The squeeze is on

How’s your news hole treating you lately? Does it feel like a slowly shrinking universe out there? Are those stock listings and that big display weather page starting to look a little less inviting than they once did? If you’re dealing with the industry blues, trying to fit all of the same content into a smaller and smaller tome, you’re probably tired of dealing with the coping strategies and ready to rethink the whole endeavor.

This article is for you.

There may be newspapers out there, perhaps in the still affordable sun belt and in places where retirees flock, where there is a land of plenty: plenty of subscribers, plenty of advertisers, and plenty of space in your newspaper. This article is not for you. The rest of us, those suffering under the constraints of shrinking revenue and fewer pages, need to grab hold of our out-of-control beast of a newspaper and throw some of its content online.

Now, before you walk up to your features editor or business editor and suggest that perhaps all of those entertainment listings or stock listings could be better placed online and see the look of horror at the suggestion that their section be slashed, it’s a good idea to protect yourself. Do you want to be identified as belittling content?

Protecting your reputation as you suggest change is the name of the game, so make sure these ideas are not originating from you, unless they are done at your editor’s request. Your editor, whose ear you might occasionally be able to bend, is the key to this entire proposal. This kind of change can be done in a couple of ways: Your editor can demand change or your editor could set up a committee of important newsroom staff dedicated to rethinking the philosophy of news organization in an online age. And then after a new philosophy is recommended and embraced, the editor could lead the newsroom in implementing the new direction, collaboratively. In this way, no one pays the price for skewering anybody or any section and everybody reaps the reward … a future that can be built upon.

I do hope you have an editor ready to take on this challenge in a positive way. … If you don’t, what are you sticking around for?

The point of this article is to suggest a few philosophical guidelines to reorganize the news, in case any of these news reorganization committee members are snooping around online for ideas.

New age, new organization

One of the fundamental differences in this new age of news delivery is that there is no lack of room and no space constraints on what you can do. So stop thinking small. Don’t view it as losing your capability to deliver the news.

Instead of one delivery mechanism, you now have two. One is your print product. The other is your online product. These do not have to have the same goals, the same approach, or the same news in them. They deliver content in a much different fashion, so what is in there should be different. Vastly different. It should be organized differently, displayed differently, in short, designed differently. Does your newspaper simply shovel its print content online, without much organization? If so, it’s selling itself short and selling its readers short. There is no justification for this, beyond maintaining the status quo for just as short of a time as you can while better policies are implemented.

So be sure to take at least this first step of recognizing that online news and print news will differ and newspapers need editors to implement each who understand the difference.

For starters, the print newspaper should be an overview of all of the news, without room to fully explore each topic or issue. The online news should provide ample ways to zero in on just the topic a reader wants to, see a very deep collection of content on that issue, and follow that issue as it changes over time. There are also stories that don’t need to be online that should be in print. Primarily this content will be an overview of non-localized wire news from the day before.

If your committee can’t agree on the concept that content will differ, then I hope I’m not on it. This is fundamental. Once this is deeply understood, all other choices at least will make sense and flow from it.

What do you owe your print subscribers?

The old philosophy was that your print subscribers got everything. That’s all there was. A print subscriber was purchasing all of the news the newspaper could provide. If they couldn’t afford the newspaper, they couldn’t get any of the news from you, unless they happened upon somebody else’s newspaper during the day. Television was the alternative news provider, and it just couldn’t touch a newspaper’s in-depth approach to the news, although many people did not care. Clearly, those days are over.

A new philosophy should accept that not all of the news will be in the printed newspaper. It can be deeper, longer, and much more complete online. Newspapers do not have the luxury, nor the need, to put all of the news in the print product.

What do I mean by this? Most newspapers do not have the space, the luxury, to fit all of the important news, fully explored and explained, with relevant background material included. The news hole simply is not there. And they don’t have the demand from readers, the need, that all of this content be in there. Readers are swamped with news and information, to the point that many just tune it out, change the channel, and ignore the newspaper, if it arrives on their step at all. By not wasting their time, but making it clear what the main issues are and how to find more about it online, newspapers would be satisfying most readers.

And you can’t satisfy all readers. Can you at both times satisfy the reader who just likes to glance at the headlines and not have a massive newspaper to throw away each day or lug to the recycling center while you also satisfy the reader who wants to spend hours poring over every article on every issue? No, you can not, unless you are offering your readers a choice of which type of newspaper they want to receive. And you can’t afford to produce differently sized versions of the newspaper to suit different desires (just a guess here).

The point here is to cover the news, and cover it well, and not break the bank while doing so. It’s better to get your financial house in order so that your newspaper can afford to cover its community as best as it is able to, now and into the future, using multiple platforms to deliver the news.

Is it time for newspapers to start acting as if computer access is part of the daily life of people in your community? Perhaps not, unless you think 75% of your subscribers having computer connections, even slow ones, is good enough. According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, in October 2005, 68 percent of Americans used the Internet, up from 63 percent a year previously. According to this study, 73% of Americans have an Internet connection at home. Will your subscriber base have a greater percentage of Internet connections? I suspect that if you study your own subscribers, more than 73 percent will have computer access, as having a newspaper subscription probably correlates with not being poor. If you assume any large changes to your newspaper’s content organization will take another year to implement, than I feel comfortable with using the rough gauge that 75% of subscribers probably have Internet connections at home. As of last October, it was very close to this already, although not all of the members of the household were using the computer.

Age differences in online use

Let’s take a look at age demographics and Internet use, according to The Pew Charitable Trust:

• 18-29: 84% go online
• 30-49: 80% go online
• 50-64: 67% go online
• 65+: 26% go online

Ethnicity differences in online use

• White: 70% go online
• African-American: 57% go online

Newspapers need to understand their community demographics and reader demographics before they can make assumptions about whether their subscribers have Internet access and will use it to read news. Clearly, it is easier to reach younger readers online than older readers, which may be true for some time to come. And those who can not afford the newspaper are often also those who can not afford an Internet connection at home. I believe a newspaper owes its community the news, and if members of the community can not afford the newspaper, there should be free news, or relatively close to it, made available to them. Is television news the answer for these people? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Will a somewhat pared-down newspaper (assuming the newspaper gets pared down) for free or at a reduced cost be the answer for the economically challenged among us? It could. Perhaps your newspaper should survey the community.

I personally believe a newspaper can afford to make news available to the poor, and it should find ways to do so with free subscriptions, once-a-week subscriptions, or by some other means. Your circulation numbers will thank you.

I also believe that important local news should be in the print newspaper without the need to go online to understand the entire issue. A newspaper does not have the same moral imperative with entertainment listings, stock listings and things of that nature, all of which are candidates to be moved online. Exceptions could be made for the publicly-traded stock of local companies with a large number of retirees in the area. The general market overview could be expanded. The entire business section could be expanded if the stock listings were moved online, and there still would be news-hole savings. It is all a question of priority, and that is a question that will have many different answers at different newspapers.

Rethinking your newspaper

Is it better to start from a clean slate and add to what the print newspaper should be or to work from an existing product and start moving content selectively online? The designer in me screams to start with a clean slate and design a newspaper from the ground up. I do see both sides though. Modifying existing work arrangements may be easier than giving everybody substantially revised daily assignments. Institutional morass will be harder to solve, though, by subtracting from the existing product. It’s really a question of how fundamentally your newspaper needs to change.

The reality is that newspapers are getting smaller and it may be a good time to tackle this head-on. Good luck and stay tuned for future installments.