Daily Newspaper Sites Re-Knit the New Local
Important Details: Gannett’s Journal-News, located just north of New York City, has been a significant test ground for Gannett, the leading US news publisher with 82 dailies and more than 400 non-dailies. The Journal-News has been an early leader in staff and community blogging as those new forms drive above-average traffic on its website, LoHud.com (see Insights, Gannett Daily Gains 20% of Its Traffic from Blogs, May 13, 2009). Now, the daily is taking a radical step: “eliminating all newsroom positions,” and asking current staffers to re-apply for positions in the “new” newsroom. That newsroom will include 50 fewer positions, a quarter of the staff. New titles include: ‘visual specialists,” “topics beat reporter,” and “local beat reporter.” The Journal-News (daily circulation of 95,000) is moving, now more dramatically, to a newsroom based on more flexible job roles, as fewer staffers must cover more beats and handle more multimedia and blog post creation. The paper is taking a similar tack on its sales side, forcing re-application and eliminating 20 jobs. At the same time, the paper cut 57 jobs in production, finance and information technology.
Meanwhile on the West Coast, the lively Seattle journalistic scene continues to be a hotbed of experimentation. The Seattle Times, the city’s lone surviving daily newspaper after Hearst’s Post-Intelligencer went online-only in March (see Insights, Thinking About Online-Only Dailies, Feb. 18, 2009), announced new partnerships with the city’s leading local sites.
The partnership focuses on:
- First of all, establishing relationships between the neighborhood sites and the Times, so that both can learn what works and what doesn’t into the future;
- Some cooperation on news reporting and on story tips; and
- Creating a distribution network as both the Times and its neighborhood partners link and promote stories.
Initially, the Times will work with four local sites, each of which will receive a few hundred dollars per month from the grant:
- West Seattle Blog, a leading hyperlocal blog that has won national recognition. Editor and Co-Publisher Tracy Record tells Outsell that her site, founded in 2005 and now drawing 23,000 unique weekly visitors and 700,000 monthly page views, sees the agreement as a work in progress. “It’s like matchmaking, putting two people together and seeing at the end of a year if you love each other or hate each other.”
- Next Door Media, which operates sites in five urban neighborhoods. My Ballard, PhinneyWood, Queen Anne View, Magnolia Voice and Fremont Universe.
- Capitol Hill Seattle, which helped create Neighborlogs, the platform for several neighborhood sites in Seattle.
- Rainier Valley Post.
Helping fund the partnership is the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which itself received funding through the innovation-oriented Knight Foundation. The Seattle project is part of a larger national pilot project nationally, as the Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer, Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and TucsonCitizen.com all test similar initiatives.
Meanwhile in California, we’re seeing investment in investigative journalism, reporting created outside the newspapers, but then partnered back to newspapers.
California Watch, funded by three foundations, is a large initiative. Launched with 11 staffers (chosen from 700 applicants) and run by the Oakland-based Center for Investigative Reporting, California Watch aims at doing the in-depth reporting on the many significant issues facing the debt-ridden state. Among the staffers hired are veteran reporters from the L.A. Times, the Orange County Register and the San Francisco Chronicle.
In San Diego, the Watchdog Institute just set up shop as a four-person investigative group, all former San Diego Union-Tribune staffers. Among those funding the Watchdog Institute: the Union-Tribune itself.
Implications: Outsell believes all these moves demonstrate how the new local is being re-knit together.
We’ve seen U.S. newsroom cuts of more than 8000 just in the last two years. Inevitably, that means lots of experienced journalists looking for work and lots of stories going unreported by the daily press.
The JLab/Seattle Times experiment is one significant marker on the road to creating new regional/local news ecosystems. In fact, it may enable, over time, much more robust reporting than existed in the pre-digital, pre-hyperlocal days. For now, it’s enough to get the parties working together and talking. Out of that work, we’re sure, will come bumps in the road, but also useful new and widely applicable models.
As to the investigative reporting innovation, we see foundations smartly moving into an area that deserves special attention and funding. If daily journalism itself has become problematic in its funding, investigative reporting — the most expensive kind of journalism done — is especially problematic. So foundation support (Outsell Insights, “Foundations Move to Fill the News Gap,” June 9, 2009) may be crucial — and a first step, as new distribution schemes are worked out for the work itself. The important thing is that the work, performed to well-established journalistic standards, continues to get done.
Finally, Gannett’s Journal-News organization is a manager’s clean-slate dream: What if I could start with a blank slate (as California Watch, ironically, is doing)? That said, all such re-orgs are in the execution, keeping the top, talented staff, mixing veterans with multimedia newbies and going beyond the old maxims of “doing more with less.” Indeed, what will the Journal-News and Lo-Hud.com look like in a year, with many legacy constraints gone? It’s a huge opportunity and challenge, and one sure to be watched by all the industry.