Business Week on Gannett approach to Web

Tennessean senior editor Deborah Fisher used many of Gannett's current buzzwords--such as microzones, pro-am and user-generated content--in her presentation to PRSA Nashville on Tuesday. It should be noted that others are taking note of Gannett's approach to using the Web to adapt and sustain its core newspaper business. Business Week writer Jon Fine had the following to say this week about the company's innovations:

[T]he newspaper chain with the most interesting and coherent approach to rethinking journalism and news-gathering is not the New York Times Co. or the Washington Post Co. ...

By May 1 Gannett will have rolled out to all its papers initiatives enabling readers to interact with each other and assist its journalists. (These approaches also will be launched at Gannett's TV stations.) To describe these efforts, Michael Maness, vice-president of strategic planning and one of the strategy's architects, is eschewing such clumsy industry terms as "user-generated content," opting instead for the more euphonious "pro-am" (as in, professional-amateur) to underscore the blend of reader contributions and traditional reporting. If this succeeds—and early indicators are good—an unlikely company will lead the industry down an unfamiliar but promising path. "What I like about it is that it's not just about saving money, it's about saving journalism," says a reliably revved-up Jeff Jarvis, proprietor of media blog buzzmachine.com.

Some of what Gannett stresses is the kind of Web 101 that local newspapers should have been doing all along. It will ramp up news-breaking efforts on the Web and rethink the product to deliver whatever to whomever on whichever platforms they desire—a phrase so hideously clichéd that most media observers can recite it robotically. Where things get really interesting, and where Gannett leapfrogs others' efforts, is in its pro-am blend. "The pros do the heavy lifting and build the framework and structure," says Maness. "And the audience can come in and fill in" around it.

The whole article is worth a read. If you make it over there, don't miss the comments, where most readers don't share Fine's optimistic take on Gannett's decision. Here's a sampling:

Nickname: drew216

Review: Our small group of newspapers has been accepting and encouraging "citizen journalism" since mid last year. I guess I am surprised that Gannett took so long to figure this out! Citizen Journalism is low cost cpm that is a fantastic opportunity for all newspapers, large and small. We are now able to re-capture the lost franchise of breaking news and leverage it even further. We can create a greater sense of community in our individual markets by involving our readers. Their "content" makes our products/stories more compelling for our customers! I am surprised by the comments by people who simply do not see this huge opportunity. Time to descend from your ivory tower!

Date reviewed: Feb 28, 2007 9:25 PM

Nickname: GannettInsider

Review: Gannett's new initiative, the Information Center, is all about creating more bureaucracy to feed the beast, or the reading audience. They don't care what the quality of journalism is, hell, they don't even hire reporters as they leave, but they're hunting for someone to fill silly-sounding new positions such as the Data Desk Editor and Community Conversations Editor. It's just more of the same with Gannett.

Date reviewed: Feb 20, 2007 1:48 AM

Nickname: newsdude

Review: What you don't know about Gannett's plan: Reporters will be selling news subscriptions and answering delivery complaints while "covering" their communities. That reporters are handing out business cards that solicit reader-submitted photos of dogs and quilts and such to post as "news." That public officials and untrained bloggers are being allowed to post unedited "news" items as daily Web updates. That real reporters' jobs are being cut in favor of Webbies who post this drivel. Ask Fort Myers all about it -- it was all discussed in a company-wide conference call last fall, and is being practiced as we speak. If that's civic journalism, we're all in trouble.

Date reviewed: Feb 19, 2007 7:54 PM

Nickname: posted

Review: Someone has had a sip of the Kool-aid. Gannett does nothing that does not mean the reduction of FTEs (can't even refer to them as people as what is left of their conscience might have a problem with what they do to people's lives.) This time the genius is to supplant paid journalists with unpaid readers. Perhaps the next initiative will be to have businesses sell their ads to themselves or readers deliver their own papers.

Date reviewed: Feb 19, 2007 12:47 PM

Hat tip to Mike P. for pointing me to this article. Thanks, Mike.

Tennessean will be 24/7 within six months

Tennessean Senior Editor Deborah Fisher mentioned during her presentation to the Nashville PRSA chapter yesterday that the paper plans to operate a "24/7 newsroom" within six months that will publish local updates to its Web site around the clock.

Currently, the paper publishes about 100 breaking news updates each day beginning at 6 a.m. Fisher's goal is for the site to be "dynamic and refreshing constantly." "Update, update, update is our mantra," she said.

