beaches or tax-free shopping or incorporation information for businesses. Fort Myers would offer a Web site for midwesterns who wanted to retire to the area, including a database of such information as movers in my area, property tax information and home insurers and rates -- so I didn't have to look around for this stuff on a bunch of other sites. (I worked in both places, just for the record.)

3. Local stories would be on incorporated into a map as well as just listed on the Web site by what time it happened. Then I could decide if I wanted to read the content by its closeness to my home or my work as well as just by a good headline. It would be really interesting if, as part of this effort, citizen videos of breaking news could be downloaded onto these maps as part of the interactivity for my geographic area of interest.

4. Sports departments would link previous stories on particular teams, so that I could read the stories that ran before about this particular story. They would use their archived profiles and statistics on a particular sport, encyclopedic information in a Wikipedia-like format if you will, as links in every story so if I would have every piece of information at my fingertips. And they'd add some kind of social networking, so I can hang out online with folks like me -- who liked the same teams.

5. Newsrooms would use their historical knowledge of the community and put that into some kind of Wikipedia-like database of information that allowed readers to learn about the area through their links to local stories as well as through just browsing on topics of interest. (Ok, I've mentioned this one before, but it has a long tail so I will mention it again.)

6. Directed the conversation on particular topics -- think msn's moneycentral -- by asking a few pointed questions about stories you've written that would engage in serious discussion, offer suggestions or tips and be another place to develop content that could be linked to the original story or new stories on the topic as they were written.

7. Think of each story not as a one-dimensional, one-time only piece that would be finished once the editor moved it to the desk. Instead, it would be interesting if newsrooms thought of every story as a container of endless possibilities for content that -- over time with links, videos, photos, maps -- offers the kind of depth that the print product has slowly whittled away at over the last few years.

Imagine.

Yahoo Can, Newspapers Can't?

Yahoo can do this. Newspapers can't?

See previous blog entry. Enough said.

Fixing What Ails Newspapers

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to fix what ails the newspaper industry. It's the topic of conversation with everyone I know who still works in the profession. And no one seems to have a magic pill.

A few months ago, at an annual meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors, I spoke with a Gannett editor who knew me before I jumped off the print bandwagon and fell into this Internet gig. She asked me, given my new vantage point, how I would move forward in the new media age.

I suggested that her company -- also my former employer -- consider taking its news service, which wasn't breaking much news ground, and use its staff in a different way -- to aggregate news from its newspapers across the country. There was, as far as I could tell, no reason for WebMD or any other national health site to exist when the company owned a string of newspapers that could provide more, and better, health-related content. Sadly, she said, a similar idea had been floated before but, for a variety of reasons, it hadn't worked.

The conversation bothered me. And today, a day after reading the full report from Newspaper Next, it still makes me cringe. The report, if you haven't read it, is a call to action for newspaper companies struggling to compete in a new media landscape.

So here's my suggestion for the day, directed at any large newspaper company that's trying to recreate itself in a world where fewer people are reading print products each day. Consider taking all your Web sites dedicated to a particular niche audience, let's say moms for example, and connect the dots for a national audience.

Imagine this. All your local niche moms sites connected under one umbrella site. (Let's steal a brand name from an already national product and call it USAmoms for lack of a better name.) All your local traffic moving through one national portal -- a Babycenter for moms if you will. I wonder, would that play with national advertisers do you think?

I guess someone will have to give it a try.

Things that Make you Go Hmm....

Last night, somewhere around 3 a.m. when I woke up and couldn't fall back to sleep, I grabbed a stack of -- ohmygawd -- printouts, wandered into the living room and curled up on the couch for a good read.

At the top of the pile was a recently released 100-plus page report called, Making the Leap Beyond Newspaper Companies. I had been saving it for an airplane trip or a sleepless night, whichever came first. It kept me awake a lot longer than I planned.

Here are some of the highlights I came across....

1. Newspapers are still behind in the new media game.
(I think we can all agree on this one.)

2. Local wikipedias. Do it.
(See previous blog entry.)

3. Search for new online target markets -- like moms. Write more for them. Sell more stuff to them. (Next will be dads and pets -- just ask Gannett. See page 17, annual report.)


4. The bottom line was simple:
Don't lose the money that's already coming your way.
Find ways to make more money with new products.
Target folks who aren't spending money with you.

