————————————————–

Bi-Co Boot Camp, September 13, 2008, By: Yoni Greenbaum ©2008

Thanks, Andrea for that introduction and thank you all for this opportunity to speak with you today.

Now some of you might laugh, especially since we just met, but the truth is I already owe you an apology. I know that may be hard to believe, but it actually gets worse, because not only do I owe you one but so do my colleagues at newspapers throughout the country.

As you all know the newspaper industry is in horrible shape. Circulation is declining, advertising is disappearing, revenue is shrinking, the news just isn’t good. But all of this didn’t just suddenly – happen. These problems didn’t just materialize overnight. Frankly, some of them didn’t have to occur at all.

Somewhere along the way we dropped the ball, we screwed the pooch, we lost sight of the goal line, hell, we just blew it.

As publishers, editors and department heads, many of us were arrogant, ignorant or just plain lazy. We thought that we knew what was best for our readers and, all too often, ignored their complaints, their requests, their suggestions and even their compliments. We thought we were immune to the economic problems that were sweeping the country and failed to adjust our spending and our budgets. We thought technology such as the Internet, Mobile and Digital Media were niches and not areas we needed to address. When it came to too many issues we were content to say not us. And, as a result, we individually and cumulatively allowed these problems to develop and grow.

And to make matters worse, reporters, copy editors and other employees sat by and watched. Sure they grumbled, they might have even complained to their co-workers, but too few took a stand, too few tried to do anything so they too share some of responsibility.

So while you might not hear it from the likes of Gary Pruitt or Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and I can’t promise anything for certain from my colleagues, let me, Yoni Greenbaum, apologize for everything that I did do and, more importantly, everything that I didn’t do. I am truly sorry, you deserved better.

Thanks. Thanks for letting me say that. I meant it, I am sorry. I am not however one of those who believe that as an industry we are doomed that our institutions are lost and that it is only a matter of time before I and thousands of others are out of work. Actually I think this is an extremely exciting time to be working in newspapers. And to be honest, I think that the answers we need will come from people like you. Not that I’m trying to put any pressure on you, but I really believe that you can save this industry and skills and drive that you will need you are getting by working at your campus publication.

I’m not kidding and I’m getting paid by Dave for saying that.

Throughout my career I’ve been fortunate to have worked at some great newspapers and to have learned from some really talented people. Sure those experiences have helped to shape the type of journalist that I am today. But you know, when I think about it, it was not the Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, the reporting abroad opportunities or the awards that have had the biggest, longest-lasting impact on me. Actually, the experience I find myself most often reflecting on was the years that I spent at my college newspaper.

See, in 1992 I was making my second go at college and was working at my campus’s newspaper. The Beacon at William Paterson University, one of New Jersey’s state schools, was, at the time, your typical student-run weekly newspaper. We had about a dozen students who served as editors, reporters and photographers and who handled ad sales, billing and receiving. Production was a cut and paste operation involving lots of razor blades and hot wax – I’ll skip the S&M jokes. We typically started assembling an issue at 5 p.m. and ended in the wee hours of the next morning at which point a staff member would drive the boards over to the printer and everyone would head over to the local diner for coffee and disco fries.

We were a passionate and dedicated bunch. A mix of stoners, skaters, geeks and outcasts. None of us were making any real money – certainly not the student government association which technically oversaw the operation of the paper. With very little guidance or support from our school we tried our best to improve and grow. We read the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and dreamed of the big leagues. We looked at our local newspapers and said “if they could do it, why can’t we.” So we decided to evolve.

We used some of the money that was in our club account and purchased new computers, a server and best of all, a large format printer. Suddenly, production went from pasting together multiple pieces to hitting print. Instead of taking all night, production now took a few hours. We purchased newspaper boxes and placed them not just on campus, but in the surrounding communities. We created a media kit to get better advertising and redesigned the office, even going as far as to hire a receptionist. Suddenly we were feeling like a “real” weekly newspaper. Now in hindsight I’ll admit that the writing sucked and the layout was boring and for some of us, working at the paper was more of an excuse to miss class then to develop our journalism skills. But at that time, we thought we were cutting edge.

I remember at one point we tried to sell our newspaper to one of the local newspaper companies that at the time was owned by Dean Singleton, CEO of Media General. I know, we didn’t even technically own the newspaper to be able to sell it, but our thinking was that the daily could use it like their minor league team and as a result, how a steady flow of reporters, photographers and copy editors to hire upon graduation.

