Leslie J. Wilkinson JOMC 713, Dec. 8 2007 UNC Chapel Hill [email protected] or [email protected]

Adapt and Innovate: Newspapers succeeding in the online world. Faced with the challenge of ‘Adapt or Die,’ newspapers and their partner websites are finally making a mark on the web.

Leslie Wilkinson is News Design Team Leader at The Charlotte Observer, where she oversees the night design desk. In her 8 and a half years at the Observer, she has been a 1A, metro and regional designer. She also works with the Observer's IT department in maintaining the newsroom’s CCI content management system and is currently leading the newsroom’s team to upgrade that system. Leslie received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999. She spent two years as managing editor for visuals at The Daily Tar Heel, the student-run daily newspaper. Leslie also interned on the features design desk of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She is currently pursuing a graduate-level certificate in communication and technology from UNC Chapel Hill and participated in the Maynard Institute’s 2007 Media Academy. Leslie hails from Richmond, Va.

UNC-CH Honor Pledge: I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance while preparing this assignment and I have written the code myself. © Leslie J. Wilkinson December 2007

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Adapt or Die. That’s the phrase that’s haunted the newspaper industry for more than a decade. As the world’s information has migrated to servers and platforms, phones and RSS feeds, readers get their news from any number of sources and don’t wait for the next day’s newspaper to tell them what’s happening in the world now. And as those readers became more impatient, calamity seemed to strike the newspaper industry. Advertising revenue fell. Circulation kept dropping. Classified advertising virtually vanished, heading for websites like Craigslist and Monster.com that let readers post listings for free. The price of paper and producing the newspaper skyrocketed. Jobs were slashed. Public companies bent to the pressures of the market to make more money and were put up for sale. Entire newspapers have been shuttered. Doom and gloom permeated newsrooms that didn’t want to see the writing on the wall and journalists who didn’t think they needed to learn about the Internet. Howard Weaver, vice president for news at McClatchy said, “You can give up, you can hunker down and bleed, or you can fight back. Well, I want to fight back.”1 And, many journalists shared Weaver’s sentiments. Newspapers and newsrooms started fighting back. Over the past several years, newsrooms have heard the call to innovate. The Newspaper Next report seems to have awoken many journalists and brought light to the notion that to win the battle of declining print circulation and profits meant innovators had to come out of the corners of the newsroom and lead change. That report was not the only impetus to change; shrinking profit margins have certainly played a role in jolting companies into action. Nevertheless, newsrooms have sprung into action, creating new content online and exploring different methods for getting their news to readers. Circulation hasn’t come back for many newspapers, and it probably won’t ever return. Many industry analysts and journalists are skeptical of what the future really is for newspapers. In spite of it all, readers keep coming and market share keeps growing. Fewer people may be picking up the printed paper, but more and more are coming to the newspaper websites for their news and information. Consider: • “NYTimes.com had more than 17.5 million unique monthly visitors in October 2007, up from 14.6 million in September 2007.” That’s 2.9 million more unique visitors in just a month. 2 • The average time spent on NYTimes.com per person was 34 minutes and 53 seconds and at washingtonpost.com was 17 minutes and 22 seconds. Readers at AZCentral.com, the website of the Arizona Republic spent about 39 minutes per person. 3 • Newspaper and newspaper Web sites (the newspaper footprint) reach 77% of adults in a given week. 4 1

Smolkin, Rachel. “Adapt or Die.” American Journalism Review, June/July 2006. Saba, Jennifer. “Exclusive: 30 Most Popular Newspaper Sites for October.” Editor & Publisher, Nov. 14, 2007. 3 Ibid. 4 “Newspaper Footprint: Total Audience in Print and Online.” Newspaper Association of America, 2007. 2

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The newspaper footprint reaches 65% of young adults (18-24) in a given week.5 The newspaper footprint reaches 82% of adults who have made any Internet purchase in the last 12 months.6 In 2005, unique visitors to newspaper Web sites represented on average more than one-third (46 million) of all Internet users over the course of a month.7 Unique visitors jumped 21 percent from January 2005 to December 2005.8 Page views increased by 43 percent over that period. 9 Newspapers own 11 of the top 25 national news and information Web sites and provide a strong draw for younger audiences, often expanding a newspaper’s reach among these demographics by more than 25 percent. 10