After I finished, I had to wonder -- is any of that really new?

A Snapshot of the Newspaper Industry

I spent the better part of the last week in another state, judging a newspaper contest for a company I haven't worked for since college. It was an odd experience given that -- after more years than I care to admit -- I no longer work at a newspaper. And it proved to be an interesting snapshot of what's happening in the industry.

As I was checking into the hotel, I ran into another judge -- an editor I haven't seen in more than 20 years. Back then I was a reporting intern, and he was the assistant city editor assigned to make certain I made it through the summer without getting into too much trouble. He must not have held my inexperience against me since he seemed happy to get reacquainted.

When he heard I'd joined an Internet startup company, he wanted to talk more about my experience. Why? The newspaper company he works for is for sale. He -- and another judge who works at a sister paper -- will find out next summer who their new owners are.

While we examined the quality of visual, written and online journalism for a group of papers none of us worked for, the state of the industry was the backdrop for discussion. Using the numbers, this picture of the profession emerged:

1. Of the 16 judges, one was a long-time journalism educator. So for the purposes of accuracy, 15 judges had been working at a newspaper in the last year.

2. Of those 15, three were no longer in the industry. One now teaches college journalism. One works for a government agency. The third (me) works for an online company. All three of us left the industry in the last year. All three of us had worked for the same newspaper company for a long time.

3. Of the other 12 judges, two editors (as I explained earlier) are working at a newspaper company that is on the market.

4. Of the 10 remaining, one -- who manages a digital department at a newspaper -- lost an assistant who took a buyout. This happened two days into the event. That manager won't get to replace the position.

At dinner one evening, we were visited by several editors who worked at the company's largest newspaper, which is located in the same town where we had converged. A friend, who lives in the city, e-mailed me a copy of a recent article about the executive editor, which was published in a regional magazine. In it, the writer described how the editor was fighting against a declining newspaper circulation by focusing more on its online site. The article gave her efforts mixed reviews.

And today, a few hours after an editor at another newspaper told me he was asked to buy equipment on eBay to save money, I read that newsprint companies are increasing their costs again. Given the recent buyouts, layoffs and declining stock prices of newspaper companies, it makes you wonder -- what will happen next?

Before I returned home from my stint as a judge, one editor at the event explained that the increasing pressures on the industry were hitting his newspaper, too. He simply isn't hiring much these days. He added: "It's not going to get better anytime soon."

But with all the talented people in the journalism industry, I still have hope that he's wrong.

Wikipedia, Collective Knowledge and Newspapers

A few years ago, I sat in a meeting with an editor and argued that we should start a local version of Wikipedia. The idea was simple. We could remain the historical knowledge of the community by using our Web site to help us.

Given that we were focusing on how to improve our online content, this new element, I thought, would offer something that people would come back to over and over again. (As an example, just consider Joe Biden’s folks trying to rewrite his political history with plagiarism.)

I figured it would be a cross between the newspaper archive and refrigerator journalism. Unless you’re from a particular region, state or community, you’re probably not going to go searching for this kind of stuff. However, school kids, locals and folks who need term paper topics for college might find it handy. It was, I believed, another way to chronicle the area’s history. And a new way to look at our jobs as journalists.

The idea was shot down for a number of reasons, including: The newsroom didn’t have the staff to maintain it; There was an unwillingness to open up the project to the community; There seemed no way to connect it to our online efforts; and most importantly, at a time when newspapers were struggling financially, it would compete with the idea that people would pay for old newspaper stories in the newsroom's archives.

Back then newspaper companies around the United States were struggling to keep readers from dropping their print subscriptions. They’re still struggling now, even though they've all changed their focus to online.

I must be honest. I’m part of the problem. I used to read a print newspaper every day. Several of them. I used to collect them on vacations so I could see what my colleagues were all doing and how well they were doing it. I used to think I’d never do anything but work for one. But today, I have a job at an Internet startup company, and if it weren’t for my parents, (and my boss who still gets the NY Times daily for work) I would rarely read a printed newspaper.

My parents are not the norm. They don’t own a computer or know how to use one. In fact, they weren’t sure what I did when I worked for one. And now that I work for a Web site, I might as well be working on another planet.

