“ASNE” Items

Changing Needs of Newspaper Readers, 1978

In 1979, Ruth Clark, noted newspaper researcher, authored a thoughtful report for the American Society of Newspaper Editors titled “Changing Needs of Changing Readers.” Commissioned during a time of declining readership, the report explored a question that still resonates: why were people turning away from newspapers It was based on focus groups across 12 U.S. and Canadian cities and uncovered a subtle but growing disconnect between editors and readers. The issue wasn’t just about what was in the paper—it was about how people felt about their newspapers. (Summary written by AI)

The Social Contract Was Fraying

Readers no longer saw editors as all-knowing gatekeepers. In fact, many questioned why faceless editors still dictated the “important” news. What they really wanted was relevance: stories that spoke to their personal lives, their neighborhoods, their struggles. “I live in one world—they live in another,” one reader lamented.

From Mandarins to Humans

The report described a “reader-editor gap” that went far beyond content. Readers wanted to see and feel the people behind the bylines, a shift toward what we might now call personalized journalism. The cold objectivity of traditional reporting began to feel alienating in a media world increasingly influenced by charismatic TV anchors and talk radio hosts.

Rise of the “Me” Generation

The study captured a cultural pivot from civic obligation to personal fulfillment. Readers didn’t just want to be informed—they wanted to be helped. They craved guidance on how to live well, manage money, understand relationships, and yes, have fun. Traditional hard news still mattered, but only when balanced with accessible, emotionally resonant content.

Format Fatigue

Even then, readers complained newspapers were too hard to navigate. They wanted summaries, indexes, modular content, and less repetitive reporting. One participant nailed it: “I can wait till the story is over and then find out what is really important.”

The Real Lesson: Listen More

The report didn’t offer a silver bullet—but it validated a method: direct, honest conversations with readers. Focus groups were a prototype for what we now know as audience engagement strategies. For a print industry historically rooted in one-way communication, this was radical.

Though this report is nearly half a century old, its themes resonate in today’s digital landscape. The need for human connection, relevance, transparency, and flexibility continues. As media evolved from analog to digital, the core need hasn’t changed: people want their stories told with care, by people who understand them. Readers want to see themselves in the media they are using.

Social Contract with Readers, 1978

starting to worry editors everywhere: why were readers pulling away from their newspapers? Clark, working with Yankelovich, Skelly and White, ran focus groups with more than 120 regular readers, occasional readers, and non-readers across 12 U.S. and Canadian markets — competitive and non-competitive, chain and independent, morning and evening. Editors observed the sessions and joined the conversation partway through. The result, published as “Changing Needs of Changing Readers,” became one of the defining reader-research documents of its era. Clark called the underlying issue “the new social contract” between editors and readers — and the report set out to describe what had broken in it.

We know very little about the subtle forces that seem to be weakening the emotional ties of many readers, making newspapers less wanted, less needed or, in extreme cases, resented.

  • The social contract was fraying. Readers no longer accepted editors as the Mandarins who simply decided what mattered. They wanted relevance — stories about their own lives, their own neighborhoods, their own problems. “Editors live in one world — and I live in another,” one reader put it. “They’re worried about the Middle East, and I’m worried about meeting my bills.”
  • From gatekeepers to people. The report described a reader-editor gap that went beyond content into feeling. Readers wanted to know who was talking to them — a shift toward what we’d now call personalized journalism, driven partly by a TV-anchor culture where credibility rode on personality rather than institutional authority.
  • The “Me” generation arrives. Clark’s groups captured a cultural pivot from civic duty toward self-fulfillment. Readers still wanted hard news, but they also wanted help — with money, health, relationships, daily coping. Self-oriented features paired with hard news, the report concluded, were becoming the real key to readership.
  • Format fatigue. Even in 1978, readers said newspapers were hard work to get through. They wanted indexes, summaries, and less repetition of running stories. “I can wait till the story is over,” one reader said, “and then find out what is really important.”

  • The real recommendation: listen. The report offered no silver bullet, but it validated a method — direct, unscripted conversation with readers through focus groups, a forerunner of what’s now called audience engagement.

Nearly half a century later, the through-line still holds: people want to be told the truth by someone who understands them, and they want to see themselves in the coverage. That need didn’t change with the shift from analog to digital — if anything, it got louder as the news landscape fragmented. 

Pagination and a Look Into the Future of Newspapers

In 1999 I was asked to contribute to a book about pagination being published by the Society of News Design and the Association of News Editors. You can download the entire book from here.

