Future | The Digital Futurist

Understanding the Online Future

In early 1994 I was given the task to figure out, with help of some great colleagues, the online future for Phoenix Newspapers [The Arizona Republic, the Phoenix Gazette and the Arizona Business Gazette]. Dave Gianelli and I spent a lot of time looking at different partnerships, such as America Online and Prodigy. And we also looked at “going it alone” also known as the Web or Internet. Remember, this was 1994. The Web was something newer than the online services. We created a report to help guide the company’s decision. In the end, we urged a dual approach — partner with AOL [for the cash bounties] and go it alone, via the Web. At the time, it was a bold and unusual strategy.

The first section is available as a PDF: PNI Online Opportunities Report 01_09_1994

PRESSTIME magazine April 2009 cover story asking 10 experts to reinvent the core print product

Ten Experts Reinvent the Core Print Product, April 2009

The April 2009 cover story in PRESSTIME, the magazine of the Newspaper Association of America, asked 10 experts — inside and outside the industry — to write a mission statement for today’s core print product, say what they would keep if they were starting a print newspaper from scratch, and predict what that product would look like in two, five and 10 years. The piece was written by Mary Lynn F. Jones.

The guest list: Ken Doctor of Content Bridges and Outsell Inc.; Mario R. Garcia of Garcia Media; Juan Antonio Giner of INNOVATION in Pamplona, Spain; Charlotte H. Hall of the Orlando Sentinel and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors; Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design; Ted Leonsis of Lincoln Holdings LLC and vice chairman emeritus of AOL; Tim J. McGuire of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University; Alan D. Mutter, the blogger behind Reflections of a Newsosaur; Kenneth A. Paulson of the Newseum; and Howard Weaver, formerly vice president of news for The McClatchy Co.

The story opens by noting that despite the repeated death knells, print still generated the overwhelming majority of newspaper company revenue. Paulson defined the print newspaper’s job as one that should

“accurately reflect what is going on in the community, meet readers’ needs for news and information and act as a watchdog on government”

Mutter argued that the framing itself was wrong:

Even though the newspaper generates 90 percent of a typical publisher’s sales, it is a mistake to think of it as the “core product.” The true core products of a newspaper company are its abilities to produce compelling content, build large audiences, sell advertising and make a profit.

On cutting sections and publication days, Doctor coined a term and a warning:

I call it “dayscrapping,” and it needs to be done judiciously. … Let’s not, above all, fool ourselves. Cutting back the core product doesn’t strengthen it. It may be a necessary evil, but pitching a less-is-more approach to readers won’t fool them.

Hall described the relationship between the two platforms in an image that stuck: print “stops the clock once a day,” and

One is the flowing river, changing constantly; the other is the rock on the shore, fixed and solid.

The predictions varied widely. Garcia expected compact and A4 formats inspired by magazines and books; Paulson expected smaller papers, higher single-copy prices and more reliance on circulation revenue; Hall declined to predict past two years. Jacobson was the most blunt:

In less than a year, there will be very few seven-day-a-week newspapers. In less than five years, newspapers will print for Sunday only. In less than 10 years, no newspapers will be printed.

The article notes that an expanded version of the report, including a podcast, was available at www.naa.org/presstime.

Printed 2008 San Francisco State journalism graduation program and typed pages of the Distinguished Journalism Alumnus speech

Adding a Sixth W: My 2008 SF State Speech

On May 25, 2008, I went back to where I started. The Journalism Department at San Francisco State University held its annual Graduation Celebration at 9 a.m. in McKenna Theatre, and I was on the program as Distinguished Journalism Alumnus, introduced by Jon Funabiki. Venise Wagner, the department chair, opened the morning. Martin Reynolds was named Journalism Alumnus of Year, introduced by Austin Long-Scott. Khari Johnson was the Class Honors Student, introduced by Cristina Azocar, and Christine Joy Ferrer was the Class Speaker, introduced by John Burks. The ceremony closed with a World Press Pass send-off by the journalism faculty.

