“Archival Documents” Items

March 2006 awards write-up page describing the News University "It's All About U" starter kit campaign, with objective, tactics and results

Silver Award for the NewsU “It’s All About U” Starter Kit

An awards write-up from March 2006 recognizing the promotional campaign built to launch News University, Poynter’s web-based e-learning site. The Silver award went to distributor Atlanta Promotional Products, LLC, with News University as the client. Credit for the campaign goes to Susan Crain, our NewsU marketing consultant.

The objective, as stated in the entry:

To help launch News University and generate awareness of the web based e-learning site.

The tactic was a request card handed out at a 2005 newspaper industry convention, with cards dropped in an on-site box or mailed back to us. Everyone who asked got a starter kit — and “kit” was not an overstatement:

Starter Kits, mailed to those requesting them, contained a cover letter and NewsU flyer, an overview brochure, a Flash movie and printable Adobe® PDFs (on CD-ROM) describing NewsU, posters for the workplace, imprinted sticky pads, polybags containing an imprinted carabineer highlighter, mini-brochures, and an imprinted magnetic memo stand. In short, the starter kit was loaded! Every piece worked nicely in concert with the others, each one supporting the theme, “NewsU: It’s All About U.”

The results section reports the campaign beat its goal:

120 starter kits were requested, representing 40% of the total conference audience. (The goal was to receive 70 requests.) 2. To date, NewsU has registered 5,175 journalists!

Reading this in 2026, the mechanics are the artifact. To market an online learning site, we mailed physical objects — a CD-ROM with a Flash movie, a poster, a magnetic memo stand — because that was how you reached working journalists in a newsroom. Today the entire funnel would be a link, an email sequence and a social post, and nobody would be counting drop-box cards at a convention.

What hasn’t aged is the underlying problem. In the early days of NewsU, the hard part was never building the courses; it was convincing journalists that online training was worth their time and that a self-paced course could be as good as sitting in a seminar room in St. Petersburg. That first 5,175 registrations was the beginning of a number that grew into the hundreds of thousands over the years that followed — but every one of them started with someone deciding to take a chance on learning at a screen.

Opening page of William P. Cassidy's 2005 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly study on the role conceptions of print and online newspaper journalists

2005 Study of Print & Online Newsroom Roles

This is William P. Cassidy’s article “Variations on a Theme: The Professional Role Conceptions of Print and Online Newspaper Journalists,” published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer 2005, pages 264-280. Cassidy was an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; the data came from his 2003 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Oregon.

The question behind the study was one the industry was arguing about at the time without much evidence: were online journalists a different species from their print colleagues, or the same people working at a different speed? Cassidy went at it with a national Web-based survey, sending 3,330 invitations between July 15 and August 25, 2003, and getting 655 usable responses — 456 print newspaper journalists and 199 online newspaper journalists — from 271 newspapers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The response rate was 23.1%.

He measured the responses against the four role conceptions Weaver and Wilhoit had established: interpretive/investigative, disseminator, adversarial, and populist mobilizer. The headline finding, from the abstract:

A national survey (N=655) examining the professional role conceptions of print and online newspaper journalists revealed the print group perceived the Interpretive/Investigative role as significantly more important than the online group. No significant differences were found between the groups in their perceptions of the Adversarial and Populist Mobilizer roles. Results were mixed for the Disseminator role. The online group rated getting information to the public as quickly as possible as significantly more important than the print group.

In other words: print journalists scored higher on investigating government claims, analyzing complex problems, and discussing national policy (6.10 versus 5.74 on a seven-point scale). Online journalists scored higher on speed (6.46 versus 6.03). But on staying away from stories where the facts cannot be verified — the accusation most often aimed at online newsrooms in that era — there was no significant difference at all. Both groups took it seriously.

That last result matters, because the surrounding literature Cassidy reviews was full of the assumption that online publishing had corroded verification. He quotes Ann Brill’s characterization of the problem:

rush to production has allowed rumor to pass as reporting and electronic processing to pass for editing

Cassidy’s own reading of his data is gentler: “Perhaps online journalists are simply getting a bad rap from these journalists.” He suggests the online journalists in his sample, working for daily newspapers rather than Web-only operations, had absorbed the same newsroom norms as everyone else in the building.

I have a personal stake in this one. The credibility research Martha L. Stone, Diane Lynch and I did for the Online News Association — the “Digital Journalism Credibility Study,” published January 31, 2002 — is cited twice in the notes, in support of the point that the public rated online news about as credible as news from other sources. It is a small thing to find your own work in someone else’s footnotes, but it is a reminder that the arguments we were having inside newsrooms were also being tested, carefully, by people outside them.