At the end of the article I made some “bolder, out-on-a-limb” predictions:

  • Design as a unique job function in newspapers will slowly dissolve into other editing responsibilities.
  • Editing will encompass more than the technical aspects of copy editing and take on more responsibilities for the entire infopacks.
  • Computers will automatically handle most of the routine production responsibilities, freeing editors to do lust what we have always wanted them to do – make journalistic choices on behalf of their readers and the community.
  • Most, if not all, maps and charts will be produced by software. There will be fewer artists at newspapers doing “art work.”
  • The presentation of information will be of such importance for the organization that the senior editor with such responsibilities will report to the publisher.

I like my final paragraph:

Newspapers are on the verge of freeing themselves from the limitations of their production equipment. While I would not predict the end of newsprint as we know it, the era of print-centric delivery is coming to an end. We need to look beyond technology to find the solutions to organize and motivate our workforce for the new millennium. If we are successful, this is the last pagination book you will ever read.

Technology and Pagination

In 1999 the Society for News Design and the American Society of Newspaper Editors published a book about how managers could more successfully integrate new technologies into their newsrooms.  This project include a number of chapters from the leading technologists in the newspaper industry, including:

  • David M. Cole
  • Heidi de Laubenfels
  • Olivia Casey
  • Ed Kohorst

While pagination, strictly speaking, is an outdated technology, the concepts about workflow and organization are still very valid. 

I wrote about Embracing Change when it came to future technologies. There were a few things I got right:

  • Working at home, even doing newspaper design
  • Always connected to a network
  • Using databases to edit and present content
  • Constant feedback on what consumers are reading

E-Learning Rocks, NewsU Launch Movie

J. Paige West, an interactive learning producer at Poynter NewsU, came up with a great idea to help folks understand what we were creating.  In the early 2000s, e-learning was still an unknown concept for training and she thought it would be fun to create a video along the lines of the animated musical educational short films that aired on “School House Rocks.”

She did a great job with both the animation and the script.  The video was built in Flash, the hot interactivity tool in 2004.  I did my “voice over” and Paige played the journalist looking for training.

“E-Learning Rocks” debuted at NewsU’s launch party at the American Society of News Editors on April 11, 2005. We also put a copy on the CD-ROM that was part of our “launch box.” More on that in another post.

YouTube player

 

Brainstorming an Electronic Future for Newspapers, 1989

In late 1988, Jerry Ceppos, managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News, invited a number of folks to help design an ‘electronic’ newspaper designed to serve readers with “increasing access to computers and other modern technology.”  I was especially pleased by the invite, as I had abruptly departed the paper in 1985 after working there for only six months as graphics editor. [Ceppos was the managing editor.] The agenda and other material can be found here.

Here’s what Ceppos wrote about the gathering:

The only requirement is that our ideas be adaptable for newspapers today. Other than that, there is no limit to the ideas we can come up with; they can involve personal computers, videotex, fax, print, other technology, or a combination. And the content of the products is as important as the technology.

We met at the Mercury News for a day and brainstormed ideas about the future of news and newspapers.  It was an interesting mix of newspaper folks, academics and technology folks:

SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS
Dr. Yale Braunstein, professor, University of California at Berkeley
Jennie Buckner, Managing Editor-PM, San Jose Mercury News
Karen Ceppos, professor, San Jose State University
Jerry Ceppos, managing editor, San Jose Mercury News
Robert J. Cochnar, vice president and editor, Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail
Sue Cook, president, Palo Alto Consulting Centers, The Tom Peters Group
Jerry Dianond, general partner, EG&G Venture Managenent
Joe Donth, president, Startext, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Roger Fidler, director/PressLink and newsroon technology, Knight-Ridder Inc.
Dr. Virginia Fielder, vice president/news & circulation research, Knight-Ridder Inc.
Howard I. Finberg, assistant managing editor, Phoenix Newspapers, Inc.
Ray Gniewek, managing editor/page one, USA Today
David Halvorsen, editor and vice president, Alameda Newspapers
Frank N. Hawkins Jr., vice president/corporate relations and planning, Knight-Ridder Inc.
James Houck, managing editor, Baltimore Sun
Bob Hucker, computer systems editor, San Jose l’v\ercury News
Ann Hurst, assistant managing editor/features, San Jose Nlercury News
Robert D. Ingle, senior v.p. and executive editor, San Jose Mercury News
Steve Landers, consultant
W. Terry Maguire, senior vice president, American Newspaper Publishers Assn.
Ron Martin, executive editor, USA Today
Scott McGehee, general manager, Lexington Herald-Leader
Kris McGrath, president, rvt:R.I Research
John McManus, professor, Santa Clara University
George Owen, marketing services director, San Jose Mercury News
Bob Ryan, assistant managing editor, San Jose Mercury News
Geoff Sharp, director/business information, Dialog Information Services
Dr. Roger Summit, president & CEO, Dialog Information Services
Mark Wigginton, assistant managing editor/graphics, San Jose Mercury News
Kathy Yates, senior vice president and general manager, San Jose Mercury News
David Yarnold, AM executive news editor, San Jose Mercury News

My notes from the meeting quoted Ron Martin asking the question “how do we stay alive?”  Ceppos talked about “time poverty”  and falling readership.  Even before the 1990s, we knew the industry needed to change.