Newspapers are becoming savvier about their consumers and are beginning to meet the challenge and are, in fact, evolving. They own the content in their markets and are recognized experts in their subject matter whether it be the New York Times national and international report, the Washington Post’s government and politics report, the Los Angeles Times’ entertainment and global coverage or the Charlotte Observer’s ability to be the best provider of information about Charlotte. Evolving newspapers are constantly exploring and harnessing the power of new delivery methods. Newspapers like the Oregonian, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune are posting news headlines and links through Twitter; several are represented on social networking sites like Facebook, where they have pages, applications and networks. The New York Times had more than 5,000 “fans” in December 2007 and more than 2,000 users of its news quiz application. Evolving newspapers look for ways to adapt their content to new technology delivery methods like the iPhone, Blackberries, text messaging and podcasting. Video, if the leading evolving newspapers are correct, will be the next hot thing to come to the newspaper sites. That’s not just video generated by the videographers now on staff in newsrooms, but also taking a cue from You Tube and sharing the videos readers send to the site. Newspapers are recognizing their strength and roots in their communities and are building online communities and adding more and more reasons for people to come to their site. The newspapers that are winning the battle online are simply the media organizations that are succeeding at changing. ~~~~~~ The economic difficulties that lay ahead of the newspaper industry was written on the wall well before words like Google, blog and podcast were a part of American vernacular. In June 1999, Chip Brown published this paper in the American Journalism Review. 5

“Newspaper Footprint: Total Audience in Print and Online.” Newspaper Association of America, 2007. Ibid. 7 “The Source: Newspapers by the Numbers.” Newspaper Association of America, 2006. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 6

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“… there were times in Atlanta (at the 10th Annual Editor & Publisher’s Interactive Newspapers Conference) when it seemed that even these most digitally sophisticated journalists were fated to spend the rest of their careers tottering on the threshold of a new world, wondering if there was a place in it for them. It was going on five years since they had been swept up (or in some cases blindsided) by the online era. And still the question was, were they nimble enough to survive? Or would they be remembered as the woolly mammoths of the information age, too shaggy, too slow, too complacently wedded to business as usual to do anything but blunder inexorably toward the abyss? … … These organizations knew what was at stake because they’d all printed or aired stories about how the current total of 62 million North American users was expected to grow to 150 million by the year 2002, and how by the year 2006 some 90 percent of Americans would be surfing.” 11 Online journalists knew even then that something was going to have to change in order for their newspaper companies to keep up with the growing movement online. Newspaper companies started websites, thinking that was all they would need to do to keep their online readers happy. “For newspaper companies, the very newspaper itself – its form, function, history, role in society and demanding production processes – creates blinders that make it hard to comprehend the fundamental changes happening around them.”12 Resources were cut to newsrooms, jobs were eliminated, papers closed entirely. Newspapers were sold. They weren’t making enough money to meet the high profitmargin demands of their public owners. One key investor was enough to force the sale of Knight-Ridder in 2005.13 “The key to it is a stronger journalistic product … and this is what the industry is missing right now,” University of North Carolina Professor Philip Meyer said a 2006 American Journalism Review article.14 “Instead, they’re doing the opposite, trying to save their way to prosperity by cutting back on the product. If they don’t take advantage of this opportunity (to put resources and information on the web), somebody else is going to do it for them.” Newspapers, it seemed, weren’t innovating and were letting smaller “disruptors”15 take away their business. Newspapers needed to come up with their own ways to be nimble and compete in different platforms. The Newspaper Next project, sponsored by the American Press Institute and the Innosight group, headed by a couple of Harvard Business School professors, put things in perspective:

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Brown, Chip. “State of the American Newspaper FEAR.COM.” American Journalism Review, June 1999. 12 Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, American Press Institute, 2006. 13 Layton, Charles. “Sherman’s March.” American Journalism Review, February/March 2006. 14 Smolkin, Rachel. “Adapt or Die.” American Journalism Review, June/July 2006. 15 Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, American Press Institute, 2006.

