Gannett’s “Information Centers” Promise Newsroom Reorg and Crowdsourcing
Important Details: Earlier this year, about a dozen Gannett papers set off on quest, testing what they could learn from unprecedented interaction with their communities. Three of them — in Des Moines, Sioux Falls and Melbourne (FL) –went furthest. And, now Gannett has embraced their findings with almost religious fervor, announcing that is transforming its 90 U.S. newsrooms, over time, into "Information Centers."
The centerpiece of the idea is the "Seven Desk Plan." Instead of traditional National/Foreign, Metro, Sports, Lifestyle, Business and Photo/Design departments, and the copy desks that support them, Gannett’s newsrooms will be organized along these lines:
- Local: Covering the local market area and getting more hyper-local as well.
- Public Service: "Extending First Amendment coverage," with more community involvement
- Custom Content: Delivering niche content in print and digitally.
- Multimedia: Cross-training photographers for video and mastering presentation across print, desktop and mobile media.
- Data: Building deep calendar and other local databased information.
- Community Conversation: User-generated citizen comment and journalism, more staff blogging, expanded sense of the editorial page.
- Digital: Selecting the best platform(s) for delivery of different kinds of content.
Notably missing is the mention of national and international news. Presumably, Gannett will extend its downplaying of such news in its local papers, and reducing the costs of producing such reports at each paper. Instead it will rely on nationally produced packages of news, understanding that such news is more commoditized and widely available.
After Friday’s formal announcement of the new Gannett plan, one of its papers lost no time showing off part of the new game plan. The Cincinnati Enquirer used its blog to solicit and collect citizen/voter complaints about the election process. The Enquirer Voter Hotline, supplied with a Google mapping, has so far collected more than 25 posts, with some lively commenting. It’s a good example of reporting efficiency: surfacing the news for reporters to check, rather than having to send reporters to every polling place to troll for problems.
You can see an evolving round-up of comment and opinion of the Gannett experiment on the Crowdsourcing blog, an appropriate place to learn and gauge reaction.
In Outsell’s Opinion: What does it mean? Overall, Gannett is doing three major things:
- It’s applying the lesson that the future of the newspaper business (other than its flagship USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times) is local, local, local. It is focusing those newsrooms on covering what moves locally, from neighborhoods to politics to kids’ sports to business.
- It is embracing user-generated content, enabling and incorporating readers’ abilities to interact with the editorial pages, provide news tips, comment on stories and, over time, engage with each other. Readers are being called on to be more than passive readers, to become, watchdogs, whistle blowers and workers, helping "investigate" the community. "Crowdsourcing" is becoming a popular name for this exercise.
- It’s committing itself to multi-platform delivery and around-the-clock news presentation.
Outsell sees the Seven Desk plan as a milestone. Gannett is the USA’s largest newspaper company and a major player in the U.K. Its embrace of user-generated content — and integration of it within its daily newspaper organization — reinforces our view that this is the growth area for newspapers as we move into 2007. In our recent report, "News Publishers Move to Capture Community-Created Content for Growth" ( Oct. 27, 2006 ), we laid out the model that Gannett is using — its integrate-with-the-newsroom initiative. It’s a model that makes a lot of sense for content-rich companies. Seed, engender and report on the community discussion. It’s a role newspapers have long played, but one to which the Internet now provides rocket fuel. Importantly, it embraces the value of the blogosphere, rather than decrying and avoiding it.
Look what Gannett gains from the Seven Desk plan:
- Next-to-free locally valuable content: It’s investing in the software and minor staff time to provide oversight and moderation, and pulling in lots of new stuff for people to read.
- Customer data: Those who post have to register, as do those who will increasingly comment. Such activity will provide both advertiser-valuable profile information and an historical click stream against which ads can be targeted. Increasingly as registrants show their local and topical preferences, Gannett will gain commercially valuable data.
- Much-needed industry buzz: As Wall Street looks forlornly at newspaper stocks as little-growth opportunities, Gannett provides a notion at least that the future may not be just all cutbacks and financial calamity.
The challenges to success are many and include the development and deployment of technology that supports — as economically as possible — the single input/multiple output system that CEO Craig Dubow has embraced. That system must take the pain out of content import, export and management, freeing staff time to devote to the creation of classic and new journalism. In addition, Gannett must quickly connect the advertising models and systems (display, classified, contextual and behavioral) in ways that maximize revenue. These are not trivial tasks.
That said, the wider reorganization of newsrooms into Information Centers, will be all about the execution. Newsroom culture and practice is a century old, the good, the bad and the mysterious. Restructuring newsrooms is notoriously difficult, and Gannett’s test will be one both of patience and of a larger, guiding intelligence. The news world will be watching how well Gannett’s papers meet that challenge.