The article also offers a useful bit of chronology for anyone dating the online news era, noting that in May 1992 the Chicago Tribune, in partnership with America Online, launched Chicago Online, and that by 1998 more than 1,600 newspapers had an online presence.

Reading this in 2026, the striking thing is that the study’s central dividing line no longer exists. There is no “print group” and “online group” to compare; there is a newsroom, and everything it publishes goes out digitally first. What has survived is the tension Cassidy measured — the pull between interpretation and speed. Twenty years on, with AI-generated summaries and an endless publishing clock, that tension hasn’t been resolved so much as industrialized.

Typed interoffice memo dated December 15, 2004 with the agenda for the Interactive Learning Steering Committee meeting at The Poynter Institute

Agenda for a NewsU Steering Committee Meeting, December 2004

An interoffice memo from December 15, 2004, setting the agenda for the Interactive Learning Steering Committee meeting at The Poynter Institute. I sent it to Karen Dunlap, Keith Woods, Paul Pohlman, Bill Mitchell, Leslie Pelley and Chip Scanlan, with copies to Paige West, Casey Frechette, Vicki Krueger and Elizabeth Ferris. The meeting was set for 2 p.m. in the Baldwin Conference Room.

The agenda covers the project overview — registration, course development, the third phase of the NewsU technology, the transition to NewsU servers, the fee payment system and a site redesign — plus launch plans, staffing and an “on deck” list of courses in development. Among the internal challenges noted:

Update on internal challenges with self-exploration
Half of faculty has registered

Launch plans pointed to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, with marketing work already underway, including a slogan:

Slogan: It’s All About U

Courses on deck included Drinking Water Quality (SEJ), Beat Basics and Beyond (Steve Buttry), Clean Copy v2 (Vicki Krueger/ACES), Sound Storytelling (Andrew DeVigal), Understanding Numbers (Debbie Wolfe), Plagiarism (Kelly McBride), Revisions (Chip Scanlan), Video Story Telling Ethics (Al Tompkins), Better Listening (Jill Geisler) and Writers Toolbox (Roy Clark). Outreach partners listed AAJA, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Education Writers Association, the American Copy Editors Society, the Dart Center, REZ Net and the Kaiser Foundation.

Attached to the agenda were enrollment and user reports as of noon that day. The ONA Training Project led with 410 students, followed by Language of the Image (260), The Interview (249), The Lead Lab (158), Handling Horrible Images (110), Color in News Design (78), Same-Sex Marriage: A Conversation About Coverage (49) and Crafting a Course: Developing eLearning for NewsU (13). Users came from the United States, Portugal, the Philippines, India, Canada, Brazil, Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Afghanistan, Albania, Nigeria, China, Poland, Romania, Chile and Ireland. By medium: print 55.45 percent, online 43.79 percent, television 13.4 percent, radio 9.06 percent. The most common way people heard about NewsU was the Poynter Online Web site.

Cover page of the 2004 American Society of Newspaper Editors report Journalism Education: An Editors' Agenda

Journalism Education: An Editors’ Agenda, 2004

This is the American Society of Newspaper Editors report Journalism Education: An Editors’ Agenda, published in 2004 by the ASNE Education for Journalism Committee. Jerry Ceppos of Knight Ridder chaired the committee and wrote the report; I served on the committee representing The Poynter Institute, along with Jennie Buckner, Judy Pace Christie, Richard S. Holden, Saundra E. Keyes, Maryanne B. McNellis, Annette Jo Procter, Susanne Shaw, George Thottam and Kenneth M. Winter.

The report summarizes a February 2004 survey of ASNE members, conducted mostly by e-mail, with a 33 percent response rate — about 180 members, though the number varied by question. The survey was inspired by a suggestion from Susanne Shaw of the University of Kansas and by earlier research from Lee Stinnett, the former ASNE executive director.

The finding, as Ceppos put it, was not subtle:

Journalism schools can’t provide too much practical, skills-based learning, according to ASNE members.

Editors were tough graders. Two-thirds mostly disagreed that today’s graduates had a better grasp of the English language than graduates five years earlier. Less than two percent strongly agreed that graduates had a broad-enough range of knowledge across subjects. Only one percent strongly agreed that graduates think more analytically. The bright spots: more than eight in 10 agreed graduates better understood the importance of diversity, and six in 10 agreed they better understood journalism ethics.