Pagination: ASNE Asks the Experts

In the mid- 1990s, pagination was the hot topic for editors.  Most newspapers were starting on their journey to digitally produce the newspapers via computer terminals.  The American Society of Newspaper Editors {ASNE] and the Society of Newspaper Design [SND] collaborated on a project to help newsrooms deal with pagination issues.  I was one of a dozen experts who answered questions for a special report.

 

Pagination Into Database Publishing

As Phoenix Newspapers installed its new pagination system from its European vendor, CCI, I became increasingly interested in the human factors of installing new technology.  And while I didn’t get it all right, even at our company, we did see some of the changes that would be facing the production of newspapers in an ever-increasing digital world.

Pagination is an ‘old” technology. More importantly, pagination will not heip a newspaper in the “new media’ landscape of today. What’s really important are the opportunities of a publication database system.

We can develop all the online, fax, and other new media products in the world, but unless we are lucky enough to be hiring dozens of new employees over the next ten years, we need to figure out better ways of using our existing resources of staff and equipment.

I gave a speech about the topic at the 1996 Seybold Conference.  From that speech I wrote an article for The American Editor, the publication of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which was published in October, 1996

Draft report pages from the July 2011 ASNE and American Press Institute survey of newspaper editors

ASNE-API Leadership Survey, July 2011

This is the draft report of a joint survey by the American Society of News Editors and the American Press Institute, dated July 20, 2011. Invitations went to 1,830 editors at about 1,400 daily newspapers, 50 online-only news sites and the deans of 100 accredited journalism schools. One hundred five people responded — nearly half of them from papers with circulations of 50,000 or less, which is where most American dailies live. Respondents rated 27 statements about content and audience, leadership and development, and organization and operations. ASNE planned to use the findings to shape training for top editors over the following 12 to 18 months, beginning with a regional workshop in Lexington, Ky., in October.

The framing of the report is a tension the authors return to again and again — editors who are determined and editors who are worn down:

These are editors focused on two things. Philosophically, they are committed to their fundamental, First Amendment roles. Pragmatically, they will do what it takes to weather the industry’s transformation as it struggles in the new “print dollars to digital dimes” world.

The three top-ranked opportunities or challenges: maintain quality writing and editing despite budget and staffing cuts (83.8 percent called it “very important”); redefine roles, strategies and tactics for moving newsrooms from once-a-day publishing to continuously updated, 24/7 news; and exploit mobile opportunities to distribute content and build audience.

What gives the document its bite are the unattributed editor comments:

“It’s time,” wrote one editor, “for newsrooms to focus on finding ways to do fewer things well, instead of doing everything poorly.”

“Too many interruptions, distractions,” wrote one editor. “Not able to put together a stretch of time that’s long enough to focus and complete anything that can’t be accomplished in five minutes. … I can get a lot of things started, but it’s becoming harder and harder to see them through to successful completion.”

“We are all in this same leaky boat together and it’s time to let go of our old ideas about labor and management. We all need to start building a new ship — and fast.”

The draft press release attached to the report quotes Linda Grist Cunningham, vice chair of ASNE’s Leadership Committee; Carol Ann Riordan, interim executive director of the American Press Institute; and Mizell Stewart III, editor of the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press and chair of the Leadership Committee.

“The affirmation that editors can stay focused on good journalism as they wrestle with spreadsheets and new technology isn’t unexpected,” said Linda Grist Cunningham … “But it certainly is reassuring.”

The report ends with the question it can’t answer:

The question remains: Which will prevail? The determination to succeed, to beat back the naysayers? Or the resignation that comes with fear, inertia and a mourning of the loss of the past?

Reading this in 2026 — fifteen years later — the survey is a useful marker of where newsroom leadership thinking stood at the start of the mobile era. The priorities the editors named are no longer strategic questions; they were settled by events. What remains strikingly current is the complaint that there is no time to think, and the one editor who predicted the tablet future and wrote, “This is the generation of transition.”

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.