A copy of the announcement that the study results will be released at the ONA convention in Berkeley, Ca. on Oct. 27, 2001
“Digital Strategy” Items
Presentation of ONA Digital Credibility Report
Here’s a copy of the main online credibility presentation given at the ONA convention in 2001. The goal was to share the results of the ONA Credibility study conducted in 2000-2001. This PDF includes notes or a script for the presenters. It has the key elements the authors wanted to share with the audience. I conducted the survey work and wrote a large section of the report and was responsible for creating the presentation.
Finding the Focus for Online Services
As part of the development process for AzCentral, the Phoenix Newspapers Inc. “skunk works” team undertook a couple of difficult, but important tasks. One task was to better understand our potential audience. With focus groups and other marketing research, we found some themes from our affinity groups:
- The Travelers
- Small business owners
- Parents of young children
- High school teachers
I really liked the idea that we wouldn’t talk only to “computer owners.” Rather we wanted to better understand how to serve the needs of our potential audience. Here’s what we wrote [I think by Dave Gianelli] about the process:
The four groups — people who like to travel, parents of young children, small business owners and high-school teachers – were selected after consulting with Ellen Jacobs, who guided the team throughout the process. We decided against creating focus groups out of demographics such as “computer owners” or “users of online services,” which are based more on the medium than content.
This strategy allowed the team to learn about the specific information needs of each group, and it pointed up some themes common across the groups. Also, the focus group members were varied in computer expertise: some used online services regularly, and others were thinking of joining one. Some said that they didn’t own a computer and that they didn’t plan to buy one.
We talked with the groups about how they get information (for planning a trip or a family outing, for example) and the frustrations they have in getting this information. What we found out can be used to help PNI shape its online services.
What is most interesting about this document is the VERY detailed inventory of the content that could be offered from existing material created by two newspapers, a business journal and an audiotext service.
From A (stock listings) to Zing!, our readers have access to news, sports, entertainment, computers, calendars, business and anything that fits under those umbrellas. And from The Arizona Republic, The Phoenix Gazette, Community and the Arizona Business Gazette comes access to other valuable reader services: PressLine, faxes and special sections.
As we wrote: It is a lot. About 100 pages of inventory. It is a great snapshot of the content that one newspaper in 1995 produced for its readers.
The Newspaper Industry’s Inflection Point
At Editor & Publisher’s 13th annual Interactive Conference and Trade Show in San Jose I gave a presentation titled “Digital Deliverance: Impact on the Newspaper Industry.”
One of the sections that rang true in 2002 and still relevant was about disruption:
With disruptive technologies, a company needs to throw off its existing culture and methods of doing business. While current customers are important, a disruptive technology demands that a company make sure these customers do not drive the company’s future direction. In other words, it means making sure old relationships — and their current economic value — do not drive business decisions needed for the future.
I argued that the newspaper industry was at “an inflection point.” I think we have long past that point and the industry needs to quickly find ways to reinvent its business model.
What I liked about this presentation was the review of disruptive devices:
- The Internet / Broadband
- Information devices / Wired and Wireless
- Reading devices
- Other digital devices / Audio, Video, Gateways
(Remember, this is 2002.)
Technology Leadership at The Arizona Republic
One of my roles at The Arizona Republic was to run the information technology department. One of my important responsibilities was to make the case internally and externally for investment in equipment and services.
In April 1997, I did a “Technology Leadership” presentation. I’m not sure who was in the audience. I laid out our plans for the future on two information pillars:
Two types of information technology support our organization
1. Business and financial applications
* Advertising, finance, circulation support systems
2. News and information applications
* Editorial and other content, regardless of delivery method
I concluded with the idea that all of this spending is needed to build “strong technology foundations for the future.”
History of Newspaper Design and Year 2000 Visions
As part of the 1989 Associated Press Managing Editors convention Des Moines, I developed a script for a slideshow about the history of newspaper design and the vision developed from the American Press Institute’s seminar on the future of newspaper design. That seminar, “Newspaper Design 2000 and Beyond,” was help in 1988.
The goal of the APME slide show was “look back so that we might look forward.” [The slide show was videotaped.] Douglas Ramsey, who was a vice president at the Foundation for American Communications, did the narration. The AP put the show together. Nancy Tobin, who was at The Asbury Park Press, helped with the creation of the show.
I found a VCR tape of the show, which is visually terrible. However, I’ve posted it. One of my goals is to take the narration, which was quite nice, and recreate the show in digital format. Stay tuned. [Update in 2021: Still the plan. Life happens.]
Year 2000 Viewed by 1988 Committee
Robert [Bob] Cochnar, whom I worked with at the San Francisco Chronicle, invited me to join his Associated Press Managing Editors committee about the future of newspapers. Called the Year 2000 Committee, one of the goals of the group was to create a report for the 1989 APME convention in Des Moines. Here’s some of what Bob wrote in a note to committee members:
To borrow an idea from Phil Meyer, who pioneered the notion that research could also be a reporter’s and editor’s tool, I’d like to divide our work into several broad segments.