I'm glad to see this move by the paper. As a media junkie, I say the more news, the better, and it's always encouraging to see additional local content arriving online.

New business section for The Tennessean

Senior editor Deborah Fisher mentioned today during her presentation to the local PRSA chapter that The Tennessean will launch a redesigned business section sometime in March. The section will feature more local content and include regular features such as "How I solved it" for business challenges, "How I started it" for new businesses, more columns by local business people and an increased focus on entrepreneurs.

Alongside this new content, the paper will include "real, practical information" such as tax deadlines and an expanded calendar page with an emphasis on networking events and opportunitities because, as Fisher noted, "Nashville is a heavy networking city."

The section will feature a different "niche" page each day with reporting on the following areas: development, Music Row, real estate, automotive, health care and small business. People in Business, the paper's current weekly business announcements section, will appear on a daily basis corresponding to the day's niche page. Movers and Shakers, which Fisher mentioned as a popular item, will remain on the section's front page.

Fisher hopes that the section will reveal more of the "flavor of Nashville." In my opinion, this is good news for a section that frequently has more stock listings than editorial content. It will hopefully provide increased information about the local business community.

Tennessean's Deborah Fisher discusses News 2.0

Tennessean senior editor Deborah Fisher spoke to the Nashville chapter of the Public Relations Society of America today and addressed the current and future direction of the newspaper. Fisher became senior editor this past December and has been heavily involved in the recent content changes in the print edition and the paper's significant embrace of its Web site and social media in the past several months.

While The Tennessean isn't announcing any major personnel changes or abrupt shifts in its focus, this presentation came in the wake of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's February 21 announcement that it will shift its content for younger readers to the Web and focus its print edition on an older audience. Fisher explained The Tennessean's reasoning behind its changes in content strategy:

"The Tennessean wanted to restructure because the way people get information has changed so much... It's not just the paper reaching people any more ... So many people have moved online. Many use PCs or PDAs to get breaking news online during the day. Our goal is to provide news when they want it and how they want it."

Fisher acknolwedged the organization's concerns about recent downsizing and acquisition trends in the industry and specifically mentioned the AJC's unexpected announcement. As the Poynter Institute's Rick Edmonds recently said about the Atlanta announcement, The Tennessean is yet another paper trying "to find the magic balance between print and online."

While The Tennessean is not abandoning its print edition or altering it on the drastic level that the AJC is proposing, Fisher acknowledged that the paper's print circulation is declining, as it is for nearly all papers across the country, and that online page viewing is booming: "The web is definitely seeing a double-digit increase. It's huge. There has been a phenomenal growth in page views and unique visitors. There's a whole set of metrics that we look at."

In discussing strategy, Fisher returned consistently to variations on the following talking points, including references to "getting information to people in different ways" and "continuing the conversation." These phrases and the messaging below echo the mission and values of The Tennessean's parent company Gannett:

"Everything in the world of journalism eventually comes down to the reporter. Good journalism really does start with the reporter, and it comes down to the reporter's passion for his or her beat. That passion ends up leading to a good story."

When asked, Fisher said that she did not foresee a time when the newspaper would abandon its print edition:

"As long as people want to consume information in different ways, I think there will always be a print product. There are some limitations to the Web. Newspapers will go away when books go away. I think there will be a print edition for a long time. We will have to continue editing it for what people expect. I don't think the print edition will entirely go away."

I will share more details from Fisher's presentation today later this afternoon.

Tennessean wants to air your dirty, er, jewelry

Yikes. This is not why I left my ring on the bathroom shelf this morning:

It’s over. Now, what will you do with that ring? What did you do with your wedding ring or engagement ring once you finally broke up for good? Share you story with our readers. E-mail your story, in 100 words or less, to living@tennessean.com. Please put ‘ring’ in the subject line, and include your name, hometown and daytime phone number.

Maybe Ms. Lopez did not want her class ring back after all. ;)

Keep riding the old cycle, too

I'm glad to see that newspapers still have some life left in them:

A recent survey by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center and Ketchum found that consumers still depend heavily on newspapers and TV news for information, with nearly 70 percent relying on their local newspapers.

The survey seems to confirm what I've long observed. People today are swimming in a sea of media. Newspapers aren't going away, they're just not alone anymore in an increasingly crowded ocean.

