Law 7 – Reporters Become Bloggers

Today’s news that the Times Company is finally selling its New York Times Regional Newspaper Group holdings of 14 newspapers absolutely fits with the last week’s news of CEO Janet Robinson’s abrupt departure. Expect the new CEO, most likely from the outside to be focused on three A’s: audience, advertising and analytics. Arrange those three in a virtuous circle, and you have an efficient spinning of the new digital economy. That’s clearly what Time Inc has in mind as it hired Laura Lang from the ad world. The new CEO must also drive a faster kind of decision-making at the Times Company,

So let’s look broadly at those numbers. Count them all up — and undoubtedly, numerous ones are missing — and you’ve got something more than 65,000 journalists, working for brands of one kind or another.

What we’re talking about here is innovation; not invention of internships, but the rapid usage of new kind of internship system applied at some scale. The scale immediately makes Patch U, as the project is called, something to be noticed, and significantly adds to the amount of coverage that Patch can put on its websites.

Bay Citizen’s Jonathan Weber explains the ins and outs of working as a New York Times bureau, nailing some of the difficulties of marrying old and new journalism as the Times reaches beyond its old comfort zone.

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.