Long story short, the sale didn’t happen, but what I remember from those meetings is that we were paginated and they weren’t. We had new distribution boxes and a circulation strategy based on census data and they didn’t. At that moment, we sure as heck didn’t feel like your typical student newspaper. I think that experience made us all believe that we could do anything. So we tried many things and in the end some failed but others worked. We made money, actually a lot of money. We got taken seriously by the local press and, in the end I made connections that resulted in first job at a daily.

In the years that have passed since my college days, I have relied on that “do anything” or “try anything” spirit at each job I’ve had. It was behind my decision to try the Nextel two-way radios that enabled my staff to effectively report from ground zero when the cell networks went down; it provided me with the confidence to ask for cell cards and laptops longs before they were popular; and it gave me the guts to send reporters to a variety of locals including Baghdad right after the U.S. led invasion.

I share those examples with you knowing full well that they pale in comparison to what each of you would offer a newspaper or media company given the chance.

For example raise your hand if you send text messages.

As I thought.

Would you believe that I’ve encountered editors who won’t let their staff’s use text messaging because they don’t like it?

There are editors and publishers who still don’t have broadband Internet access in their homes; who don’t know how to setup voicemail and who can’t even open email attachments. And we wonder why they can’t get us out of the mess that we’re in.

But as I said previously, I don’t believe all is lost. There are newspaper companies where the staffs are fighting for a future. Places that “get it.” Places where people with your skills would be welcomed.

I think Philly.com is one of those places and, not just because I work there.

Before joining the philly.com team some six months ago, I had a choice, go back to the newsroom and lead the fight for survival or join an outfit that was taking an ambitious and decidedly different approach. Having always straddled the online and the print worlds I saw philly.com’s graying of that line as exciting, as a chance for me to combine my two passions and skill sets and, frankly, an opportunity for me to help create a model for the rest of the industry.

Philly.com is more then just a website for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. We are not, like you see at so many newspapers, an adjunct to the newsroom – a group of poorly dressed people sequestered in a corner of the newsroom or holed-up in a former janitor’s closet.

If anything, we are more dot com.

Our offices are not even in the same building as the two newspapers, but on the 35^th floor of a Center City building that features panoramic views. In moving to our new location, something that we did bout four months ago, we combined an operation that was stretched out among eight different floors. Now, content, tech, sales, and biz dev can all work together and that is important because our job, the job of philly.com is not to right wrongs or win awards, but to grow as a website and, most of all, to make money.

So, we consider anything. We don’t believe we have all the answers. We pay an ever increasing amount attention to our visitors and advertisers. We frequently ask them how we are doing and what can we do different, what can we do better?

All of our employees have a say. And by all I really mean all even interns. We explore new technologies and new approaches. We try something and if it works, we stick with it and if it doesn’t we move on.

Additionally, we believe in a personal touch. While you can look at the homepage of nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com and see lots of automated headline lists, at philly.com nearly everything that appears on our homepage is there because a member of my team has chosen it to be there.

And as part of that, metrics rule. At least every 30 minutes we are looking at our stats and seeing what is doing well, what is doing poorly. What is rising and what is falling. And we use that data along with our journalistic sense to then power our decisions.

In addition we’ve embraced video and not just news video. Philly.com now produces three daily shows and half a dozen weekly shows. Our videos are viewed nearly 300,000 times a month.

We’re launching new products including a new music site, a site for sports fans, others online products.

I think we have a good strategy. Our traffic is growing, this month alone we’re looking at more then 40 million page views and 4.2 million unique visitors and online revenue is up.

But the truth is we can’t do it alone. Those companies that are going to survive this period, including philly.com, who have embraced the Internet and who see technology as a salvation and not a distraction need individuals like yourselves. I hope you recognize how much we look forward to working with you. Ultimately, the future of our industry rests in your hands.

So please, don’t believe the naysayers and continue the fight to help newspapers survive and thrive. And check out philly.com and let me know what you think my email is on the site, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thank you.

I’m all for “venting” and blowing off steam. But, I would note that this is a precarious moment for newspapers and what our newsrooms need are more leaders willing to make to take a stand and not more followers lining up to simple add their complaints.

So which are you and what are you doing?

Jonathan, 59, was assistant city editor at one of my former newspapers, the Herald News of West Paterson, NJ. But that experience doesn’t come close to describing his career. By the time that I interviewed him for the then-open position of features editor, Jonathan was a noted author, naturalist, environmentalist, filmmaker, world traveler and award-winning journalist and journalism educator. I new that he was something different when at the start of that interview he asked if “we were going to be long” and then summarily removed his shoes and made himself comfortable in his chair.