The two documents here are the printed program
ed u2014 with the full list of graduates u2014 and my speaking text, marked 22, 2008. Speaking to a room full of new journalism graduates in the spring of 2008 meant speaking into a very bad news cycle for the news business, and I decided not to pretend otherwise.

This is a wonderful time to be a journalist. This is also a lousy time to be at a traditional journalism-based media company.

The rest of the talk was an argument for flexibility, built out of my own ru00e9sumu00e9. I told them I left school with one goal u2014 to become a news editor at a newspaper u2014 and never got there.

That was my career dream. It was a good goal, but I never reached it. I went around it. I went through it. I went over it.

Instead I counted seven careers: copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Chicago Tribune; graphics and picture editor at the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times; newsroom leader at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Arizona Republic; head of information technology at The Arizona Republic; online strategist at Central Newspapers; new media consultant; and educator, trainer and director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute. My journalism education, I told them, had prepared me for maybe two of those jobs. My wife, Kate, has her own diagnosis for this pattern u2014 she calls me a u201cpioneer addict,u201d someone who is happy only when he creates something new, and she is right that pioneers are easy to spot by the lost look and the absence of a map.

The heart of the speech was a small piece of advice dressed up as journalism 101. Everyone in that theatre already knew the 5Ws. I suggested they add one more.

What you need to add is another W, a 6th W: the u201cWhat Ifu201d.

I framed 2008 as an inflection point u2014 the moment when an industry, a company or a person has to choose between protecting the old or jumping into a future where the rules are unclear. The railroads didnu2019t make that leap. Newspapers, I argued, could have decided in the 1980s that their business was helping people make sense of the world around them, u201cand not just crushing trees and smearing ink.u201d I warned the graduates they would witness the failure of some well-known newspaper and television companies during their careers, and also the birth of new forms of journalism, including nonprofit-supported experiments then under way in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.

I also reminded them that they were the first truly digital generation u2014 born about when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, in fifth grade when the first Palm Pilot shipped, in ninth grade when Napster arrived and took the music industryu2019s business model with it, in high school for Skype, in college for YouTube. My generation still marvels at the Internet; theirs would treat it the way we treat electricity, without noticing the lights are on.

It is your responsibility to think about what the future might hold. It is your responsibility to shape the future. Do you think that you arenu2019t ready for that responsibility? Sorry. Too late. You already have the job.

Rereading this in 2026, the predictions hold up better than I would like. Well-known newspaper companies did fail. Nonprofit newsrooms did grow into a real part of the ecosystem. The one line that makes me smile is my hope for an innovator who would combine the Wii with journalism u2014 a very 2008 way of asking a question that AI and immersive storytelling are now answering in ways I couldnu2019t have named then. The advice underneath it, though, is the same advice I spent the next decade acting on at Poynter, building News University to give working journalists a way to keep learning after the diploma. Formal education can only take you to the starting line. Preparation, as I told the class of 2008, comes from within.

Journalism & Technology, Linked Forever Presentation

This is a presentation I gave to the Centre for Journalism and Further Education on Sept. 23, 2002. The opening slide greets the audience with “God Eftermiddag,” so I was clearly speaking to a Danish room. At the time I was Managing Director of Finberg-Gentry, the Digital Futurist Consultancy, a Presidential Scholar at The Poynter Institute and a Senior Fellow at the American Press Institute’s Media Center.

The purpose, as I laid it out early on, was to help the audience think about the future: how journalism is shaped by technology, how consumers drive technology, and how journalists need to position themselves regarding technology. My argument was that journalists could no longer treat technology as somebody else’s department.