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“Newspaper Next’s conclusion: (Newspapers) can (survive) – but not without dramatic changes in the way they think, the strategies they adopt and the innovation processes they use. … The public is migrating away from us … Will we cling to our old perceived roles and sink into irrelevance? Or will we commit to finding new roles that the public will welcome in their lives, even if these are unfamiliar and challenging to us?”16 A mindset change had to happen in order to keep up with the readers. Where were they going and how would newspapers win them back? How would newspapers innovate and change the culture in newsrooms? The Newspaper Next report suggested a fourpronged attack: Spot Opportunities; Develop potential solutions; Assess ideas; Test, learn and adjust.17 There must first be newsroom leaders in place who will lead the innovations and take chances on the new technologies. Finding ways to foster innovation and collaboration have become key pieces to the move online. There must be “pathfinders,” as George Rodrigue, vice president and managing editor of the Dallas Morning News said at the 2006 International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you don’t have (pathfinders) in your newsroom hire them,”18 Rodrigue said. Newspapers have hired computer programmers and developers to build new online databases and features for their websites to help keep them competitive with bigger more technologically based companies like Google, Yahoo! and AOL. Newspaper Next echoed the sentiment, urging newspapers to “partner with technology vendors when possible” instead of building solutions from the ground up when solutions already exist elsewhere.19 The Newspaper Next report suggested “appointing innovation champions tasked with spotting and seizing new growth opportunities”20 to help get newsrooms moving. Put people in leadership roles who want to innovate, who can network and collaborate and get the newsroom working in a different way. Newspapers have begun developing databases and interactive maps that let readers look specifically at issues close to their home, school or office. Readers can look for information based on addresses at the click of a button, rather than skimming the printed pages searching for a couple of sentences about happenings in their neighborhood. The Newspaper Next report suggested “developing searchable content – such as directories, online classifieds, and other transactional channels – helps to increase search volume and paid search opportunities. This also provides opportunities to upsell listings with features like preferred placement, pay per call and multimedia.” 21 A major challenge for innovative leaders would be how to get the journalists in the newsroom to buy in to need to put stories, photos, even video on the website first. The answer would be to look to the early-adopters in the newsroom, those journalists, 16

Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, American Press Institute, 2006. Ibid. 18 Online Symposium, Austin. 19 Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, American Press Institute, 2006. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 17

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designers and photographers who were excited about the new technologies and content delivery systems. It is these journalists who will help carry the rest of the newsroom. An American Press Institute session on “Leading the Revolution,” suggested tackling the “Culture Vultures” that exist in newsrooms. Don’t fight the resistors; instead look for ways to develop a smart newsroom that is outward looking, agile, collaborative, cooperative, and entrepreneurial and smart.22 At the 2006 International Symposium on Online Journalism23, editor in chief of NYTimes.com Len Apcar talked of the shifting reporters’ focus from writing for the printed newspaper to writing for the website. “For years, assigning editors would make the assignment, think about photos, think about graphics, but when it came to the Web it was always an afterthought,” Apcar said. “(We had to make) that instinctively a thought at the beginning of the assigning process instead of the end. And what we finally decided was the only way to really make that happen was to put the Internet front and center in the newsroom.” It is not simply enough to put online producers and editors in the middle of the production cycle, reporters and editors have to have buy-in to the process as well. Blogs have been a tool that has helped reporters become a part of the online process. Blogging, Apcar said, “is a way to get writers and desks involved and to take ownership of a particular part of the online report.” Blogging on a regular basis builds readership and gives reporters an opportunity to practice writing in the short, quick burst form that’s necessary to keep online readers satiated. Rodrigue also spoke of the need to eliminate redundancies in the work that is done in newsrooms. In Dallas, they reconfigured the morning news, metro and online teams to help eliminate overlap. The team would help each other in getting stories started on the web in the morning and then turn those stories for print publication as the day progressed. Other newsrooms have tackled similar staffing shifts to put a morning news team in place to populate the website with weather and traffic information during the morning rush hours. Websites are also expanding the number of updates to their sites throughout the day. Keeping content fresh and new helps make the website “sticky,” a place where readers will want to come back and spend more and more time. The more new features and stories websites offer, the more they seem to linger in the online community. Newsrooms have gradually become more integrated as newsroom leadership has eliminated redundancies in the work done by print and web journalists. Pablo Boczkowski, a professor at Northwestern University, has studied these different production models and how difficult the integration of the two can be. “The longer these production models remain separate and independent,” he said, “the more difference there will be in terms of the cultures of these two.”24 The longer newsrooms wait to integrate their print and online production staffs, the harder it will become to integrate them in the long run. The sooner newspapers can have reporters who are skilled at posting breaking news stories online, the sooner newspapers can have a more efficient and productive workforce. 22

“Leading the Revolution: A story from the Readership Wars.” American Press Institute, Reston, Va., September 2006. 23 International Symposium on Online Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, 2006. 24 Ibid.

