I spent three days last week in Washington, D.C., at the annual conference of the American Society of News Editors.
While this was my first ASNE conference, I’ve attended a number of editor get-togethers over the past several years. The news flash from this one may have been the relative optimism of the editors.
Editors are thankful their organizations survived a tough 2009, when most of them lost advertising revenue and thus people and other resources. Rem Rieder, editor of American Journalism Review, put it this way: “The outlook was post-apocalypse.”
After years of hand-wringing, editors are coming to grips with a future that looks different from the past. Much of the past two years’ revenue loss was a result of the Great Recession, but the media landscape is forever changed and more fragmented. So are reader habits.
Even with smaller staffs, we must get on with figuring out how to serve news and information to people in print, on websites, on smart phones, on digital tablets and through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While that’s a challenge, it also offers exciting new possibilities.
In the midst of all this, editors know they must maintain the bedrock ethics of professional journalism – seeking truth, being fair, verifying information. What sets us apart in a noisy and fast-moving media landscape is our credibility.
Here were some themes that ran through the conference:
• Building a new business model for journalism remains critical. Most experts agreed that the print newspaper will remain, but it will serve a gradually smaller segment of readers. There was no agreement about whether to charge readers for access to our websites.
Many panelists thought people would pay for mobile applications that deliver news but said apps would be only a piece of the money-making solution.
Steven R. Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, offered this multi-faceted revenue model: 1. Post online content for free to create a mass audience that advertisers will pay money to reach. 2. Have customers pay for print subscriptions and for apps that allow them the convenience of getting news on a smart phone or digital tablet. 3. Turn the advertising sales staff into consultants who sell ads on every platform.
• The community can help do the reporting. Several news organizations are creating networks of community bloggers and featuring their work prominently on newspaper websites. Some sites contract with existing blogs, while others recruit and train people to start blogs. Either way, these armies of community mavens provide hyper-local information that extends the reach of newsroom reporters.
Bloggers typically must agree to abide by standards for accuracy, decency and news gathering. Content provided by bloggers is clearly distinguished from that provided by newsroom reporters.
Many of the blogs cover geographic areas – inner-city neighborhoods or outlying towns – while others represent communities of interest such as knitters in Chicago or Orthodox Jews in Miami.
• For readers, local is no longer where they live, but where they are this minute. More and more people have smart phones equipped with global positioning systems that pinpoint their location. Increasingly, news consumers turn to these phones for up-to-the-minute information when they’re away from their laptops or print papers.
And the information must be hyper-local. A person navigating though downtown Tacoma, for instance, doesn’t need a traffic report for all of Pierce County. For news organizations such as ours, that means we need to geo-tag stories and other bits of information so they show up on smart phones’ searches of people in our community whether they live here or not.
Some of my favorite quotes from the conference:
“Trust is the new black.”
– Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief, The Huffington Post
“You can’t build a business model on what people should pay for.”
– Jim Brady, digital editorial consultant, Allbritton Communications
“Print used to have an enormous following; now it’s just huge.”
– Donna Barrett, president and CEO, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.
“I think we’re getting to the good part.”
– David Carr, media columnist, The New York Times
“There’s never been a more important time to be a journalist … There’s never been a better time to have a great idea.”
– Marty Kaiser, editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Karen Peterson: 253-597-8434
karen.peterson@thenewstribune.com
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