For decades, journalists had little reason to pay attention to technology… The pace of change was slow. 50 years between innovations. Hot type to cold type. Letterpress to offset. Today, the pace is much faster. 20 years or shorter…

I split the disruption into two buckets. Internal: how we do business. External: what is our business. And I was blunt that the external questions mattered more, because our industry was at what I called an “inflection point.” I leaned on the Marshall McLuhan line that has never stopped being useful:

“We see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Much of the middle of the talk was a tour of devices and delivery: broadband going mainstream in the U.S. and accelerating in Western Europe, information devices wired and wireless, the smart phone as “a telephone with an operating system,” the first generation of reading devices — Softbook, E-Reader, RocketBook — plus NewsStand and Zinio, the coming TabletPC from “those fun folks up in Redmond, Wash.,” home gateways, personal video recorders, IBM’s MetaPad, the OQO, E-Ink displays and IBM’s e-newspaper mockup. I also included my caveat that not all technological changes are valuable, and that convergence might be an example of value that isn’t clearly understood.

Woven through the slides were five questions for the audience, and the third one is the one I’d still ask today:

While the paper might not disappear from newspaper, what happens if those who read it on paper disappear?

The last third of the presentation was the part I cared most about: a method for deciding what to do. The Technology Prioritization Matrix, copyrighted by The Digital Futurist Consultancy, simplified the decision to two criteria — consumer value, and expense and effort — with a list of internal questions (productivity, training, skills alignment, probability of success) and external ones (revenue potential, market share, customer adoption). The point was that not every project with a “gee whiz” factor returns value to the consumer or the company, and that there would be no single leap to the new world. I closed with four technology rules, including one I’ve repeated many times since:

Experiments cost money; doing nothing costs even more

Reading this in 2026, the specific hardware is a museum tour — most of those reading devices are gone, and the ones that survived didn’t look much like the mockups. But the framing held up better than the gadgets: consumers drove the fundamental changes, adoption took longer than predicted, and the newsrooms that waited for certainty paid the higher price.

Two ways of looking at an Adobe Acrobat Reader PDF file: on a Palm handheld device and on paper

Palm-Reading for Fun & Profit

A column for Editor & Publisher‘s technical section, published June 15, 2001, under the headline “Palm-reading for fun & profit — For a question about the future, Adobe has an answer in the Palm of your hand.” The subject is Adobe Systems Inc.’s release of Acrobat Reader software for the Palm operating system, which ran on both Palm’s Pilot and Handspring’s Visor personal digital assistants, and what that development might mean for newspaper design across devices.

The problem with predicting the future is that the darn thing keeps moving. Just as I’m ready to proclaim that this is the path we will all walk, the road shifts.

The column argues that printed news will be around for decades, but that newspaper Web presentation was falling short. After judging a recent Web contest for newspapers, the verdict was blunt:

Our content is good; our presentation is often downright boring.

The technical discussion covers tagged documents, the limits of HTML — “It, too, locks the content into the design” — and the promise of extensible markup language (XML) for designing across multiple platforms. Gary Cosimini, business development director for Adobe’s Cross Media Publishing Group, is quoted on the state of PDF at the time, with the content “trapped inside the ‘look and feel of the document.'” The column describes Adobe’s plans to export a “tagged PDF” file to RTF, HTML and XML, and a forthcoming plug-in that would let a newspaper publish an entire edition’s content “to devices that have yet to be designed.”

Under the subhead “The Design Thing,” the column makes the case that publishing skill is itself a newspaper asset:

We know how to communicate by design. We organize and prioritize by design.

It closes by questioning whether the industry and its vendors were ready for a “handle-once” work flow publishing visually rich content across multiple devices, noting that competitors — CNET.com is the example — could run the process in reverse, converting XML- and HTML-formatted documents to PDF for print.

The road just shifted slightly, and there are warning signs ahead

The author’s note identifies Finberg as “a managing director of Finberg-Gentry, The Digital Futurist Consultancy,” with prior roles at The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. An accompanying illustration showed “Two ways of looking at an Adobe PDF file: On a Palm device, on paper.”

1999 American Press Institute letter from John G. Finneman confirming participation in the Newspaper Design: 2020 seminar

An Invitation To Imagine Newspaper Design: 2020

Eleven years after API’s Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond u2014 the 1988 seminar I’ve already posted documents about elsewhere on this site u2014 the American Press Institute decided to run the exercise again, this time looking two decades out. In the spring of 1999, John G. Finneman, API’s director of operations and administration, wrote to confirm that I’d be part of the 16th annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar in Reston.