Thankfully, we didn’t hire him as features editor and in the coming years Jonathan became a senior and valued member of my team, a colorful leader in our newsroom and a mentor to dozens of young reporters.

Jonathan didn’t flaunt his career, rather choosing to teach and guide young reporters using their own experiences. He didn’t cite his experiences in Bolivia Chile, Turkmenistan or his “8,000-mile journey through Russia’s remote provinces.” And, even after returning from shadowing an Iraqi-American making the dangerous journey back to Baghdad in the early days of the war, Jonathan didn’t express any sense of reporting seniority.

To say that he was a character based solely on his sitting in bare feet during his interview robs the rest of you of the entire experience that was Jonathan Maslow. Here was a guy who, in warm weather, routinely road rode a second-hand bicycle (purchased at a local police auction) to work and in cold weather walked miles from his local home to the office wearing one of his many Russian-styled fur hats that could have likely housed a small family. His desk was a whirlwind of papers and books, assorted dead bugs mounted on index cards, organic foods, a reproduction of a nude painting, strange looking drinks housed in unusual bottles and a scary looking tumbler that he used to store the effluence from his chewing tobacco. He wrote (yes he used a computer, but when he could, Jonathan still wrote by hand) in colorful and visually striking style full of sweeping letters. He was an avid reader and seemingly always had newspaper clipping full of notations stuffed into books, pads or even his pockets.

Jonathan cared deeply about the communities we covered, but even more so for the reporters he worked with. Sure at times he raised his voice in that old-school journalism way and sure there were those who saw his mannerism as gruff and unpolished, but none could doubt his sincerity. He truly wanted his reporters to succeed and he celebrated their victories and mourned their defeats. He was the driving force behind the establishment of our best practices mailing list and was supporter of our coaching and feedback-based approaches.

For me, Jonathan was great team member and a better friend. While we didn’t always see eye to eye, he would always hear me out even when that meant hours of rambling. We stayed in touch and close even after I left the Herald News, as he struggled with the paper’s new leadership and as he launched his own online project. In recent years, we unfortunately talked less and less. The last time we spoke in person was before his formal diagnosis but after he had already started to feel sick. We sat in his home and talked about our individual lives and the future of the Herald News and journalism. He was optimistic about everything.

By the time we spoke next, just a few months ago, that optimism had faded and our conversation was punctuated more with anger and frustration then encouragement and understanding. It was a call that I did not enjoy but that was necessary and that I accepted. So when I received the call that he had died, it was far from unexpected.

Personally, I’ll remember Jonathan for the years that we spent working together, the lessons that he taught me and insights the he shared. I know that he was always thankful for the opportunities that journalism had given him and I’ll always be thankful for the opportunity to have had him as a colleague and friend.

Just about a week ago, Managing Editor Bill Rose announced in a memo, “it’s time to change.” Rose went on to make a compelling argument:

“For too long, we’ve stuck with a structure that was designed to serve a print newspaper. We’ve sort of grafted the Internet onto that and it’s worked, but not nearly well enough. Especially in this time of economic uncertainty, we cannot continue to do things the same way we’ve done them for decades upon decades. The Internet now represents a significant and growing source of revenue at a time when our revenue is not what it used to be. For us to make the Web an afterthought would be pretty foolhardy.”

Highlights of what they are doing include:

• Metro now called the Breaking News Department.
• Reporters and editors in the former metro department first priority will be to file all breaking news to the Web as soon as possible.
• A print editor will supervise production of the Local section and the preparation of print stories for the newspaper.
• Most Metro editors and reporters will be working much earlier shifts, while several other editors and reporters will work even later shifts to handle print stories.
• A new Enterprise Department will be created, whose primary responsibility is serving the print newspaper. The enterprise team will produce a steady diet of investigative, enterprise and trend stories. It will also produce well-written “reads” or feature stories. Its stories should be aimed at Page One.
• Continue to hire more people into the Digital Department (Online), from inside — and outside — the building and will focus on not only beefing up and improving the daily production of our site but will increase focus on developing new products and other niche ideas.
• Business and Sports and Features will create Web pods within their own departments.The
  Features pod will initially consist of two producers for Accent and A&E.
• Studying the feasibility of a universal copy desk.
• Ultimately, begin to merge our print and online production operations. Traditional way of “putting out the newspaper” will eventually give way to a 24/7 production desk for the entire newsroom. Editors would simultaneously produce print and Web products.

