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New Business Models for News: Rebuilding the Newsroom

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Photo by John Smock, CUNY

At the CUNY summit last week, I was assigned to the group that looked at rethinking our newsrooms to meet the current financial imperatives. Or, as someone wryly named us, “the cost-cutting group.”

But, as Chris O’Brien, one of the thought-leaders in that group, notes in his excellent distillation of the day’s themes and discussions, it was less about the wild slashing that’s going on now in newsrooms large and small, and more about rebuilding a newsroom suited to the needs and challenges of 2008 and beyond.

We took the approach of essentially creating a new news organization from the ground up. But the other way to look at this question is to ask: How would you make a current newsroom more efficient? After leaving the discussion, a number of things occurred to me that should be explored:

1. Use templates for the print paper. Spend less money on designing the paper every day and use that money elsewhere. Newspapers have been trying to design their way out of their problems for years, and it hasn’t worked. I don’t think this something print readers think about. They want substance and content, not more pictures.

2. Cull circulation. Most newspapers are underwriting a chunk of their circulation to fight churn. What if you stopped spending so much money trying to sign up new subscribers? That costs a lot of money. This would require a change in ad rates. But I think it might save costs in the long run.

3. Reduce editors. I love editors, but it seems a lot of content, especially shorter stories, could be posted directly the Web. Many newspapers now let reporters post to blogs without editing. Why not the main site?

4. Newsroom salaries. I’m not sure yet how I feel about this, but it would seem that how we pay people needs to be rethought. Some online news sites pay employees by traffic they generate. That’s ruthless, but still, I wonder if that might work for some online jobs at newspapers?

There’s much more, here at Chris’s Next Newsroom project.

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Comments

  1. Here are some brief responses to the points you posted:

    This “templating” feature is already available at any newspaper that uses CCI NewsDesk (every single Tribune property). It’s actually one of the most prominent features of the pagination system. I have personal experience with this, as my last task before leaving The Sun was to design and implement the publishing workflow for it. At the very beginning, everyone involved in the project on the IT side wanted to add page templates to the system. If every page had been added (like it should have been), the paper would have literally built itself every single day. The only design work that would be required would be minor tweaks to templates that already existed. Unfortunately, due to severe push-back from the newsroom, not one single template was added, resulting in a system that was just as inefficient as the previous pagination system (Harris). The ability to do this has been available for years. People just need to be forced to use it.
    I absolutely agree. I just caught wind of the NYT increasing their issue prices to help increase revenue. Unfortunately, it just means fewer people will pick up a copy. That in turn will lower circulation numbers, inevitably reducing the amount of advertising revenue (the only thing that really matters). How are classifieds doing these days?
    While this may be a strategy taken from the “success” of citizen journalism, I think everyone knows how important editors are. Editors need to stick around, they just need to be incredibly GOOD at what they do.
    This is surprising to me. I’ve found the salaries of newsroom staff to be shockingly meager for the amount of work and education the jobs require. I would replace this point with “eliminate the unions” to cut excessive employee capital.

    How about “5) Eliminate the print publication altogether.” Expenses would drop by 90% and you’d have time to reinvent yourself as a Web publication.

  2. Here are some brief responses to the points you posted:

    1) This “templating” feature is already available at any newspaper that uses CCI NewsDesk (every single Tribune property). It’s actually one of the most prominent features of the pagination system. I have personal experience with this, as my last task before leaving The Sun was to design and implement the publishing workflow for it. At the very beginning, everyone involved in the project on the IT side wanted to add page templates to the system. If every page had been added (like it should have been), the paper would have literally built itself every single day. The only design work that would be required would be minor tweaks to templates that already existed. Unfortunately, due to severe push-back from the newsroom, not one single template was added, resulting in a system that was just as inefficient as the previous pagination system (Harris). The ability to do this has been available for years. People just need to be forced to use it.

    2) I absolutely agree. I just caught wind of the NYT increasing their issue prices to help increase revenue. Unfortunately, it just means fewer people will pick up a copy. That in turn will lower circulation numbers, inevitably reducing the amount of advertising revenue (the only thing that really matters). How are classifieds doing these days?

    3) While this may be a strategy taken from the “success” of citizen journalism, I think everyone knows how important editors are. Editors need to stick around, they just need to be incredibly GOOD at what they do.

    4) This is surprising to me. I’ve found the salaries of newsroom staff to be shockingly meager for the amount of work and education the jobs require. I would replace this point with “eliminate the unions” to cut excessive employee capital.

    How about “5) Eliminate the print publication altogether.” Expenses would drop by 90% and you’d have time to reinvent yourself as a Web publication.

  3. Those are all Chris's points, but I wouldn't have posted them if I didn't find them interesting. (Don't want to take credit for his work).

    On #4, I don;t think he's suggesting that journos are overpaid, given that he is one himself. I added this comment on his original post:

    Where I've landed is that the incentives – at least in the first years – should be additive to the base. The formula should be simple, understandable and deliverable. If you get XX page views over this level, you make $X per 1,000 page views. There needs to be some way to balance the payout for fairness – an investigative reporter has fewer opportunities, for example, to drive traffic than a popular columnist/blogger who writes daily. But part of that unfairness is reality; that same blogger might be worth a million page views a year to the enterprise and the investigative reporter maybe a quarter of that.

    But there are opportunities to encourage outcomes other than just page views. A good example here is linking. If your reporters aren't curating enough links to other content both inside your site and (more importantly) outside of it, establish a bounty for sustained and high-quality linking. Bonus reporters for extraordinary participation in online discussions, again both at your site and at other sites in your market.

    Ultimately, I want the best, most engaged reporters and editors to stay. Paying them more than the average performers is a good start.

  4. Good points, but i'd disagree a bit with 3 and 4. On 3: Our industry is only getting younger, with many of the higher-paid and older reporters and editors getting laid off or bought out by the thousands at newspapers across the country. And now you want to cut more editors and have mostly youngish reporters post news content to the web without editorial oversight? that's disastrous, especially for a print news outlet with a respected brand. i'm a relatively experienced reporter who's been working in online breaking news for nearly two years now, and i am 100 percent grateful that at least one pair of eyes — and usually two pairs — looks at my copy before it goes out. and even then, mistakes get made. An iron-clad reputation for accurate news is always gonna cost you a little money, so you gotta allow for some overhead on that front.

    For 4, I don't think it's fair to tie compensation to most metrics for reporters cuz here's what it'll happen: a reporter will spend a few hours reporting and writing a story, but then spend the next few hours trying to promote it every which way online, from twitter to facebook. why? because you're concerned about your salary. that's human nature. bloggers have an easier go of it with their blogs but not every news reporter is a blogger. Actually, I think there's more wiggle room than ever now in newsrooms for a new class of workers who can help bridge the gap, who can act like online promoters of content but aren't necessarily involved in creating it from scratch. I see some of my own colleagues doing that now, and I think it's vital.