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Print and online newsrooms that were once in different parts of the building or divided by different parent corporations, like the former Knight-Ridder Digital and the Knight-Ridder newspapers have been reunited with their sister publications. The website managers report to newsroom editors and vice versa. The results have been stronger content and an increase in communication as the print and web have begun to recognize their reliance on one another. Newspaper websites are realizing the power in figuring out what they want to do and learning to be the best they can be at it. Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, a technology newsletter at CNET Networks, said newspaper companies need to be clear about what kind of information company they want to be. “Are you a media company, tailoring content to reach an audience and sell ads? Or are you a journalistic enterprise, focused on finding out and publicizing important truths? If you don’t really know what you’re trying to do, then you keep disappointing people who think they understand.”25 Local, local, local has become a mantra that more regional newsrooms can understand. Be the best provider of local content that they can possibly be in order to maintain dominance in their markets. Newspapers are recognizing that they can rely on larger national papers to cover national and international news in much the same manner that medium-sized newspapers have relied on the wire services for national and international news for decades. Why beat yourself up covering national news when the Associated Press, Washington Post and New York Times can do such a better job? What those papers can’t do is cover your town as well as you can. Newspapers are seeing the value in doing so and consequently, content is becoming focused on more local issues. What else is working? Asking readers what they want. Building a community and a website that is a place where they want to go to be informed as well as entertained. Newspapers have traditionally seen themselves as informers, a traditional piece of the democratic process. What they have sometimes forgotten is their roots in entertaining their customers along the way. The comics. The wedding announcements. The crossword puzzles and the games. Even letters to the editor sometimes find themselves filled with humorous assaults on local figures and events. New media should build a community that satisfies its members. “They should ask whether their Web sites hold people’s attention rather than whether they provide clear messages that inform and persuade readers.”26 Newspapers are finding they can have fun online and build readership and viewership at the same time. Online games like sudoku and crossword puzzles, slideshows of events and reader submitted photos and video have made their way online. Rodrigue of the Dallas Morning News noted that citizen-submitted video has often turned out to be some of the most popular video they have posted.27 Sports are also an area where newspapers have been able to gain readership. Newspapers are hiring database developers to produce searchable databases for local sports statistics – like the hometown colleges or the high school football teams. That is 25

Smolkin, Rachel. “Adapt or Die.” American Journalism Review, June/July 2006. Kenneye, Keith, etal. “Interactive Features of Online Newspapers.” First Monday, Jan. 2000. 27 International Symposium on Online Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, 2006. 26

