Advice for Next Century: An INMA Panel on the Future

An Editor & Publisher story by Ann Marie Kerwin, published August 8, 1992, reporting on a session at the International Newspaper Marketing Association conference in Dallas. The question on the table: how to reinvent the newspaper for survival in the next century’s media environment, at a moment when audiotex, videotex, databases and fax services were all competing for newspaper investment dollars.

The main speaker was Michael Schrage, a visiting scholar at the Center for Coordination Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argued that newspapers and media should be in the community-building business rather than the information business.

“New media technology is a medium for relationships. New media affect how people communicate with each other, how people relate to each other. If you change the medium, you change the relationship. … New technology creates new relationships.”

Schrage said the Information Age never happened and isn’t going to happen, that the real value of a medium is not in the information it carries but in the community it creates, and that designing a newspaper for a faster read is the wrong goal — papers should invite readers to spend more time with them. He dismissed the fax newspaper as “a pure packaging job,” suggesting instead that fax be used for polling or for services like menus and maps tied to a restaurant review.

“Humans are information processors, but anybody who defines them that way would be better off programming a computer instead of editing or publishing a newspaper.”

The second half of the story covers the Gannett Company’s News 2000 project, then being implemented at all Gannett-owned papers, with community at the center of the effort. Betty Liddick, executive editor of the Stockton (Calif.) Record, described arriving in Stockton a year earlier:

“I was stunned by reader reaction. Many folks weren’t indifferent to the paper as many readers have become these days. They bitterly hated us. So much so, staffers said they often were reluctant to tell people outside the paper where they worked.”

Readers complained of too much negative news about their community and home, and didn’t want crime news to be the only thing the paper covered. At a meeting with readers and top editors, one man stood up and said, “Show us our heroes.”