I, on the other hand, have a laptop at home connected to the laptop at work. I have a laptop at work connected to RSS feeds from around the world. I read more news online than I ever did when I collected newspapers to read. And my Blackberry connects me to everything, all the time, even in traffic. Not a day goes by in which I don’t know what’s happening, when it’s happening, updated by news alerts. So by the time the newspaper arrives at my doorstep every morning, I’ve heard it all several times over.

The only time I check the news is when it’s breaking. For example, when the recent shooting at a Wendy’s restaurant occurred down the street from where I live, I went to my local newspaper’s Web site to check out the coverage. I was able to share the name of a person in the restaurant at the time with an editor in another part of the state where that person was from – helping an editor in a newsroom I used to work in get a local angle to a story that got national attention.

I have, unfortunately, become the reader I wanted so badly to attract when I was working in newspapers, which circuitously gets me back to my point.

If we want to attract readers to newspaper Web sites, we have to be more than we have become. And one of the things I think we lost along the way was our commitment to being the historical memory of our communities. Between the buyouts and the layoffs, employees with years of experience in their communities no longer work at a place where they can share their knowledge with readers.

So here’s a suggestion. Give up your paid archives. If you were making the kind of money from them you needed, you wouldn't be laying off folks in the newsroom. And because I'm the kind of news person who hates telling you what to do without offering to make it better, here's an idea to consider.

Set up a Wikipedia for your community with topics based on the beats that are important to your readers. Use the collective knowledge of your readers to build that historical knowledge for your news Web site. Then assign upkeep of the facts of those entries to reporters in your newsroom – or if you’re a larger newsroom and still have a librarian or two, they can help as well. Older reporters who might be annoyed by the new work could be swayed by its ability to become a community resource. And reporters new to a particular beat might actually learn something about their community before they go out to cover it.

Then, if you consider my previous blog on links, you'd be able to use it to give readers a deeper online content experience. Every time a name pops up in a story or a well-known court case is mentioned, you can use your community's Wikipedia. And if you're like the editors I have spoken with who have concerns about the resource's accuracy, you will know that your version has been fact-checked by your staff as part of your new media efforts.

In the end, you become more useful to your readers. And who knows? You might attract an advertiser or two along the way.

An Old Dog Can Learn New Tricks

They say an old dog can't learn new tricks. I know they're wrong.

About a month ago, I wrote about my "journalism dad" Don Moore, who had spent several decades working at the Charlotte Sun-Herald in Port Charlotte, Fla. He was my deskmate for several years -- a grump of a man with a big heart and an eye for a good news story. I used to tell people, "Don Moore could find a story in a crack in the sidewalk." And he could.

Last month, he got laid off in a round of cuts at the family-owned newspaper on the west coast of the state. It was just one more in a long line of layoffs at newspapers across the country. But because it was a small paper, it seemed no one even noticed he was gone.

Don started in the business when the writing tools of choice were a pad, a pencil and a typewriter. So in an economic climate like the one facing newspapers today, it was unlikely he was going to find another job. When I discovered he'd been let go, it felt like someone knocked the wind out of me.

So I wrote an entry in this blog, from a former newspaper-editor-turned-web editor, that asked the newspaper industry when it was going to find the answer to what ails it? And when it does find the answer, where will all the people like Don Moore be? You know the folks I'm talking about. They're too old for an industry that is struggling, if not dying. And too young to retire and sit out on a beach thinking about the good, old days.

After a few more days of stewing about it, I decided I couldn't sit around and wait for anyone else to come up with the answer -- because it may never happen. So I called him and asked him if he wanted to write for the web. Four weeks, a new laptop, a wireless router and some story assignments later, he had his first web-only byline on divorce360.com, the site we launched in December. And while he's still tryiing to figure out links and attachments, the same skills that served him in the newspaper industry have found a new home writing stories on the Internet.

Today, I got a series of e-mails from some friends I met when I attended the Maynard Institute a few years ago. All smart, savvy young professionals who fell in love with journalism and wanted to make a difference. The title of the string of notes was "another round of layoffs." And from newsrooms around the country, they e-mailed one-after-the-other about the various states of economic well being at their companies. It was not a pretty picture.