I. Things We Know For Sure About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
II. Things We Think We Know About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
III. Things We Need to Know About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
IV. A Summing Up: What We’ve Got to Do.
Somewhere, in some file is the report. Meanwhile, in this PDF, is some of the correspondence from committee members.
[Bob didn't put a date on his letter, so I'm guessing it was in fall of 1988.]
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.
Techno-Evangelism: Thoughts for Newsroom Leaders
Dealing with technology at The Arizona Republic, especially the introduction of new computer systems, led to a number of presentations about what I called “techno-evangelism.” I wanted newspaper managers to pay more attention to technology and its impact upon their staff members and workflow.
Some of my key ideas, from a talk given at the Society of Newspaper Design’s 1993 convention in Dallas, were these five points:
1. Technology is an ecological issue. By itself, technology adds nothing. Its introduction changes everything.
2. A newsroom learns by example. If a newsroom manager isn’t willing to invest time or energy in understanding technology, don’t expect the staff to care.
3. The key issue about technology isn’t hardware or even software. It’s workflow. Understand the how work moves (or how you want it to move) through the newspaper and you’ll understand what technological solutions you’ll need.
4. Techno-evangelism means finding a leader who will take risks, become a teacher, shoulder responsibilities and be willing to go wandering in the “desert.”
5. Looking at history can help prepare you for the future. Understanding when there is a “paradigm” shift is important; knowing when there isn’t is even more important. Going from hot type to cold type is evolutionary; going digital is revolutionary.
I also handed out a technology adoption quiz. Taking the quiz would identify whether you are a techno-phobe, a techno-boomer, a techno-to-go or a techno-wizard.
The slides from the presentation are here.
Points to Poynter: Report on Our India Workshop
In March 2014, Poynter took its teaching on the road to India — three three-day workshops, one each in Chennai, Kochi and Bengaluru, done in partnership with the U.S. Consulate. We covered more than 500 miles in the process. The Kochi workshop was organized with the Kerala Press Academy and ran March 23-25 at the Taj Gateway.
What makes this document historically interesting is that it isn’t ours. It’s a report by Ashok R. Chandran, an independent journalist and researcher in Palakkad, Kerala, who sat through all three days in Kochi and then wrote up the whole thing session by session — with a great deal more style and mischief than any of our own after-action summaries. He describes the workshop as something to zip through, seatbelts fastened, and the reader really does get carried along.
The report opens Day 1 with a detail that tells you exactly what era we were teaching in: a participant tweeting from the room while the inaugural speeches were still going, using a hashtag the faculty had created for the students.
My own session kicked things off with disruption: Clayton Christensen, the collapse of U.S. newspaper advertising revenue, and then findings from The Future of Journalism Education 2013 report and a preview of Core Skills for the Future of Journalism, which was released the following month. The through-line was the gap between what professionals value and what journalism educators value, a gap that looked much the same in an Indian classroom as it did in an American one.
Chandran was kind about the session. Mostly.
It is not every day that one gets to see in this part of the world, an energetic 70+ educator enlightening the audience on “The Exciting, Changing Future of Journalism.”
I’ll happily take “energetic.” The rest of the faculty got sharper portraits: Tom Huang of The Dallas Morning News on credibility, story ideas and finding focus; Casey Frechette on digital tools and how to teach them; Zella Bracy of McClatchy on the business side; Jeffry Couch of the Belleville News-Democrat on transformational newsrooms and watchdog journalism; Sue Burzynski Bullard of the University of Nebraska on Twitter as a teaching tool and on digital ethics. And Vidisha Priyanka on multimedia, whose session Chandran renders as an action movie. I was tweeting from the room too:
@vidisha71 owns the room talking about multimedia at #PoynterIndia workshop. Lots of teaching.
The most valuable passage in the report, and the most uncomfortable, is the Day 2 session on editorial-business collaboration. Our faculty pushed for newsrooms to work across the old firewall; the Indian journalists in the room pushed back hard, describing the phenomenon of paid news and citing what the Times of India’s Vineet Jain had told the New Yorker: “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business.” Chandran’s verdict on the exchange is blunt.
The faculty see a storm coming but apparently misread it as part of century-long rivalry between journalists and marketers in media houses.
He also notes that the session then turned genuinely two-directional, ending with what he calls a Gandhian compromise — collaboration for need, but not for greed. That’s the part I keep coming back to. We went to teach and got taught, which is the honest outcome of any cross-border training worth doing.
