APME/SND: The Digital Chiefs

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

APME president David Ledford leads a discussion about the role of editors in digital strategies with Howard Weaver, McClatchy’s vice president of news, and Rob Curley, news website pioneer and now head of the Las Vegas Sun’s digital operations. Video clips of Gannett digital chief Chris Saridakis addressing the same questions are incorporated into the conversation.

Some highlights:

Saridakis: The best way to advance digital strategies is to build a culture of experimentation in the newsroom. Constantly push the envelope of technology and of reporting. Understand how readers use information.

Curley: He explains a benchmarking experiment the Sun is about to do. But first some background: The Sun is in a unique situation (earlier post here) because it can start over, setting distinctly different but complementary missions for its print edition and website.

The Sun pays close attention to traffic trends and now has a home page that is not templated. It is redesigned every day to respond to traffic trends and news. Because breaking news drives traffic, in recent months the Sun has started posting those headlines at the top of the homepage, pushing down the well-designed packages that lead the page at the start of the day.

“It couldn’t be much uglier,” Curley says. Those ugly headlines are getting traffic.

In a couple of weeks, the Sun will begin adding design concepts to those ugly headlines and will watch the traffic. “Whatever wins is what we’re going to do,” he said. (He promises he will blog about this.)

Weaver: Newspapers need to think about a much wider range than their websites. Younger readers, he notes, assume the news will come to them — through RSS feeds, email, etc.

In order to stay true to our mission, which is public service journalism, newspaper companies have to remain a mass medium, but not the same kind of mass medium. “If we can’t find a way to do this that sustains public service journalism, then there is no reason to suffer this bad.”

Curley complains that most top editors know everything happening in print, “but they don’t know how their online site works.”

Ledford asks a question that’s been a topic of conversation during the breaks and informal moments this week: Will things get worse before they get better?

Weaver: He expects the economy is going to get worse, but he’s not sure about the newspaper industry. He believes a big part of the problem is cyclical because three of our biggest sources of advertising revenue — real estate, auto and retail — are in the tank. He acknowledges though that some is secular, brought on by the shift away from print toward online. “It’s not raining on us, it’s just raining … we have to learn to work wet for a while,” he says.

Saridakis and Curley believe things are going to get worse and the secular shift is significant. Saridakis says a bright spot, though is that content is still king, no matter the medium.

When the conversation is thrown open for questions, a journalist notes the deep staff cuts at McClatchy papers this year and challenges Weaver to explain how, in the face of such cuts, newspapers are going to sustain public service journalism.” How do we do it? We can’t do it all.”

Weaver replies: He says he was not intending to minimize the losses in McClatchy newsrooms this year. “This has been an incredibly painful process for us and one that hurts our journalism. What we’re trying to do is get through this the best we can with a mission-centered vision and our mission is public service journalism.”

Another editor in the audience asks: How do you define great journalism — adding that “most what we do that readers love the most would never win the Pulitzer Prize in a mission years.”

Curley agrees enthusiastically and offers an example: The Sun recently published an extensive story on water that a reporter had spent a year on. It got a little over 200 page views. A report report on the death of Mojave Max, a turtle used for years to teach Las Vegas school kids about the desert, got 22,000 page views. “If you’re not going to do Mojave Max, you’re screwed.”

Weaver challenges the either-or assumption as a false dicotomy. He says public service journalism is not necessarily massive projects. It’s aggressive coverage of local government; it’s holding public officials accountable; it’s journalism that creates community cohesion.”

SND: Rethinking the Business

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences, which are being held concurrently this week in Las Vegas. 

Lee Abrams, innovation chief at Sam Zell’s Tribune Co., leads off this session of SND. Abrams, a longtime radio executive, joined Tribune last spring from XM Satellite Radio and almost immediately set off waves with provocative memos and statements about the state and future of newspapers. Soon, clever journalists were parodying his memos to Tribune employees.