This is to finally confirm that you will be participating here in API’s 16″ annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar, which we’re entitling Newspaper Design: 2020, on Oct. 24-26.

The letter is explicit about the lineage, and it’s worth reading alongside the 1988 material in the timeline:

As we’ve discussed, this will be a follow-up to API’s 1988 program, Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond.

At the time I was director of technology and information strategies at Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. u2014 a title that says something about how far the conversation had moved from the drafting table since the first seminar. The assignment, though, was the same one: put on the collective creative hat.

During our upcoming fall program, participants once again will be asked to wear their collective creative hats and envision the “newspaper” of 2020 from a design standpoint. How is it most likely going to evolve and what might it look like?

The quotation marks around “newspaper” are Finneman’s, and they do a lot of work.

The Society of News Design was again a partner, with a study organized around three buckets u2014 design, color and infographics; technology and new media; and people. Finneman credits the framing to a conference call I’d had with David Gray:

Warren told me this is what you came up with in your conference call with David Gray.

The signature element of the 1988 program came back as well. Each participant would build a front page of the future, content mix and all, for analysis and a post-seminar book.

These pages, which will once again be featured in our post-seminar book, will be analyzed in advance by Roger Black. As he did in 1988, Roger will be leading a discussion on the body of work.

The seminar was underwritten by API’s J. Montgomery Curtis Fund, which covered tuition, room and meals at the Hyatt Dulles, plus the production of the book. Participants paid their own way there. And, in a detail that dates the letter as surely as anything else in it, I was asked to send along a glossy photo and a biographical sketch.

Looking at this from 2026, the target year has come and gone u2014 and then some. What strikes me is that the 1988 group was asked to imagine 2000 largely as a printed artifact, while the 1999 group was being asked about 2020 with the web already reshaping the question. Whether any of us got it right is a matter for the front pages themselves.

Typewritten memo from editor Robert J. Cochnar to the APME Year 2000 Committee outlining a study plan for newspapers

Focusing a Committee on the Year 2000

This is a memo from Robert J. Cochnar, vice president and editor of the Anderson Independent-Mail in South Carolina, to the members of the Associated Press Managing Editors Year 2000 Committee. He had asked the committee what it should study during its year of work, and the replies — enclosed with the memo, from papers all over the country — make up the bulk of the packet.

As I suspected, any discussion centering on the future is opening a very large can of worms. I asked you for your thoughts on the projects we might take on during the study year and you have responded. Boy, have you responded.

I’m in this document twice: once as a new addition to the committee, and once in the membership list, at 120 E. Van Buren St. in Phoenix.

Incidentally, I’ve expanded our committee a bit with some distinguished folks who have expressed their willingness to add their expertise to the hopper. They are Bob Haiman, who runs the Poynter Institute, and Howard Finberg, assistant managing editor for graphics at the Arizona Republic.

Cochnar’s first concern was not duplicating the work of the ASNE Future of Newspapers Committee, chaired by Ron Martin, or New Directions for News. So no prototypes. Instead he proposed a structure that still strikes me as a smart way to organize thinking about the future:

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.

Not essays. An introduction, a conclusion, and in between, well-organized snippets from the literature and from smart people inside and outside the business — contradictions allowed, sources required. Cochnar described the goal as “a sort of extended data bank, or almanac, of facts, ideas and notions” that an editor could cherry-pick from a table of contents. He also liked a committee member’s suggestion that it all be treated as an interim report, with annual updates from future committees on the future, which he thought should adopt Satchel Paige’s line:

“Don’t look back; something may be gaining on us.”

The work was split into two groups: George Blake of the Cincinnati Enquirer on content and production, Susan Miller of Scripps Howard on everything else — circulation, advertising, competition, legal trends. Doug Ramsey at the Foundation for American Communications had proposed a co-sponsored committee meeting; Cochnar was thinking June, in Atlanta.

