Newspapers moving to the same place
Atlanta, Dayton, Knoxville, Gannett. We're pretty much all doing the same things.
Among them:
* Putting readers -- knowing them, interacting with them, learning from them -- first in everything
* Emphasizing local enterprise and exclusivity; cutting back on commodity news
* Building new media expertise across the organization, expanding well beyond the newsprint-centric publication that comes out once a day
* Devoting more time and resources to watchdog journalism; ramping up the urgency and aggressiveness of the report
* Displaying more personality -- both our own and the community's
* Creating a different sort of paper; we're going to do that first with Sunday's edition for which we're building a new plan
Doug Fisher, a J-school prof at University of South Carolina and who came to ConvergeSouth last fall, addresses the phases newspapers are going through. We are well into Phase four.
We're reading the same tea leaves.