The open-ended answers carried the report. A sampling:

“MAKE EVERYONE WRITE MORE!! I think a journalism major should have to write in every class, every week! I am disheartened when I see how little some journalism students actually write. I would not like to be operated on by a surgeon who’d had as little practice in cutting as some journalism graduates have had in writing.” — Bob Haiman, The Freedom Forum

“More required hands-on production of news: publishing articles, photos, page layout, headlines, writing editorials and producing news Web pages.” — Gilbert Bailon, Dallas Morning News

Educators pushed back, or at least complicated the picture. Tom Kunkel, then dean at the University of Maryland, described the squeeze:

“But keeping that focus is more challenging by the year, as we’re expected to stay current with the industry’s technological advances and offer more courses on, say, ethics, and yet still not exceed the number of credit hours students can take in the major. Too often and at too many places, I fear, it’s the core skills that get shorted.”

Ceppos closed by naming the contradiction in his own data — editors said schools were best at teaching the basics, and also that the basics weren’t good enough:

My interpretation of the apparent conflict: Editors want more teaching of the basics and believe that it’s what journalism schools do best–but they still expect students to do even better.

A personal note on why this document matters to me. I was sitting on this committee at exactly the moment Poynter was building News University, the online training effort I would go on to lead. The editors answering this survey were, in effect, describing the demand: more writing, more reporting, more hands-on practice, more of it available to people already in newsrooms and to students who weren’t getting enough of it in class. NewsU was one answer to that demand — self-paced, low-cost, scalable in a way a week-long seminar in St. Petersburg could never be.

Reading it now, in 2026, the complaint is remarkably durable. Every generation of editors has told every generation of educators to teach more writing and more reporting, and that argument outlived most of the newsrooms that were hiring in 2004. What has changed is the technology gap: in this survey, “producing news Web pages” was the forward-looking ask. Today the same conversation is about generative AI in the classroom and in the newsroom. But the underlying question the committee was chasing — what should a journalism graduate actually be able to do on day one — hasn’t changed at all.

Cover of the Pew Internet & American Life Project report America's Online Pursuits, dated December 22, 2003

America’s Online Pursuits: Pew’s 2003 Snapshot

A December 22, 2003 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, pulling together more than three years of tracking survey data into one picture of who was online and what they were doing there. The numbers come from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates between March 2000 and December 2002, with additional data from an August 2003 survey.

The headline finding is a plateau. After the rush of the late 1990s, the online population had essentially stopped growing, even as the people already there kept finding more to do.

63% of Americans now go online — last measured in our August 2003 survey.

31% of Internet users who go online from home have broadband as of August 2003.

Email was still the center of gravity, and the report says so plainly. Among the 25 core activities tracked, online banking grew fastest — the kinds of transactions that required people to trust the medium.

Email continues to be the “killer app” of the Internet. More people use email than do any other activity online.

Online banking increased by 127% — more than any other activity about which we asked 2000 and 2002. In March 2000, just 15 million had tried some form of online banking, but by October 2002, 34 million had done so.

For those of us in the news business, the news line is the one worth marking: the online news audience grew 50% between March 2000 and December 2002, from 52 million to 78 million, and Pew credits big events — Campaign 2000, September 11, the run-up to the Iraq war — with each ratcheting the daily audience up a notch and leaving it there.

The conclusion reads as a prediction, and it holds up better than most:

All the trends set out here seem destined to continue, if not evolve, as the technology gets better, the applications become simpler, the appliances that use the Internet become omnipresent, and the technology fades into the background of people’s lives — as powerful, ubiquitous, commonplace, and “invisible” as electricity.

Some 2026 context for the numbers above, which is what makes this document interesting to me: the 63% of American adults online in August 2003 is now in the mid-90s — Pew’s recent tracking puts adult internet use at roughly 95%, which is about as close to universal as survey research gets. 

Home broadband, at 31% of home users in 2003, is now the norm rather than the advantage, and the “dial-up user” category that Pew compares against on nearly every page of this report has effectively vanished. Smartphone ownership, which does not appear in this report at all, now runs around 90% of adults, and a meaningful share of Americans go online only through a phone.

That last point is the real gap between 2003 and now. Pew’s 2003 framework assumed a computer, a connection, and a user who sat down to do a discrete thing — check a score, book a flight, read the news. The report’s own prediction about the technology fading into the background came true, and in doing so it dissolved the categories Pew was counting.

Mary Madden is the principal author; Lee Rainie, the project’s director, is listed as editor.

Editor & Publisher "Digital Output" column from March 11, 2002 reviewing products from the DEMO 2002 conference in Phoenix

DEMO Models Make Debuts

My “Digital Output” column from the Tech News section of Editor & Publisher, March 11, 2002. The column previews three products shown the previous month at the DEMO 2002 conference in Phoenix, organized by IDG Executive Forums, and notes that DEMO had shifted its emphasis from consumer tools toward infrastructure, enterprise, and mobile-connectivity products. The deck:

These not-ready-for-primetime players could soon land key roles at newspapers

Zinio Systems Inc. (zinio.com) was building an Adobe Acrobat-based system for distributing electronic magazines — the magazine industry’s counterpart to NewsStand Inc.’s newspaper service — with a more compact file size and features for highlighting content and forwarding articles to other readers.