The enclosed correspondence is the real reward here. Tom Stites of the Chicago Tribune argued for starting with the underlying trends, a point Cochnar quoted back to the committee:

“the trends that underlie all the other trends are demographic and psychographic. This will tell us more about our readers than almost anything else, and who our customers are will affect many other trends.”

Stites also noted that Alvin Toffler wrote “Future Shock” on a personal computer but never mentioned personal computers in the book — a warning I’ve repeated in one form or another for most of my career. Others wrote about pagination and electronic photo handling reshaping newsroom structure, about classified advertising eventually moving to interactive electronic media, about retailing shifting away from the big department stores, about recruiting and keeping women and minorities, and about owners with no history in journalism buying profitable newspapers.

Reading it now, what stands out isn’t what the committee got wrong. It’s how much of it the industry saw coming and how little of it changed anyone’s behavior in time. And a small note of personal history: Bob Haiman joined this committee running Poynter, an institution where I’d spend a good chunk of my later career.

January 1997 memo to Arizona Republic editors on the multi-skilled journalist of the future

The Future: Journalist’s Skills

This is a January 1997 memo I wrote to Don Henninger and Steve Knickmeyer, two senior editors at The Arizona Republic and The Phoenix Gazette. It came out of a conversation we’d had the day before about the skills journalists were going to need, and it was very much part of my techno-evangelism at Phoenix Newspapers — trying to help editors prepare for changes coming to journalism and, potentially, to their newsrooms.

The core argument was that the future belonged to people who could do more than one thing:

The overall direction that I see journalism [and journalists] heading in the next five to 10 years is one of multi-skilled individuals. These will be the people that will succeed and prosper in the next century. In a sense, we will be going back to our roots — the small town publisher/editor/reporter/ad salesman — to find models that put more responsibility for all aspects of journalism in the hands of the source.

I used my own history at the newspaper as the example, which felt honest at the time and still does. Creating a separate design department had made sense when I arrived, given the technology we had. By 1997 it made a good deal less sense — and the split between the art department and the design department looked worse still.

So, in a sense, we created a “graphics factory,” because they had their own special technology — the Macintosh — to create charts and maps.

The point wasn’t that everyone should do everything. Specialized talent still mattered. What I expected to disappear were the divisions that existed only because of the equipment:

However, the artificial separation of skills based on technology will be eliminated [and much sooner than the five to 10-year time frame that I’m using].

From there the memo works through photography — why not put a digital camera in every reporter’s hands, since other delivery methods would consume far more visual material than the printed paper had room for — and then video and audio, and what editing skills would be needed to combine words, audio, stills and moving images.

The section I’m still fondest of is the one about the Web not being print and not being broadcast either.

On the Web, you tell stories in non-linear fashion. You need to tell those stories in such a way that the reader/consumer/user can understand the story regardless of where he entered the presentation. This is a different way of presenting news.

And the editing skill that follows from it, which I called “de-composing” linear stories into Web format.

Title slide reading "Back to the future" from a July 1996 NAA marketing and technology meeting presentation in Chicago

Back to the Future: A 1996 Presentation to NAA Marketing

In July 1996 I presented “Back to the future” at an NAA marketing and technology business meeting in Chicago. At the time I was Senior Editor / Information Technologies at Phoenix Newspapers

The argument started with the bad news:

We can’t get there from here
Unless we change the way we think about our business

That change meant seeing the difference between publishing as an industry and publishing as an activity. Publishers love the industry — and the presses — “Just like the railroad owners loved trains.” But people love the activity. My historical example wasn’t computers at all: in the late 1800s a more affordable printing press gave even the smallest towns competing newspapers.

The heart of the talk was a scorecard, rating newspapers against seven digital consumer needs — knowledge, interaction, networking, sensory experience, ubiquity, aggregation and customization. The tally: two advantages, three neutrals, two disadvantages.

I also warned against the era’s favorite word:

Don’t “repurpose” content
Repurpose our role

And about the delivery debate: “It isn’t about dead trees OR live wires.” Forget online, forget the Web, forget about the wires — focus on information value.