I definitely think the Post’s efforts should be applauded and encouraged by everyone in the newspaper industry. We need more newsroom leaders who are willing to take the steps that Rose and his team are undertaking. And I think that in the coming weeks and months we all should take advantage of the opportunity to learn from their decisions. For today, I wanted to bring their ideas and approaches to your attention and hopefully get you thinking about this I approach, I know I am.

I can not think of a more fitting symbol for a troubled industry then crumbling offices and derelict buildings.

While much of this may exist outside of the watchful, critical eye of readers and advertisers, it is not lost on a newspaper’s staff who, understandably, interpret the poor conditions as a symbol of low regard. To them, if their corporate or private owners cared about them and respected what they did, they would not let them work in that environment.

With revenues continuing to shrink, it is understandable that there will be those readers of this post who will argue that I cannot in good consciousness be suggesting that companies invest limited dollars in infrastructure. While I respect that opinion I think it misses the point. I would say how can you not invest in infrastructure. All the equipment a staff uses, from the pens and pads to the computers and servers to the copy machines and printers have a direct impact on bottom line. Can you imagine an automobile manufacturer expecting its employees to churn out contemporary vehicles using old and broken equipment in an antiquated facility?

I recognize that increasingly, newspaper companies are faced with difficult decisions about how and on what to spend limited funds. But I think the approach of ignoring infrastructure, from office furniture to computers, to phones, to even the paint on the wall and the bulbs that go in the lights, needs to stop. Everyday, editors and publishers expect more and more of their staffs and, all too often, offer less in return. Frankly, there needs to be more of a balancing act otherwise performance will continue to degrade, morale will continue to suffer and more and more employees will continue to leave the industry.

So my advice to newspaper companies is to look elsewhere for savings and to spend at least some of what is needed to improve their facilities. And if the response is that there is no where else to look, I would reply look harder — your business and your future depends on it.

Now to be fair, not everyone does this. Some bloggers, Amy Gahran for example, will provide some guidance for why she is sharing a particular entry with her readers. For example, her entry “Impressions on obsession with recession (The Joy of Tech comic)” was accompanied with the following explanation:

“I gotta admit, I think there’s a lot of truth to this one — especially re: media’s role.”

But others don’t even make that effort. Some bloggers will simply include an excerpt from the piece that struck them while others won’t even provide that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with the use of these sites. I also don’t have a problem with bloggers including them on their pages. But to complain about others not providing context and then to ignore it yourself, just shows how lazy an industry we can be.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some great assistant editors; they’ve been writers and poets, comedians and musicians, environmentalists and artists. And while I don’t think any of them dreamt of one day being an assistant editor, they gave the position their best and in most cases, had a lasting impact if not on the reporters they worked with then, on me.

As I previously wrote, I believe that assistant editors are the unsung heroes of the newsroom and that starts with how they got the job. In many cases, they were hardworking reporters who one day were told “you’re an editor now,” and without any fanfare and even less training, they’re thrust into this new position. Suddenly, they find themselves managing their former peers, working an ungodly schedule and following instructions that would leave anyone shaking their heads.

See, I believe that most assistant editors are smarter then they get credit for. Actually, I believe that most are even smarter then the executive editors they work for. But that typically isn’t taken into consideration in an environment where the assistant editor is seen as the “grunt” of their desk, expected to silently do as they’re told.

The truth is that assistant editors typically have their finger on the pulse of the newsroom. They know when the reporting staff is aggravated or depressed. They know when a project is going off the rails long before the metro or features editor gets around to paying attention. And they know how readers are going to react (or not react) to changes in say, the TV book.

If it was up to me, assistant editors would be rewarded appropriately and given the training and tools worthy of their roles and positions. But, we know where you can find that storyline. So, I believe, that these editors need take control of their own careers. Here’s what you can do if you find yourself in this position:

• Go online and seek out your own low-cost or free training.
• Advocate to be sent to programs like Poynter’s Leadership Academy by highlighting the ROI for your newspaper.
• Discover, use and share new tools and techniques.
• Reach out and connect with colleagues at other papers; even if you compete, you’re all in the same boat.
• When the fun stops, take stock and figure out why and what you can do.

Those are a few ideas, I’m sure as the life of this blog progresses I’ll have more, so check back. But the most important thing that I think I can say to you, that maybe you don’t hear often enough is — thank you — thanks for all that you do, thanks for keep our newspapers going.