PrinterOn Corp. (printeron.net) was building an Internet-based mobile printing network using the Internet Printing Protocol, already built into devices such as Hewlett-Packard’s JetDirect, aimed at mobile workers who need a hard copy without carrying a printer, with a planned service model for airports and hotels.

Kettera Software (kettera.com) demonstrated AskBox 3.0, a customer-service Web tool shown live on CNet.com, letting site visitors ask questions, gather product information, and give feedback without leaving the page or waiting for a reload.

Editor & Publisher "Digital Output" column from February 11, 2002 on editorial involvement in newspaper press selection and printing-plant planning

Editors Pressed on Production

A February 11, 2002 column from my “Digital Output” series in the Tech News section of Editor & Publisher. The subject: editorial involvement — or the lack of it — in newspaper press selection and printing-plant planning. The column opens with a cynical observation from a longtime newspaper observer:

“Editors find it hard to change the ball cock in a toilet, let alone understand how a printing press works.”

The column notes that press-selection committees were typically made up of the publisher, production manager and several pressmen, and that editorial involvement was “often a random occurrence.” It cites a remote printing plant built without enough space for additional color-printing units — a problem that took several years and many millions of dollars to fix. The question editors should be asking: “What will the newspaper look like in 10 to 15 years? How big? How many pages? How much color? How local?”

Examples cited include The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, where managing editor Lara Edge said new presses would allow color on every page; The Dallas Morning News, with Swiss-built Wifag presses able to change printing plates without stopping a press; and MAN Roland’s DICOweb, a digital offset press allowing “the imaging, de-imaging, and re-imaging of printing cylinders.” The column ties these capabilities to reader demand for zoning:

They want to know what’s going on in the White House — and in the white houses on the next block.

The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times is offered as a model of newsroom involvement in long-term planning for systems and manufacturing infrastructure. Marty Petty, executive vice president, is quoted:

“We have cross-departmental meetings to talk about what we see down the road for additional regional editions, zoning, sectioning, color, targeted advertising needs, etc. This collaborative approach is mandatory if we want to make investments that ensure we can deliver on our journalistic and business objectives.”

The closing line:

And that means editors need to know about everything from “on-the-fly” page changes to plateless printing — even if they still don’t know how to change a ball cock.

Scanned pages of Stephen Quinn's paper "Media convergence: Implications for journalism education" from Australian Studies in Journalism, 2001-02

Media Convergence and Journalism Education, 2002

This is Stephen Quinn’s paper “Media convergence: Implications for journalism education,” published in Australian Studies in Journalism, Number 10/11, 2001-02, from the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland. Quinn was then director of the Center for Media Training and Research at Zayed University in Dubai, and he surveys what was, at the time, the newest idea in the newspaper business: the notion that one reporter’s work should appear in print, on the Web, on radio and television, and eventually on a mobile phone.

The paper takes its starting point from the IFRA/WAN “Beyond the Printed Word” conference in Amsterdam in October 2000 — a gathering of nearly 500 senior newspaper managers from more than 40 countries. I was one of the two conference chairs, which is how I turn up in the text and in the references.

The other conference chairperson, Howard Finberg, pointed out the publishing industry’s strength was its staff, and these people would be “called on more and more in this multimedia, multi-task newsroom” (Finberg 2000).

The bibliography entry is a small pleasure to find in a scanned journal two decades later:

Finberg, Howard (2000), The Digital Futurist Consultancy <www.digitalfuturist.com>. [Finberg’s paper was “Classified: Cannibalism or growth impetus”.]

Much of the paper is case studies: the Tribune Company’s three models of “multiple-journalism” at the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Tampa Tribune, as described by IFRA’s Kerry Northrup; the Turun Sanomat operation in Finland; Ming Pao in Hong Kong; Singapore Press Holdings; and the Australian cross-media ownership debate. Quinn also gives space to the skeptics, including Walter Kiechel of the Harvard Business Review, who argued news was far more “medium-specific” than the convergence enthusiasts believed.

The section that has aged best is the one on education. Northrup frames the problem as a chicken-and-egg relationship between the schools and the industry:

“Do you train journalism students for the jobs that exist today so that when they graduate they can be employed? Or do you train people for the skills that they’re going to need in the news organisation tomorrow so that when the newspapers come along and say ‘we need a new generation of journalists’ they have people to pick from?”

