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.

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.

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?

Mapping the Local News

A reporter I worked with at my previous job recently sent me a link to a news site she works with in Chicago called ChiTownDailyNews.org. I was fascinated by the mapping on it. The idea of linking news stories to a map of the community seemed like another way to localize the news for readers. I've seen it done before for special events -- a marathon bicycle race in the midwest and crime in a city.

If I were from the area, mapping of the news would help me prioritize what I wanted to read -- and what I wanted to read first. I wondered if video could be incorporated to make it more interactive -- something like this new site, Seero, which focuses on travel. My only complaint was that there weren't enough news stories on the map, which would make it a richer experience for readers.