Given that I'm out of the traditional print industry for a time, I could only sympathize, send good wishes and hope for better days for them -- and for the profession itself. There was, in my mind, one happy thought. At least one of the fine newspaper journalists I know has been able to find his way to another job doing what he loves to do -- writing good stories -- in the new media landscape.

And that's got to count for something.

The Future of Newspapers, Pink Slips and Don Moore

I hate what the newspaper industry is doing to itself. It's like a trapped animal chewing off its paw. There's been a lot of talk, but no one has the answer to what ails it -- less advertising, declining circulation and more competition for reader time. Before I left the industry a few months ago, all I heard day in and day out was how we'd have to do it better, faster, quicker in order to survive in the new media world. And while that's happening in newsrooms around the country, I'm still having regular conversations with friends in the traditional print industry who wonder whether they're going to have jobs tomorrow.

This weekend involved a flurry of such calls, ending today when I found out my "Journalism Dad," no longer has a job. I met Don Moore more than a decade ago at the Charlotte, Fla., Sun-Herald. He is loud and cranky and always had some opinion to share with the younger journalists revolving through the door on their way to bigger and better markets. In fact, he was a pain-in-the-ass for his deskmate, namely me, who had to learn, over time, to completely drown him out as he was pestering his latest source. At first, my biggest joy was when he'd leave the office for hours on end because Don believed a journalists' job was -- ohmygawd -- not done in the office on the phone. I used to plan my days around it, so we'd never be in the office at the same time. That's how I'd get a break. Until he returned, (usually while I was trying to write), grumbling about this source or that one and pitching his latest story to the editor with the kind of passion that you'd expect from a much younger man.

I don't remember exactly when I realized what an idiot I was. But sometime over the next several years, usually over Crown Royals and shrimp at one Southwest Florida hole-in-the-wall or another, I discovered that this grumpy old guy was a part of Florida's journalistic roots. The fact is, Don grew up around Florida and newspapers. And he fell in love with them both. He even owned a newspaper on Anna Maria Island, which he turned into a successful, award-winning publication. Eventually, he decided to retire early and sell it to a large newspaper company, and it was -- grr -- shut down in time. He was coerced out of retirement by the opportunity to help another community paper improve its journalism. And so, he joined what was then-called the Venice Gondolier and turned it into another award-winner.

Don eventually went back to his first love, reporting. That's where I met him. After some months of sitting beside him, I realized Don was a throw-back to a time in journalism that I had never seen -- and never would. What he lacked in writing style, he more than made up for in persistence, passion and sheer force of will. He was a reporters' reporter, a pit bull who never let go of a story until he'd turned over every rock that might hide a fact or two. He wielded Florida's public records law like a sword, slashing through government bureaucracy until he got the answers that "the public needed to know."

When other reporters were frightened off by his in-your-face style, I would tell them: "You may not like him, but he can find a story in a crack in the sidewalk." Don never returned to the newsroom without a story -- or more likely three or four. He even wrote about the experience of waiting (and slowly dying as each day passed) for a new heart. Thank God, he finally got one, allowing him to write more stories, many more -- this time about veterans, their issues, their needs and their lives, many of which would never have been chronicled had it not been for him.

I've been worried about Don since last week when I discovered that Sun Coast Media Group, a private company on Florida's Southwest coast, planned to lay off part of its workforce. It's not surprising, given the state's been in a funk for several years -- battered by a two-year bout of hurricanes, increasingly hard-to-get home insurance and a real estate decline that has spiraled out of control. While every newspaper in the country is beating back, and back again, the problems facing the industry, Florida's newspapers have been particularly hard hit. And so one after another, they've scaled down on home delivery, held open jobs and whittled, through attrition, until there's nothing left to do but look around the room.

This time, that hit that came hit home and struck "my journalism dad" -- the man who shared with me his love of newspapers and Florida and the public's right to know anything about anything, because that's what this country was founded on -- wasn't it? It's struck the man who taught me never to take the first answer, the convenient one, the one they want you to believe because, well, it's just easier than having to explain.

Unfortunately, Don Moore isn't likely to be asking those questions again. You see, he's way past 60, and there aren't many newspapers lining up to hire an old guy with someone else's heart. No, he won't be asking those questions again. But I will. And today I have one big question to ask the industry before it looks around again for another paw to chew off...

What is the future of newspapers -- and who will be left to report it?