Two outside voices made the point better than I could. Mark Hauptschein, director of strategy and business development at Ameritech:

“The old way of throwing advertising – spraying and praying – will weaken over time. Marketing will become a form of content.”

And Eric Berg, Price Waterhouse director of technology:

“In the late 1990s, getting access to information will no longer be an issue. The real issue will be avoiding information. We’re going to need new technology which will enable us to filter, sort and extract the information which is relevant to us.”

The process section covered the questions we were all avoiding — what is news, what are the jobs, what kind of organization — plus the return of the 24-hour newsroom and a caveat I still like: going from hot type to cold type is evolutionary; going digital is revolutionary. Make sure the paradigm really shifts.

There was good news, too. No new technology has yet replaced an older one, and information providers have always found a way, from newsbooks to newsletters to newspapers. I closed with Darwin — survival belongs to the most adaptable — and with people:

Give them information
Give them tools
Give them training
Give them room

Opening slide from a 1994 American Press Institute seminar presentation for journalism educators in Reno

Technology For Tomorrow’s Journalists — an API Seminar, 1994

This is the slide outline from a presentation I gave at an American Press Institute seminar for journalism educators, in Reno, on September 21, 1994. At the time I was Senior Editor / Information Technology at Phoenix Newspapers, and the assignment was to talk to the people teaching the next generation of journalists about what was coming at them.

The opening slide set the tone with what I called the understatement of the decade:

The world of information is changing
And so are the newspapers that provide information

Then the harder question, which I put back to the room rather than answering it myself:

JUST WHAT IS A NEWSPAPER?
WE NEED A DEFINITION FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
Any suggestions?

Much of the middle of the presentation was a tour of the bets newspapers were placing in 1994 — audio services over the telephone, fax editions, CD-ROM, “electronic newspapers” delivered by e-mail to a portable computer, online services, and PDAs. I was blunt about the state of play: some publishers were going online, some were looking at CD-ROM, and “others are putting their head in the sand.” The framing throughout was gambling — place your bets, and then:

WILL ANY OF THESE BETS PAY OFF?
What happens if you lose?
What happens if you don’t play?

The numbers are a good reminder of how early this all was. My online services slide reported that 34% of homes had a personal computer and 13% had a modem, with a forecast that by 1997 the computer number would reach 40-50% but modems would only reach 20%. The named players were CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy and Delphi; the partnership examples were Mercury Center and Access Atlanta; the “future players” I listed were Microsoft, Ziff and Sony. And a slide on why modem penetration might not matter at all — because of “cable boxes that have a computer chips inside.”

Because the audience was educators, the second half turned to jobs and curriculum. I argued that reporters could no longer treat the process of getting the story onto the doorstep as somebody else’s problem, and that they would be gathering content for multiple products. Some of it was deliberately provocative:

Even “hot” jobs may disappear
Do we really need designers?

Coming from someone whose career had been built in newspaper design, that was meant to land. So was the slide on teaching:

HOW DO YOU TEACH THESE NEW SKILLS?
It won’t be from a textbook

My prescription was more connection — “Newsroom and classroom need to get closer / Classroom needs to get real.” Two decades later I was still working on exactly that problem, with News University at the Poynter Institute, trying to close the same gap with online training instead of slides.

The closing section was what I labeled my “vision thing”: that newspapers don’t just provide content, they provide context, and that dumping data isn’t journalism — “If you want data, try the phone book.” I also made the point that newspapers were already interactive:

Newspapers are already interactive
They push content
Readers push back

And the last two slides hold up best of all, in 1994 and in 2026:

Understand that “cutting edge” means “bleeding edge”
Look at workflow, not hardware

Followed by “TECHNO-EVANGELISM / Lead by example / Take an interest.” Substitute today’s technology of the moment for CD-ROM and PDAs and the advice doesn’t need much editing.

Editor & Publisher clipping from August 1992 covering an INMA conference panel on how to reinvent the newspaper for the next century

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.”

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