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.