And John Pavlik, then executive director of the Center for New Media at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, argues that most American journalism programs were still organized along “early twentieth-century technological lines”:

“Rather than learning to be newspaper, magazine, television, radio or online reporters, they should simply be taught to be journalists working in a digital age” (Pavlik 1998).

Quinn’s conclusion is blunt — “Convergence is inevitable” — and his prescription is training, on the theory that news organizations would have to spend money teaching their own staffs, and that journalists would need to embrace what he calls lifelong learning.

That last point is why I’ve kept this one. The training gap described here is precisely the problem I spent the following decade working on at the Poynter Institute, building News University as a way to deliver journalism training online, affordably, to people who were never going to get to a week-long seminar in Reston or St. Petersburg. The industry’s appetite for paying for that training turned out to be a lot smaller than the industry’s appetite for talking about convergence.

Reading this in 2026, the vocabulary is what dates it. Nobody says “convergence” or “multiple-journalism” anymore, because the argument is over — every newsroom is multi-platform, every reporter shoots video, and the mobile phone Quinn treats as an emerging distribution channel is now the primary one. What did not get settled is the harder question underneath: who pays to teach people the work, and whether journalism schools train for the job that exists or the one that’s coming. Substitute “AI” for “XML” in these pages and the debate reads as current.

Gartner research note listing twelve high-impact technologies with a Technology Radar Screen adoption timeline

Gartner’s Twelve Technologies For 2000 To 2010

A Gartner research note (Technology, T-10-8085) by analysts J. Fenn and A. Linden, forecasting the technologies that would reshape enterprise computing over the coming decade. The note is short — two pages — but it is a useful snapshot of what the industry’s most-quoted research firm thought mattered as the century turned.

We identify 12 high-impact technologies for user enterprises, including wireless Web technologies, biometrics, content-based retrieval, natural language processing, Bluetooth and speech recognition.

The twelve, as listed: Wireless Web technologies (including Web phones and WAP), biometric identification, content-based retrieval, natural language processing, Bluetooth, speech recognition, Webtops, XML for content and data exchange, embedded miniature computers, pattern recognition, e-cash and display technologies.

The methodology was a modified Delphi process — a cross-section of Gartner analysts built a list of high-impact technology areas, then each voted for up to 10, with the emphasis on those judged currently undervalued. Wireless Web technologies were the only unanimous pick.

A “Technology Radar Screen” figure assigns each technology a year marking “the point at which the technology begins the steepest part of its adoption curve”: XML in 2001, wireless Web, Webtops, Bluetooth and NLP in 2002, pattern recognition and content-based retrieval in 2004, speech recognition and biometrics in 2005, e-cash in 2006, display technologies in 2007, and embedded miniature computers in 2008.

The most interesting passage is a sidebar defining what the analysts called spontaneous computing:

An era of spontaneous computing will begin around 2007, predicated on the availability of ubiquitous, reliable wireless connectivity that will provide any time, any place access to information and messaging through highly portable or wearable systems with speech interfaces.

And the consequence they drew from it:

Instead of being the center of attention, information processing will become a secondary activity achieved while the user is performing some other task (driving or sitting in a meeting), leading to true multitasking.

The note closes with the standard Gartner formulation:

Bottom Line: Technology and business planners should evaluate these technologies as part of their technology portfolios to determine the impact on future IT and business directions.

Clipping from the November/December 1999 issue of TechNews, the NAA magazine of newspaper operations, featuring a 100-year retrospective of newspaper technology coverage

100 Years Of Technology News

A clipping from the Newspaper Association of America’s magazine — these pages are from TechNews, “the NAA magazine of newspaper operations,” November/December 1999. The feature is a century-end retrospective assembled by editor Clark Robinson from the association’s own publications: the ANPA Bulletin (1900), the ANPA Mechanical Bulletin (1927), the ANPA Research Institute Bulletin (1959), Presstime (1979), ANPA tech news (1990) and TechNews (1995). All of it archived, the article notes, in NAA’s Information Resource Center — “an unbroken chain of technology news and information covering the past 100 years.”

The organizing idea is that the tools change and the problems don’t. Robinson opens with Richard E. Lewis, then manager of ANPA’s Mechanical Department, speaking to production executives in Atlantic City on June 22, 1958, after reading the transcript of the first Mechanical Conference in Harrisburg, Pa.:

“I noted the problems that these 87 gentlemen in Harrisburg were facing then are pretty much the same problems we are facing today.”

And then makes the same point about his own moment:

Forty-two years have passed since Lewis’ speech and 72 since that first Mechanical Conference. And believe it or not, we are still facing the same problems: improving the printed quality of newspapers; reducing costs, and reducing the time a story takes to get from editor to reader. These are the same issues, in fact, that our predecessors faced in 1900. They are timeless.

