Law 6 – It’s a Pro-Am World

One headline: “Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff”. Another: “Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry”. One’s a fact; the other is aspirational.

From the Post, Gilbert takes the ability to be two things, simultaneously, a worldwide political news leader and a company plying in the waters of hyperlocal; he believes that in the digital age, you can difference faces for differing audiences. In this case, you can be both a worldwide Mormon vertical — serving a potential readership of six million — and the newspaper of Salt Lake’s and Utah’s smaller communities.

The notion: to put a more intimate face on the problem. Take a look the project of 10 stories, 6 videos and more than 75 photographs, “Invisible Families: The Homeless You Don’t See” and you do get a different kind of appreciation of the issue. The blogs’ postings vary in journalistic quality, and add a grassrootsy dimension to metro paper coverage. A great model for others to test.

In the coming digital decade, news brand management will become more important than ever. Since the internet age dawned, news publishers have thought of the print product and the dot.com. Now in the age of the smartphone, iPad and TVs becoming monitors, those news brands that endure and prosper will be ones that master ubiquity. That means that those brands, merrily crossing and re-crossing platforms, become even more important identifiers, stamps of recognition — and one would hope, trust — as digital ubiquity both complicates and simplifies our information worlds.

Today’s announcement that the USA Today is falling on its own grenade, blowing itself up, taking casualties (130 layoffs) and taking an increasingly familiar digital-first, print-last path makes historic sense.