!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: 21st-Century Journalism III: Substance and Relevance

Saturday, June 17, 2006

21st-Century Journalism III: Substance and Relevance

Tribune Co. has been in the news the last few days, its management under attack by the Chandler family. The Chandlers became 12% Tribune owners in 2000, when Times Mirror Co., of which the Chandlers were controlling owners, was acquired by Tribune.

Prominent among the Chandlers' complaints are expected cuts in Tribune newsrooms, which have already been slimmed down. For me, after years of facilitating a newspaper management simulation in which participants, playing the role of publisher, often take a knife to the newsroom (along with other departments), I find it refreshing that some newspaper investors detect a death spiral risk inherent in ...
... depleting the resources that produce ...

... what the circulation department is striving to sell to large numbers of households ...

... so that the advertising department can charge handsomely for ads.
It may be wishful thinking, but I believe I've noticed — both at the simulated newspapers I observe, and at at least some of the real-world newspapers I read and read about — greater appreciation of the need to offer substance to loyal readers, not to mention maintaining traditional virtues of accuracy, fairness, and enterprise.

Forward-thinking newspapers are combining reanimation of core values with research-based initiatives to become consistently reader-focused. Much as some editors may believe that they, in their wisdom, should unilaterally determine what goes into the paper each day, the fact is that their readers have plenty of alternatives for passing the time, so meeting readers' needs is the only viable approach for the long haul.

Fortunately, clear-eyed training is available to help newsroom personnel strengthen and update skills. IMHO it's a far, far better thing to learn how to keep readers using the paper (physical or online), than to acquiesce to shrinking your newspaper through buyouts — which let experience, institutional memory and deep knowledge of the local community walk out the door — and/or layoffs.

I will be very interested to see what happens at Tribune Co.

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