The excerpts run from typewriter discounts and newsprint waste percentages in 1900, through Linotype maintenance complaints in 1910, offset presses in 1940, the Fotosetter and the Sheridan stuffer in 1950, to the ANPA Research Institute Bulletin’s 1970 “newsroom of the future” — reporters at CRT consoles, editors with light pens, “a group of editing consoles will take the place of the copy desk.” A 1979 bulletin from Harris Corp.’s Dr. Joseph E. Rowe describes, quite accurately, digital cameras and Photoshop. My favorite is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, in a 1979 ANPA Research Institute Bulletin, on the terminal in his office:

“At first, I inadvertently caused a problem by signing my notes with my nickname ‘Punch.’ Apparently, that word triggered the system downstairs to spew out paper tape—no one could figure out who wanted all that tape!”

The issue closes with a TechNews fax poll of production executives on their top three priorities for the first 100 days of the new millennium. Nearly every answer begins with Y2K. The best of them, from Kelly Perine, production systems manager at The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch:

1. Y2K
2. Pagination
3. Vacation.

A note on the publisher: NAA itself was a merger — the association was formed in 1992 when ANPA combined with the Newspaper Advertising Bureau and several other newspaper groups, which is why the article can move so easily between “ANPA/NAA.” In 2016 NAA renamed itself the News Media Alliance. The magazines didn’t survive. Neither Presstime nor TechNews is published today.

Archival transcript of Hazel Reinhardt's newspaper readership demographics talk at the 1999 APME Conference in Memphis

Changing Readers: A Demographic Warning to APME, 1999

This is a set of excerpts from a talk given by Hazel Reinhardt at the 1999 APME Conference in Memphis. Reinhardt was president of Hazel Reinhardt Consulting Services and the former Minnesota state demographer, and her subject was the one part of the newspaper business that could be forecast with confidence. The document notes that copies of her slides were provided courtesy of the Northwestern University Media Management Center, and that the boldface in the transcript was added by Kees.

Her opening argument was that demographics, unlike almost everything else the industry worried about, were not a matter of speculation.

The numbers I’m going to show you for the next 10 years, outside of some major catastrophe, are the numbers that will be realized in the United States. There is almost nothing we can imagine that will happen to change that.

The readership numbers were the sobering part. Weekday readership had fallen from 78 percent of adults in 1970 to 59 percent; Sunday had barely moved, from 72 percent to 69 percent. Education and age were the two powerful predictors — 71 percent of college graduates read on a typical weekday versus 40 percent of those with less than a high school education, and 71 percent of adults 65 and older versus 45 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds. Broken into generations, the pattern was unmistakable: Pre-boomers at 70 percent, Baby Boomers at 58 percent, Generation X at 47 percent.

It’s a mystery to me that we could have known about this for so long but seemed to not want to talk about it: Each generation of younger people is reading less or less frequently.

From there she walked the audience through four population changes — an aging population, growing racial and ethnic diversity, a widening gap between rich and poor, and the concentration of population in certain regions and metros. She spent the most time on aging: Boomers were then 42 and 43, not 50; fertility was low; the number of Americans over 100 was projected to grow from roughly 37,000 in 1990 to about 137,000 in 2010 and 850,000 by 2050. Households with children would not grow; empty nesters would. Editors who had built their sections around “what’s of interest to families” were going to need another hook.

The hinge of the whole talk was Generation Y, which contributed only 15 million adults in 1998 but would add 65 million by 2010 — 29 percent of all adults. Everything depended on how that generation behaved.

If Generation Y reads at the same level as Generation X, overall daily readership will be below 50 percent by 2010 — 45 percent by 2015. Following that train of logic, the last American reading a newspaper would be observed in 2078.

Reinhardt offered a reason for hope — surveys showed Generation Y as more optimistic, more community-minded, more involved than Generation X — and then framed the challenge as a question the room had a very short window to answer:

The challenge to newspapers is how and what do we need to do to make a larger proportion of them newspaper readers than Generation X?

She also dismissed the industry’s favorite consolation, that people pick up the habit as they age. Asked exactly that in the Q&A, she was blunt:

If you did not read a newspaper when you were 35 and you did not read one when you were 45, why would you suddenly take it up at 55 or 65? You have established patterns.

You have a few safe years. Do not be lulled. You have a few years when you have the Boomers and Pre-boomers who are big readers with you. The future is whether you can get Generation Y.

Reading this in 2026, the arithmetic has long since resolved itself, and not in the direction the hopeful reading allowed for. What stands out now is not the forecast but the framing: Reinhardt was telling a room full of editors that the crucial period was the next five to 10 years, and that working on it that day was “none too soon.” Those were the same years the industry spent arguing about what to put on its websites. The demographic clock she described was running the entire time.