In this session, he makes many of the same points. But they don’t seem to carry the same edge — perhaps because we’ve heard/read them before. Or perhaps it’s because Abrams takes pains to point out several times that he is a newspaper believer. And, he makes it clear that his role is to be provocative — to push newspapers to change and think differently, but not to figure out or dictate precisely what shape that will take in each newsroom. 

He lists some of the reasons he’s heard against change and quickly dismisses each: we’ll alienate our core readers, we’re dumbing it down, we’ll get complaints.

Abrams says papers are too subtle, too reserved and quiet — in how they present their content, how they market themselves and their journalism. “Everybody is so damned subtle,” he says. Abrams says newspapers need to stop treating certain things as sacred and therefore not open for change, including the nameplate and section names. He cites the Chicago Tribune’s features section name — Tempo — as an example. “That was great in about 1953.”

Abrams has no patience for those who blame shrinking resources for not changing. Layoffs “suck” he says, but are not a good excuse. Newspapers are too timid about how they pursue, present and promote their journalism, he says. The buzz is local, local but papers basically all look and read alike. “Ooze your community, not only in content but in the way you look,” he says.

Abrams says newspapers need to stop looking inside — within the industry — for answers and be open to experimentation and rapid-fire change. He says he’s not the “idea guy” and his role is to inspire and challenge people to be bold, creative and experiment. 

“There’s no reason we can’t create a newspaper renaissance,” he says. “Newspapers are inherently smart in a dumb world.”

Rob Curley is up next. He’s still settling into his new gig at the Las Vegas Sun, a unique little paper that because of an interesting JOA (joint operating agreement) arrangement and a supportive family ownership is sheltered from the economic upheaval of the industry.

He’s brought a few slides and keys up the first: “What would starting over look like?”

What if you didn’t have to worry about falling revenue, holding onto circulation or cutting newsroom jobs, he asks. “What if you could just blow shit up?”

That, he says, is what the Las Vegas Sun is doing: building a newspaper “for people who love newspapers” and a website for those who want news/information digitally and mobily. The paper focuses not on “what” happened, but the “why” and the “how.” The website: breaking news and “useful, addictive evergreen content,” and supplementing the print edition.

The content is intensely local. Noting the hype around “hyperlocal,” Curley observes: “In Kansas, we call this doing your damned job.”

He gives an example of this supplementing. The paper did a story on flight delays at the airport here. The website, drawing on federal aviation data, produced this calculator. You can find out the delay history for every flight leaving/arriving in Las Vegas.

As evidence the Sun is achieving its goal of having two distinct news products that complement, not duplicate, he cites the “most read” metrics from the prior day: Only one of the 10 most read stories on the site was also published in the paper and that was a column.

How does the Sun do all of this with a total newsroom staff of 50? By hiring the best people, Curley says, not the cheapest or those fresh out of school. To the recent graduates in the audience, he tells them to go pay their dues by working small local beats like he did in Kansas.

Curley punctuates his talk with examples of some of the web initiatives he and his team have started since he came here from Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive last spring (he brought several people with him).

– New weather site, which draws on feeds from 80 local weather stations and has lots of features, including a five-day forecast that is illustrated over the Las Vegas Strip.

–Las Vegas history site: This project helped make The Sun one of three finalists for APME’s second Innovator of the Year award; the winner will be selected later this week by the audience here.

–High school football site: It includes individual player pages. Users can sign up for cell phone alerts, delivered quarterly during games.

The main goal of these initiatives, he says, is to “move the needle” — increase traffic, increase conversation, increase the site’s influence in the community but, mostly, increase traffic, he says again, drawing laughter from the packed room.

Curley advocates doing broadcast quality video and he shows some examples from their site that have a very glitzy Las Vegas feel. During the subsequent Q & A, he acknowledges that the video is not drawing great traffic, which is one reason the Sun recently made a deal with a local TV station to daily air four 1-minute clips repurposed from the videos on its site. He says doing this type of video also positions the site to take full advantage of broadband, which is still emerging.