This "crowded ocean" is a good description for the evolution of media I wrote about earlier this week. I'm also encouraged to see that the survey indicated that young people are in fact newspaper readers, despite the common perception that recent generations don't read the paper:

More than half of adults 18 to 24 read local newspapers, the survey shows, with 16.4 percent reading a national newspaper or newspapers. Young adults are the most well rounded in their media habits, making significant use of all types of new and traditional media.

There are disadvantages to having more media options, including feeling overloaded by content, but I for one am happy to have more choices than ever for news sources. Thanks to Brittney for spying this information.

Ride this cycle

I am amazed how fast the news cycle has shortened. I just received an email from the City Paper reporting the breaking news that John Wilder is no longer speaker. My first thought was that this news is no longer breaking because I read about it 150 minutes ago. Granted, I'm a news junkie, so I'm essentially wrong: This major, first-time-in-35-years news is still breaking, and plenty of people still haven't heard about it. Note that I just wrote "still."

Newscoma has an interesting and related post today about, among other things, how news is (or isn't) evolving. It begs the question, what is all of this going to look like in 5, 10 and 20 years?

Marrying the new media with the old media is a conversation I’m having with a lot of folks. You see, I may run a bi-weekly paper but the thing is, I would like to see how to arrange this effectively where everyone wins.

There are people in this world (I’m one of them) that loves the smudged ink stains on the tips of my fingers, the smell of a newly printed paper still toasty from coming off the press, reading the cutlines with an editor’s words describing their interpretation of a picture and opening the box of a newspaper box, the change clicking into the small box offering me a little slice of the world.

I also love the blogging community I’m in. Instant feedback, intimacy, dialogue and slices of worlds that I used to not have access to.

There has been plenty of ink and plenty of pixels devoted to the notion that newspapers are gradually dying out (some claiming not so gradually), but I'm not sure that's the whole story. Too many of us still like to read, even if a future newspaper doesn't look the way Newscoma describes above sooner or later, so I don't think we're headed toward an all-video future, as some have suggested. Hopefully, there will always be room for the written word alongside the spoken word and the image (moving or still).

[Thanks to Nashville Is Talking for pointing this post out.]

Related case in point: Even the media we choose to consume is changing. Despite the drawbacks that come from an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia is a favorite site of mine. The entry regarding John Wilder that I have been referencing recently in my posts has already been edited to refer to his tenure as speaker in the past tense. Aside: Does Wilder know about the series of tubes??

Just answer the freaking question

NBC News has chosen to call the situation in Iraq a civil war as of this week. Many other news outlets are doing the same. Here's how President Bush responded when asked that question today:

"No question it's tough, no question about it. There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented in my opinion because of the attacks by al Qaeda causing people to seek reprisal."

My point here, though I did not vote for Bush in 2004 and objected to the war in Iraq prior to its onset, has nothing directly to do with which side of the aisle the president or anyone else is on. This kind of non-answer to a reporter's question, once lauded as an effective media relations tactic, is not only hurting public discourse in our country, if you ask me, it is damaging public opinion of anyone who uses it consistently. Democrats do it just as much as Republicans, and I think it's hurting America.

The Bush administration spent six years refusing to answer questions, even ones that it was silly to refuse to consider. Now that the balance of power has shifted in Congress, the administration is finally beginning to address its critics humbly and openly, relatively speaking, despite what Bush did or did not say today. If the administration had learned how to do that even six months ago, it might not be dealing with a loss of seats in both sides of Congress today.

I think it's fine to have talking points to get across in any interview, but it isn't fine to just parrot them back incessantly as if the question were never asked. It's really a moot point by now any way because the media is so accustomed to public figures doing this. CBS went ahead and did what Bush was trying to avoid by clarifying the president's position: "President Bush said Tuesday that the sectarian violence rocking Iraq is not civil war but part of an al Qaeda plot to use violence to goad Iraqi factions into repeatedly attacking each other."

Just say "yes" or "no," and then tell us why. We'll all be a whole lot better off, if you ask me.

Crackberry: word of the year

The World College Dictionary's word of the year is crackberry, which describes addiction to Blackberry devices. This seems a little late to me because I remember hearing this phrase in 2003 or 2004 at the least, but I guess this means that crackberry has officially entered our societal consciousness (or at least that, on average, this word doesn't have to be defined at least somewhat often when used in conversation because people know it already).

It's interesting to me when a word transcends its original meaning over time. How often do you picture the fruit (above) before you picture the phone when you hear this in conversation? The first time I've thought of the real berry before the smartphone berry in a long time was this past weekend, and that was because I was in a winery that featured blackberry wine. (It wasn't very good, if you ask me.)

