Thursday, November 16, 2006
One Newsroom Downsizes While Others Radically Reorganize
byTwo recent stories illustrate how turmoil in newspaper industry is affecting newsrooms and newsgathering efforts.
The St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press announced it will eliminate 40 jobs – including roughly 20 in the newsroom – after steep declines in ad revenue during the past several months. Positions will be cut through buyouts, attrition and layoffs.
According to Publisher Par Ridder, national advertisers – such as car and cell phone manufacturers – are shifting dollars to online media, greatly impacting the newspaper’s revenue.
Meanwhile, the Gannett media empire is radically reorganizing its newsgathering efforts to meet online and offline trends. Newsrooms will become known as “Information Centers” that redefine the traditional newspaper newsgathering model. Amy Gahran (among others) published excerpts from an internal memo by Gannett CEO Craig Dubow:
“The Information Center is a way to gather and disseminate news and information across all platforms, 24/7. The Information Center will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it…
“The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future. It will fulfill today’s needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process. And it will be platform agnostic: News and information will be delivered to the right media—be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented—at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.”
This is a fundamental shift in the newsroom structure and mentality – one that could dramatically affect the industry and the next generation of journalists. At minimum, Gannett deserves credit for recognizing the need to evolve – and it seems to be well-suited for this model given its mass and various newspaper/television holdings.