He closes with the group photo — “It is a Poynter tradition,” I told him — the certificates, and a feedback session that ran hot instead of polite, recorded by a room full of phone and iPad cameras. His last line is the headline of the piece:
The future is in digital, and the Malayali journalist is already there.
Newspapers and the Dilemma of Innovation
It was clear, even to me, that by the early 2000s, the newspaper industry would be facing its greatest challenge. The disruption was widespread in many industries and there were lessons from book publishers, record companies and even the steel manufacturers.
I gave a presentation at media-convergence workshop sponsored by The Media Center at the American Press Institute at Newspaper Association of America’s technical conference, NEXPO, in Orlando, June 21.
As reported in TechNews, the NAA’s convention daily, I said the newspaper industry
… sits at an “inflection point,”where disruptive technologies surround the medium and demand that companies “throw off the existing culture and methods of doing business.
“Our customers are getting smarter. Their expectations are higher,”he said.“They want to do business in their time, not yours,”aided by “forces of disruption,”such as cellular-data services, instant messaging and real-time businesses.
Some of this presentation referenced one of my favorite books, The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.
Editors Told Big Changes Needed. Did They Listen?
Even though it was 2007, I was still making speeches to editors [and publishers] about the need to embrace change and transform the newspaper business. One such plea for change was made at a Texas Associated Press Managing Editors convention in San Antonio. A fellow trouble-maker at the event was Michael P. Smith, executive director of the Media Management Center at Northwestern.
I said that not even popular online sites can rest easy and the challenge is young people who aren’t newspaper readers. And I talked about “control” of content and media.
From a story published in the San Antonio Express-News:
And editors can’t forget they’re dealing with an audience that’s “digitally equipped,” as more people own devices that give them control of a medium such as digital video recorders like TiVo.
These digital devices give control.
“No one wants to give up something that gives them control, Finberg said. Young people, especially, “want to take somebody else’s content and add to it.”
Helping the Newspaper Industry See into the Future
Randy Bennett, a friend and industry colleague for more than 20 years, ran an interesting project at the Newspaper Association of America during his time as a vice president. Randy created the Horizon Watching initiative, with the hopes of being a ‘early warning’ system for newspaper executives.
Task-force participants, including newspaper executives and NAA associate members, set out to help publishers understand the external strategic forces that will shape the future of their industry.
I was delighted to serve on the committee. It was an interesting group to work with and I loved looking at the future. I’m not sure the group got a chance to make the impact that I hoped would be possible. Presstime, the NAA publication, wrote about the project about a year after it started.
Changing indicators mean different things in different markets. “There is no right answer,” said Howard Finberg, director of technology and information strategies at Central Newspapers Inc. in Phoenix. The important point, from the task-force perspective, is to grapple with the indicators and create a process for dealing with their business consequences.
I did argue this point as well, often in various meetings:
“We’re trying to challenge the industry to think differently,” Finberg explained, adding, “We have no right to survive.”
The Digital Future: The Next Technological Steps
At the request of John Oppedahl, my boss at Phoenix Newspapers, I wrote a very long memo about technology and the company’s newspapers, The Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette. The memo was 25 pages.
Technology influences the newspaper in many different ways: From offset presses controlled by computers to database programs that help circulation, independent components become part of an interdependent system.
This connection is the strongest between the newsrooms and production. We are linked, tied electronically by common systems, common needs and common problems. In the same way siblings share bloodlines, editorial and production share an electronic network of bits, bytes and data.
I wanted to outline what technologies the company needed to invest in. I wrote about pagination, text editing systems, color systems, advertising needs and more. I framed the report on the idea of a new newsroom.
More important than relationships between computer systems and more interesting than the technological feat of pagination is the way the newsrooms are organized to produce the newspaper. Using new technology to produce a newspaper in the same method utilized 20 years ago or 5 years ago is a tremendous waste of money, manpower and creativity.
The top of the memo has lovely saying: “Man plans, God laughs” -Old Yiddish saying
The complete memo can be read in this PDF.
Chicago Tribune — 5 Years Hence [1980 as the Future]
I don’t remember who asked for this memo about the future or why we were looking at “five years hence” (1980). This is probably one of my earliest “future look” memos.
At the time this was written, the Tribune was publishing both morning and afternoon editions. Lots of them, as we had just merged the staffs of the afternoon newspaper {Chicago Today} and the morning Tribune. It was a grueling publishing schedule that was truly a 24-hour publishing cycle.
I still like this thought about giving readers more about what a story means.
We need to stop thinking “freshest is best”; a need to end the traditional cycle of publishing edition after edition, sometimes barely enough time to consider what the news means. The Tribune could reduce it cycle to two editions (major remakes) with replate options. Continue to provide a morning and afternoon edition; new equipment will allow a savings in time – use the savings to give editors and reporters time to include the “what it means” in their story.
Here’s the full memo, a carbon copy from the “copy book” it was written on.