the exploding newsroom

by john hassell

1. Ryan Sholin 01.09.08 / 10pm

   I’ll just take on the A section here:

   I’d go with an all local front with teases to local features and local sports above the flag, an index/menu on page 2 (no stories there, maybe a stand-alone photo and a few briefs.

   The rest of the section is local news, except for opinion pages in the back that pull most of their content out of letters and comments on yesterday’s online stories. There is no editorial.

   There’s no wire coverage of national/world news in this paper unless something remarkably large blows up/collapses/is hit by natural disaster. And even then, it’s probably downpage or inside.

   Local news stories are heavy on human beings. There are no meetings in ledes. Many stories have an online element teased from print.

   Unless they’re narratives or profiles or long-term enterprise work, stories top out at 9-10 inches. Anything longer that needs a framework other than the inverted pyramid.

   Oh, and on the stand and in the box, this newspaper costs $1 exactly every day, and the boxes take dollar bills.
2. Zac Echola 01.09.08 / 11pm

   I love berliner format so much more than broadsheet, personally. Tabs are super hip, too.

   If I could eliminate one thing; the AP would go. The costs exceed the value in most cases nowadays. You can get national coverage when you need it from NY Times or WaPo for way cheaper. The AP is in compete mode in most markets, rather than culling the best information to alleviate stress on thin newsrooms. They hand newspaper content to competition in radio and television, who in turn throw it on their own Web sites and compete directly.

   Spend the money on more young beat reporters. Get hyper-local. Write less about more (meaning shorter stories, follow ups on the popular stories). Dominate the information market for your regions. On the Web, this will snuff out your competition for local keywords searched. In print, it broadens your relevance to under served markets.

   And that’s only the first step. Depending on my market size, I’d split the paper into multiple papers with targeted circ drops to increase single day sales. An example would be larger focus on different topics every day, for instance. Which could create more granular subscription options. There would still be community news, but most of it would be targeted to an area, followed by extended business coverage on Mondays or entertainment coverage on Thursdays, etc.
3. peter brantley 01.12.08 / 11pm

   I’m an outside observer (as director of the digital library federation) but libraries and newspapers have many of the same problems.

   That said, in this context, I am not sure what “local” means or should be. I live in the East Bay of CA, and I have multiple locals: CA news (state budget, for example); San Francisco (local “big” city); Berkeley (where I have an office); other East Bay communities (like El Cerrito or Albany where I live). In other words, there is a regionality that I might benefit from, that I might pay $1 for … and what that actually is might vary for me from time to time.

   Seems to me, in some ways, the best paper is one that I can build myself - maybe not daily, as that’s too much work - but as a set of preferences (this is much like Dave Winer’s vision of next-gen TV programming). Imagine a set of filters: for now, I want CA budget; El Cerrito schools; Berkeley economic development; Richmond crime. Maybe next week, as a reader, I want a different set. And I want to be able to pick that physical paper up somewhere, on the way to work, or on campus, or somewhere i know where i will be - let me choose. Or, I want to pick it up at a custom url. (In electronic space, this gets to be closer to a raw assemblage of RSS feeds).

   As a consumer, not a publisher - how could i do this? Newspapers would have to permit their content to be disaggregated and rebuilt by users across broader markets. Would they ever do that? Seems to me that the El Cerrito News would get more audience, not less, by supporting that. (Again, digitally, RSS takes care of this - that could be leveraged to build custom print on demand).

   There are a lot of places to take customizability - we haven’t even begun to start.
4. Henry Howard 01.15.08 / 7pm

   First off, thanks for the props on the Berliner. It’s been nearly 18 months since we launched the new Journal and Courier in Lafayette, and our readers really love it.

   Several of the suggestions here rang true in our redesign: more local news, shorter stories. Readers were concerned at first with the smallness of the paper, but were won over by the fact that it is easier to handle, the color is amazing and we’re getting more news in.

   In our first marketing survey since the Berliner launch, fourth-fifths of respondents said they prefer the new paper. And more people said that they were spending more time with the paper and reading it more frequently. How does that compare with other news you’ve read about the industry?

   That said, I’m guessing that newspapers will have to adjust their strategy, given their current size. I don’t see a lot of papers paying for a new press (pretty much a requirement to go Berliner) in these economic times.

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