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.”