Clipping of David Noack's November 1998 Editor & Publisher article on the AP's fee-based news archive for The Wire

AP Launches Its First Consumer E-Commerce Venture

This November 21, 1998 article from Editor & Publisher, written by David Noack, reports on the Associated Press launching its first electronic commerce venture aimed at consumers: a fee-based archive for its online news service, “The Wire.” The service was available through The Wire’s Web site and the 250 online newspapers that hosted the AP’s online news service, with an official announcement expected around Nov. 23.

The subscription archive covered national, international, sports, financial and business stories dating back to July 1, 1997 — a big jump from the free two-week search, which held about 10,000 articles versus the new service’s 250,000. Individual pricing ran from $2.95 for a single article to a $99.95 “Annual Pass” for 1,500 articles, with a 20% revenue-sharing arrangement for newspapers that signed up customers.

Jim Kennedy, director of AP Multimedia Services, said the e-commerce component had been in the plans since 1995:

“This will be the first time that we have a text service of our own that goes directly to the consumer.”

“This was part of our original planning, but it took some time to get over some of these hurdles that we had with technically making this available to consumers and also editorially ensuring the integrity of the content.”

Editor & Publisher News Tech column page from March 1, 1997, reporting on the pagination quiz at the 1997 SuperConference in Orlando

“Pagination Imagination” at the 1997 SuperConference

A News Tech column by Mark Fitzgerald in the March 1, 1997, issue of Editor & Publisher, reporting scenes from the Newspaper Association of America‘s 1997 Newspaper Operations SuperConference in Orlando. The centerpiece: a Jeopardy-inspired quiz hosted by David Cole, described in the column as “the newsroom systems maven and editor and publisher of the Cole Papers newsletter.”

The panel of contestants included me, then at Phoenix Newspapers, and Kristin Tennent of the New York Times.

Industry pagination experts such as Phoenix Newspapers’ Howard Finberg and the New York Times‘ Kristin Tennent giggled, hemmed and hawed, guessed and sometimes answered quickly and correctly a series of often-obscure questions about pagination.

Cole’s answer key did not always survive audience review u2014 asked what RISC stands for, he ruled for “chip” over “computer” until the room objected, at which point: “Okay, computer,” Cole said.

One audience-contributed question asked how long it would take for 80% of newspapers to be fully paginated.

By an overwhelming voice vote, the audience picked the answer, “When hell freezes over.”

The column also noted attendance at the 1997 SuperConference was “just over 700, a substantial increase from the approximately 450 at last year’s SuperConference, the first.” Other items in the same News Tech package covered agri-pulp newsprint testing at Smurfit, Blevins Harding Group projects, an Agfa–Monotype typeface alliance, and the 1997 Isaiah Thomas Award to Knight-Ridder‘s P. Anthony Ridder.

Editor & Publisher syndicates and news services page from April 8, 1995, reporting United Media's World Wide Web site launch

Early Syndicate Efforts on the Web, 1995

A syndicates and news services page from the April 8, 1995, issue of Editor & Publisher, reported by David Astor. The lead story covers United Media‘s April 1 launch of a World Wide Web site at http://www.unitedmedia.com — an in-house operation for the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned syndicate — carrying the work of nine comic creators and 10 editorial cartoonists, along with feature previews, background information, photos, graphics and feedback areas. 

Comics from United Feature Syndicate and Newspaper Enterprise Association were to be collected in a two-week archive and posted online one week after newspaper publication. “The Comic Strip” section included an enhanced “Dilbert Zone” devoted to Scott Adams‘ strip, with biographical material, early sketches, a “tour” of the studio and an interactive map for locating “Dilbert” client newspapers; Adams also maintained a presence on America Online. “The Inkwell” area featured the editorial cartoonists, among them Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Benson of the Arizona Republic.

From United president Doug Stern:

“We are using the digital power of the Internet to reaffirm the awareness of an ageless art form for a new generation. It’s a way for readers to see talented cartoonists that they might not see in their local papers, and a way for us to create even larger followings for those of our strips they read every day.”

Lisa Klem Wilson, United vice president/sales and marketing, framed the audience question:

“We’re reaching a demographic — young, computer-savvy readers, who may not be subscribing to daily newspapers — and pulling them back to comics pages.”

Alma Derricks, United’s director of new media development and head of the Internet project, said the site could eventually add animation, contests, a columns area, licensed product sales and ad sponsorships:

“Six months from now, the Web site could be a much different place. We’re using only 10% of our capacity so far.”