Is there a word for Treo addiction, because that's my particular strain of this ailment. Treoitis, perhaps?

Blog Math

Technorati released its latest "State of the Blogosphere" report this morning. What strikes me about the report is how much blogging is not happening. Look at these numbers:

• Technorati is tracking about 57 million blogs right now.
• Half (55 percent) are considered active, but "active" means they have been updated one time within the past three months. That does not seem active to me.
• That figure means that 25.6 million blogs are outdated and not being used. (I think that is a conservative estimate.)
• Technorati tracks 1.3 million blog posts per day. That seems to indicate that only a small fraction of the 57 million blogs update even once per week (at best it would be 9 million blogs).
  
• Of late, the number of blogs tracked doubles every 236 days.
• At least 100,000 blogs are created each day, more than one per second. Using the numbers above, that means that roughly 45,000 blogs are being created every day that will ultimately be abandoned and just sit dormant out there on the Web.

I want to examine this in a subsequent post in more detail, but this report supports a notion I've held for a long time: The Web is only an effective communication tool when you commit to consistently using it to communicate. If you don't, you're just filling (and wasting) space.

Thanks to Micro Persuasion for alerting me to this report's release. (This is a solid communications blog, if you are in the need for one.)

How not to interview on NPR

I think Representative Tom Reynolds (R-NY) needs media training, badly. NPR aired his interview with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep today, and the interview is a good example of how not to interact with the media. Here's an NPR brief about about the interview, and the audio clip is expected to be posted later this morning.

I think Reynolds did three things wrong. First, he refused to do anything except repeat his talking points, which essentially insisted that the only issues that matter in his election are local (jobs, taxes and Social Security). Having talking points is fine, and using them to guide your response to questions is fine to a point. Much like many of the Bush administration's spokespersons and the President himself, though, he refused to acknowledge anything except his talking points. He rebuffed questions about Iraq repeatedly, and his answers came off as insincere and scripted lines, not conversation.

Second, he quickly became defensive when Inskeep continued to try to get him to answer specific questions. It's a challenge to maintain your composure in an interview, but losing it rarely is successful. Inskeep's full 20-minute interview with Reynolds was not aired today, but you can bet that NPR selected the most engaging 60 seconds or so of it to broadcast. The selection was the part where Reynolds became increasingly defensive and lashed out at Inskeep. Gotcha.

Third, Reynolds ducked out of the interview by claiming that he was late for a meeting. That may even have been true, but cutting an interview short by blaming your watch only makes you look like you're running for cover. (I'm pretty sure Reynolds was, by that point.)

Digital Influence

The Wall Street Journal has a thought-provoking story today on public relations as it relates to blogging. Here's a quote from John Bell, an Ogilvy employee who is quoted in the article:

"The interesting thing about digital influence is that control is the wrong word. You can't really control everything. What we can do is get involved in the conversation. When we're [dealing with] bloggers for instance, our best strategy is to start to talk them as fellow bloggers. Many of us are bloggers, myself included."

I like the use of the words "fellow bloggers" because I feel like bloggers have a high sensitivity toward deception and inauthenticity. Communicating with a blogger only works if you are sincere about it, I think, if you're being proactive and if you're coming to him or her with something that is legitimately suitable for their blog. If you're just trying to blast your message out, it isn't going to succeed.

Participating in the conversation is the appropriate way to dive in, too, I think. It will only work if you're willing to participate and willing to give up the control Bell mentions above. That lack of control is what gives blogging its credibility. Giving up control and being open and honest are essential behaviors, in my opinion. That's the same advice I give anyone who's about to interact with traditional media, so in that sense I guess new and old media share some similarities after all. This bit of advice is straight out of kindergarten, but that means it's pretty solid advice.

"As marketers, we believe in and support the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association's ethics guidelines, which boil down to: Be honest. Be transparent. Don't trick people."

If we all did that, this would be a much easier world to call home. :)

Clever marketing, bad idea

This is a savvy, albeit immoral, marketing strategy. The maker of this new energy drink is banking on negative publicity driving sales in the short term. (It's only available in New York and California right now.) In the long term, the name probably won't last, but that may not matter if the creator is just banking on a quick buck.

I'm not offended by the use of this product name, but I do think it is wrong. Profiting by making light of or in any way endorsing substance abuse is really an awful thing to do. If you live in New York or California, please don't fall for the hype and buy this drink. Let's let the market echo what I imagine will be common public perception: This isn't a good thing.