Reinventing the newspaper. Again.
I've spent a lot of time here pondering the future of newspapers and attempting to signal where we're going. Our thinking evolves as we watch others in the industry do new and interesting things, as the research gets smarter and as technology opens new doors.
This is where we're headed. It has been our path for nearly a year, and Minneapolis has done much of the spadework for us.
"It's the question on every newspaper person's mind: can you reinvent your core newspaper -- especially its hard news content -- to attract younger adult readers, or is the "mother ship" a lost cause? Based on results from two Readership Institute studies at the Star Tribune in Minnesota, we urge you not to succumb to the doomsday scenario. You can engage this group -- if you're prepared to fundamentally rethink your news choices and the way you present news and advertising content. We call this approach 'editing for experience.'"
The Minneapolis experiment tooks three different approaches to the front page of the newspaper. Here's what they did, as described by a reporter at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention last week:
"The Readership Institute, surveyed 340 young adults last month, asking what they thought of the news and advertising content of three Star Tribune front pages: the original Feb. 22 front page; an improved page, where editors kept the same front-page articles but changed the design and focus of the articles; and an "Experience" page, where editors chose articles from the original front page or that day's budget."
Not surprisingly, attendees at ASNE, were less than thrilled. Some editors feared the proposal dumbs down the paper. But the tendency to look at content changes as "either/or" is flawed. Newspapers can be serious-minded, civic-oriented and appealing at the same time. In fact, the changes preferred by younger adults also appeal to older ones.
We're pushing on with changes on the Web site; we're pushing on with changes to the newspaper. They don't come quickly or without mistakes. But we push on. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions.
Comments (1)
To report abuse of the comment feature on this site, please use the feedback form at the bottom of any page.
Did you see this story from the Wall Street Journal online? I am not sure if it was in the print edition, but it talks about your paper there!
Enjoy making history!
============================
News Sites Solicit Articles
Straight From Readers
By VAUHINI VARA
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
April 11, 2005
The local newspaper in Greensboro, N.C., is trying a new approach to help its readers feel more connected to the newsroom: The paper is asking readers to go out and write some articles themselves.
At the Greensboro News & Record's Web site, registered users can submit their own stories by clicking on a link. An editor gathers submissions, makes a few small edits, then publishes the articles online -- sometimes within hours. Among recent stories written by readers: a feature on an upcoming cotton-mill convention and a primer on Social-Security reform.
The Northwest Voice, from the publisher of the Bakersfield Californian newspaper, includes news articles and photographs submitted by readers.
In the past year, a handful of small newspapers have launched variations on that model. Newspaper publishers are eager to find new ways to connect to readers -- daily newspaper circulation dropped 11% between 1990 and 2003, according to Editor & Publisher magazine. Now, as do-it-yourself Web publishing tools are making it easier for laypeople to create blogs, newspapers are borrowing ideas from those informal Web journals in an effort to make their own coverage more accessible, and, they hope, attract more readers.
"If they didn't host these conversations, they would still occur outside the confines of the news organization," says Al Tompkins, an online-journalism professor at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit training center for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. "It's much smarter for us to be somehow involved in this."
Secretary Turned Reporter
Readers don't get paid when they submit stories to the sites, but those who contribute say they don't mind, as long as they get credit. "It's what I've always wanted to do," says Caroline Reid, a 67-year-old in Bakersfield, Calif., who writes for Northwest Voice, a reader-written Web siteand biweekly newspaper launched last year by the publisher of the Bakersfield Californian newspaper.
Ms. Reid used to work as a secretary for an oil company executive. Now retired, she writes about one article a month, on subjects like senior citizens who are writing memoirs, a group of local teenagers on a surfing trip and a pastor's wife who acts on the side -- recently, in a local production of "The Vagina Monologues." (The story's headline: "Not Your Mother's Pastor's Wife.")
In Greensboro, meanwhile, the chief executive of a local retirement community wrote a recent piece titled, "Understanding Social Security Reform." It begins as a primer on Social Security and finishes like an opinion column: "Americans cannot depend upon its lawmakers to do the right thing tomorrow if they are unwilling to do it today. We need to do something today. The program will not fix itself."