The rest of the page carries shorter items: centennial-of-comics events announced by the Newspaper Features Council, including Sunday night live chat sessions with cartoonists on America Online beginning May 7 with Mort Walker, an AOL centennial area starting May 5, a Library of Congress comics exhibit, U.S. Postal Service cartoon stamps, and an October comic fair in Bryant Park; Universal Press Syndicate‘s new statistics column “Unconventional Wisdom” by Washington Post polling director Richard Morin; Tribune Media Services‘ new panel “True!” by Daryl Cagle; the debut of Tool User Comics, an “online comic book publisher” on the Web; Ray Walker’s promotion to news editor of Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service; and “Jill Jackson’s Hollywood” from the King Features Weekly Service.

Cover pages of the Associated Press Managing Editors 1995 committee report on journalism education

APME’s 1995 Report on Journalism Education

The 1995 Journalism Education Committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors set itself a straightforward assignment: go back to the committee’s own 1984 study of journalism schools and see how it had held up. Ham Smith of Washington and Lee University, who wrote the lead section, answered in five words — “Mostly, it seems, not much has changed.” The committee was chaired by Deanna Sands of the Omaha World-Herald, with vice chairmen George Kennedy of the University of Missouri, Marcia Bullard of USA Weekend and Mary Dedinsky of Northwestern.

The report opens with a line that still describes the terrain pretty well:

Journalism education has been called everything from an oxymoron to the last best hope for professional ethics. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the extremes. One sure thing, though. Thereu2019s no better way to stir up a passionate discussion than to ask educators and professional journalists whatu2019s ahead.

Smith lays out the structural mismatch between newsrooms and J-schools: about 80 percent of entry-level daily newspaper jobs went to journalism majors, while fewer than 20 percent of journalism students were in the news-editorial sequence. Small papers wanted graduates who could work the first day; big papers wanted an education and hired five years later from the small papers. Paul LaRocque reports on a survey the committee mailed to 202 journalism schools, accredited and non-accredited, which drew 128 responses u2014 a 63 percent return u2014 measuring schools against the 1984 recommendations.

The sharpest material is about accreditation. Bob Giles, then editor and publisher of The Detroit News and president of the accrediting council, had told a February gathering of deans at the University of Maryland something the American Journalism Review called an extraordinary statement:

u201cJournalism education still seems to fall uncomfortably between universities and the industry. Neither has embraced journalism education. Too many universities seem more comfortable with the idea of mass communications as a research-based discipline, while the industry wants graduates who can do journalism, but is not willing to make a full commitment of support.u201d

u201cAs the number of accredited programs has increased … it is clear that we can no longer give that assurance.u201d

George Kennedy’s chapter tracks the fight over Giles’ proposal to recognize merit beyond the minimum standards u2014 first framed as a u201ctwo-tier system,u201d a phrase quickly abandoned. Florida A&M Dean Robert Ruggles: u201cYouu2019re either accredited or youu2019re not. Degrees of accreditation make no sense.u201d Jerry Ceppos of the San Jose Mercury News, APME’s representative on the council, was on the other side: u201cAny time you can get journalism education to raise standards, thatu2019s a good thing.u201d Maryland’s Reese Cleghorn had advice for editors who wanted to help u2014 get to know the programs, support the good ones, u201cAnd increase starting salaries.u201d

Berl Schwartz of Michigan State interviews Giles at length. Carol Nunnelley of The Birmingham News profiles the University of Alabama’s Institute for Communication Research, whose biggest customer was Southern Progress Corp. And Dick Thien of Nebraska closes the report with u201cA Dangling Conversation,u201d a bus ride in which an editor and an educator answer for each other’s sins without knowing they are seated side by side. It ends with both of them giving the same answer to the same question:

u201cI love it u2014 and if I do it right I can make a difference.u201d

Two passages date the document usefully. Lawrence McConnell of the Tampa Tribune, whose paper u201cled Media Generalu2019s leap into cyberspace with Tampa Bay Online on Prodigy,u201d says flatly: u201cIf there is such a thing as journalism school graduates prepared for this field today, I have yet to meet them.u201d And John Driscoll, retired from The Boston Globe, notes that ASNE offered a videotape on the future of journalism at cost, $10, hoping it would spark curriculum discussions. u201cAlas, only 70 were sold.u201d

I keep this one because the argument in it never ended. A decade later I was at Poynter building News University, and much of that work was aimed squarely at the gap this committee was describing u2014 professionals who wanted training and educators who wanted respect, with not much traffic between them. Reading it in 2026, with journalism programs still being merged, renamed or closed, and with AI now doing to the newsroom what the Internet was doing in 1995, the committee’s central finding holds up better than anyone should want it to.