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often information that readers can’t get from national sports sites like ESPN or SportsIllustrated. Several newspapers, including the Charlotte Observer and the Providence Journal, have partnered with television company Belo to produce an online high school football community, a place where readers can read about their teams, but can also post comments, photos and videos of the game. Newspapers have heard the call and seen the results in the bottom line. The only way to survive will be to get content online and compete in that market. As companies, newspapers have learned they have to take more risks and change the way they do things. To simply do nothing would certainly mean a faster demise. Business models and expectations might have to change as the market has dictated that things aren’t the same. Doing the same thing they’ve always done because that’s the way it’s always been done just won’t cut it any longer. The business model has changed, and the newspapers have finally begun to recognize change must happen. Newspapers are recognizing the value in thinking innovatively, in starting new products both in print and on their websites. These companies are learning to not be afraid of trying new things. Newspapers are hiring developers and non-journalists to help produce the types of interactive community journalism that is taking hold on the Internet. Further, newspapers must keep changing, adapting and looking to the trends around them. It is not enough to simply report on the latest social network or high-tech phone, newspapers must participate in these places in order to continue to expand reach and readership. It is not enough to sit back and wait for readers to find them. Newspapers must share their journalism in the places where readers congregate. Not entirely unlike the newsboys of the early 20th century who stood on street corners shouting out why their paper had the best news of the day. The same concept applies today: give readers your headlines in as many places as they can be found. Make your news easy to obtain and easy to share and the hits and the readers will keep coming back for more. To succeed in their online markets, newspapers are using their expertise in areas of news, entertainment and sports in order to draw and keep readers interested and informed. Being online doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the types of long form investigative journalism that has long since established newspapers as a key part of the democratic process. Rather, being online is bringing new readers to these types of stories. Audience is growing. Readers are finding like minded people in their communities by using their hometown newspaper websites. Newcomers and transplants can learn about their adopted towns by becoming part of the website. As more and more readers continue to come to newspaper websites, these sites will only continue to strengthen. As newsroom innovators lead successful reader surges online, hopefully, more journalists in those newsrooms will learn the value in the website publishing model. Adapt or die. Newspapers are finally adapting and doing so successfully. The printed newspaper still may change form or disappear entirely, but the content continues to thrive. Content is still king and is being read by more people than ever before.

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Bibliography Anthony, Scott D. and Clark G. Gilbert, “Can the Newspaper Industry Stare Disruption in the Face?” Nieman Reports, Spring 2006. http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/06-1NRspring/p43-0601-anthony-gilbert.html http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/06-1NRspring/p39-0601-trade-survivalintro.html Boczkowski, Pablo, Len Apcar and George Rodrigue. International Symposium on Online Journalism 2006 Day 1, Panel 2: The Integration of Newsrooms: Should Online and Print Newsrooms Merge? International Symposium on Online Journalism, a program of the Knight Chair in Journalism and the UNESCO Chair in Communication of the University of Texas at Austin, 2006. Bowman, Shayne and Chris Willis, J.D. Lasica, editor. “We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information.” The Media Center at The American Press Institute, 2003. http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/we_media.pdf Brown, Chip. “State of the American Newspaper FEAR.COM.” American Journalism Review June 1999. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3230 Connell, Christopher. “Journalism’s Crisis of Confidence: A Challenge for the Next Generation.” A Report of Carnegie Corporation of New York Forum on the Future of Journalism Education, 2006. http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/journalism_crisis/journ_crisis_full.pdf Deuze, Mark. “Online Journalism: Modelling the First Generation of News Media on the World Wide Web.” First Monday, Vol. 6, Number 10, October 2001. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_10/deuze/ Gorney, Cynthia. “The Business of News: A Challenge for Journalism’s Next Generation.” A Report of Carnegie Corporation of New York. 2002 http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/businessofnews2.pdf Kenneye, Keith, Alexander Gorelik and Sam Mwangi. “Interactive Features of Online Newspapers.” First Monday, Vol. 5, Number 1, January 2000. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_1/kenney/ Layton, Charles. “Sherman’s March.” American Journalism Review February/March 2006 issue. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4037 “Leading the Revolution: A story from the Readership Wars.” Powerpoint presentation American Press Institute, Reston, Va., September 2006.

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Meyer, Philip. The Vanishing Newspaper, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. McLeary, Paul, “The Battle for Eyeballs.” Columbia Journalism Review, Paul McLeary, Aug. 17, 2007. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_battle_for_eyeballs.php “Newspaper Footprint: Total Audience in Print and Online.” Newspaper Association of America. 2007, NAA Business Analysis and Research Department Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, American Press Institute, 2006 http://www.newspapernext.org/ Patterson, Thomas E. “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet.” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. August 2007. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/carnegie_knight/creative_destruction_web.pdf Saba, Jennifer. “Exclusive: 30 Most Popular Newspaper Sites for October.” Editor & Publisher. November 14, 2007 http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=100 3672198 Smolkin, Rachel “Adapt or Die.” American Journalism Review, June/July 2006. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4111 “The Source: Newspapers by the Numbers.” Newspaper Association of America, 2006 “Synapse: The future of news.” The Media Center Briefing on Media, Technology & Society, April 2005. http://www.mediacenter.org/pages/mc/research/synapse_the_future_of_news/

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