Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher with 110 titles, is rolling out “information center” guidelines that it calls “the newsroom of the future.” In its essence, The Information Center downplays hard news in favor of more community touch points. It also de-emphasizes the newspaper industry’s traditional focus on print in favor of a 24/7 multi platform orientation.
In an employee memo, covered by Jim Romenesko, CEO Craig Dubow notes that “news and information will be delivered to the right media – be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented – at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.”
Dubow adds that early tests indicate that the combination of a community orientation and media flexibility draw more people to both the newspaper website and to print. “Asking the community for help, gets it – and delivers the newspaper into the heart of community conversations once again,” he says. The bottom line is that more people, in a community context, will “attract the customers advertisers want…. Simply, appealing to more and different readers helps bring us more and different advertisers.”
One would think that digging deep into the community is something that newspapers intuitively do. But actually, they don’t. Low budgets, unfocused editing and a desire to avoid controversy sometimes leave many communities feeling alienated from their newspapers – on both the reader and advertiser levels.
They are going to have big problems pulling this off. While they want to appear to be more local and “community focused”, their business model is still heavily reliant upon classified ads and subscriptions, neither of which pay real well on the web. While they are at least realizing what needs to happen, their feeble attempt to turn the ship won’t miss the iceberg.
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[...] Gannett is making a big push to reorganize its newsrooms, by merging online and print staffs and making them 24/7. It’s also seeking to make the news platform “agnostic,” as reported by Peter Krasilovsky earlier in the week. This Editor & Publisher article also goes into some of the organizational changes.Here’s data from Gannett corporate on the September performance of its publications. You can scrutinize the details. But, overall, the message is: print is down, online is up. As discussed many times in the past, the problem with online growth is two-fold: 1) online is much more competitive than offline and 2) newspapers don’t have the traffic or the inventory to shift lost print revenues entirely online. [...]
[...] A recent post by a local portal guru cites an employee memo from Gannett’s CEO Craig Dubow saying that “news and information will be delivered to the right media – be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented – at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.” [...]
[...] Gannett’s “Information Center” project to overhaul its newspapers with user generated content and data-driven services is making some progress, per this month’s Wired magazine by Jeff Howe. Since I first reported on the initiative in November 2006, the company has zeroed in on Mom and College Age/Recent Grad sites – two demo groups that aren’t picking up the newspaper very often – online or off. [...]