Despite the occasional controversial article, many of the reader-written sites look more like church bulletin boards than, say, the New York Times. As it turns out, most contributing readers prefer to leave the city council meetings and school board elections to reporters at the local papers. Instead, they tend to focus on news the paper would likely overlook -- like photos of a young gymnastics champion in Bakersfield, Calif., courtesy of his mother. She makes the case that he should be the next Northwest Voice youth athlete of the month.
Lex Alexander, who holds the newly created position of citizen-journalism coordinator at the News & Record, says it is too early to tell whether the reader-generated content has boosted Web traffic. A spokeswoman for Northwest Voice declined to reveal traffic numbers for the Web site.
Local newspapers have long accepted submissions from readers, but they typically come in the form of letters to the opinion page or society columns about goings-on about town. The sites are betting the new approach will help them uncover feature stories that residents find interesting, but that their staff reporters are unlikely to write about.
"A newspaper staff has no monopoly on knowledge," says blogger Dan Gillmor, a former San Jose Mercury News columnist who has been a vocal advocate for what he calls grassroots journalism. "In fact, every reporter should realize that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about."
James C. Currow, executive vice president of newspapers at Augusta, Ga.'s Morris Publishing Group LLC, is an unlikely proponent of that idea. This week, his company pulled the plug on the Carolina Morning News, a 10-year-old daily newspaper in Bluffton, S.C., with a circulation of 6,000 and replaced it with a flashy Web site and matching newspaper called Bluffton Today. As part of the launch, Bluffton Today's staff passed out digital cameras to the community's best gossips -- "the unofficial cruise directors," Mr. Currow calls them -- and told them to snap away, then upload their photos to BlufftonToday.com. The site also hosts blogs by local residents, and Mr. Currow says he'd like to solicit articles written by readers in the future.
Barbershop Gossip
For newspapers to acknowledge that readers might make good reporters is an unusual -- and risky -- move. After all, editors often say their unbiased writing and professionally trained staff set them apart from blogs.
Poynter's Mr. Tompkins compares reader-generated Web sites with barbershop conversations, but says it is more difficult to decide whether to trust a person through the Internet than when he's getting his hair cut in the next chair. "It's much harder to assess the answers to these questions: What's their motivation, how reliable are they, and what's their past track record?" he says.
The reader submissions raise legal concerns for publishers, lawyers say, particularly since they are reviewed before they are posted online. "It's not like a blog or a bulletin board where people just throw things up and the publisher has no control," says Marc Gorelnik, an attorney at Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP in San Francisco. "They're editing it, and they're choosing to place it there, so there's potential for liability."
Gary Bostwick, an attorney with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in Los Angeles who defends media companies against libel claims is more blunt: "It seems to me that it's fraught with dangers," he says.
All of the sites that accept reader submissions clearly mark the source of such content, and keep it separate from their own reporters' work. At the Northwest Voice, stories are given a basic scan for grammar, spelling and obvious factual errors, a spokeswoman says. The site tacks a disclaimer to each story that reads, "The opinions and accuracy of information in this article are the responsibility of the contributor." The News & Record tucks user-submitted articles into a separate arts-and-entertainment Web site tied to the newspaper, and doesn't publish them in print. Editors at the paper plan to integrate reader-submitted stories more closely with the main site, and they plan on printing some of the stories in the paper in the future.
A few larger news organizations have experimented with giving readers a greater say in what gets published. Boston.com, the Boston Globe's Web site owned by New York Times Co., invites readers to submit content like wedding photos and restaurant reviews, but stops short of letting them write news articles. MSNBC.com, a joint venture of General Electric Co.'s NBC News and Microsoft Corp., is going further with its new Citizen Journalists page, which recently posted first-person accounts of encounters with Pope John Paul II, but says it carefully checks each submission's accuracy through independent reporting or by following up with the person who sent it.
"It's a real concern," says MSNBC.com Executive Editor Tom Brew of the difficulty of confirming facts. "We don't want people trying to pull a hoax on us."
But Ms. Reid, the Northwest Voice contributor, playfully rejects the suggestion that readers can't produce the kind of work that professional journalists turn out. "I don't think there's a reporter at the Californian that has any better skills or writing than I do," she says. The daily newspaper, she says, is riddled with "misspelled words, poor grammar and unflattering pictures of people."
Write to Vauhini Vara at vauhini.vara@wsj.com
(c) 2005 Wall Street Journal Online
Posted on April 17, 2005 1:42 PM