SPECIAL: Newspapers Must Embrace Digital Future To Survive

CAPE TOWN - Newspapers hoping to retain their readers and survive in the technological age must venture into the online and mobile phone spheres, a World Association of Newspapers (WAN) meeting heard Tuesday.

Speakers at a workshop said the newspaper was a dying breed but could avoid extinction by modernizing its approach and extending its digital reach.

"We have to learn that online is where the action is, and we have to move our journalistic resources there," Mario Garcia, chief executive of the United States-based Garcia Media Group, told delegates to the WAN's 60th world newspaper congress and 14th world editors' forum being held in Cape Town.

He described the new path of news, starting with an e-mail or mobile phone alert of a breaking story, followed by reading it online and ending in its publishing in a newspaper the following day.

In such a scenario, he said, there was little point in newspapers repeating the news hours after it first broke. They would have to learn to present readers with new, forward-looking story angles.

"Nowadays, you have to assume that the reader knows more than you do," he said.

Martha Stone, director of the WAN's "shaping the future of the newspaper" program, told delegates the time has come for news organizations to cross-train journalists to tell a story in print, radio, television or online.

"Many newspapers experience today their circulations going down, but their reach into the market place with the internet is surging," she said.

Leonard Brody, chief executive and co-founder of NowPublic.com, a website for "citizen journalism" with over 90,000 contributors in ordinary people worldwide, believed the monopoly of traditional media was being challenged by camera phones and other technology enabling anyone to find news.

"We are moving very quickly into an era where everything is being recorded," he told the meeting.

On Monday, a WAN report said newspapers around the world saw a 2.3 percent rise in circulation in 2006 and a growth in advertising revenue despite the rise of digital media. (We are reposting this article by the international news agency, Agence France-Presse, to help bring awareness about the power of the Internet in today's media. Ed.)

The New Haven Independent: Community-dedicated, hyperlocal, online reporting

We hope this piece would serve as an inspiration to fellow journalists!

Paul Bass

Newspaper companies beware! The journalists you are increasingly willing to let go may come back to haunt you. In today’s Internet world, all it takes is a little budget and a lot of ambition. Take the story of Paul Bass.

For 25 years, Bass covered the New Haven, Connecticut area for print publications and watched them all get eaten up by corporate giants. During a yearlong book leave, he decided that he couldn’t return to a newsroom “sucked of its spirit.” His salvation? The Internet.To continue working in the profession he loves without the corporate pressures, Bass created the New Haven Independent, a non-profit, Web-based publication founded in the tradition of newspaper journalism.

With a small, dedicated team and a growing readership, Bass has found a rejuvenated optimism in the news business through online reporting. The efficiency of Web reportingAlthough he is an old media reporter, Bass finds that journalism on the Web is “definitely” more efficient than print journalism.

For starters, the Independent doesn’t have an office. “Our reporters are out reporting all the time instead of talking in the newsroom,” explained Bass. If he meets with his staff to discuss stories, they do so in a local coffee shop. Secondly, Bass doesn’t have to wait until stories go to press; as soon as an article is ready, it is posted on the Independent’s site.

In what is perhaps the most efficient characteristic of Internet reporting, Bass and his staff have their stories proofread and fact-checked by readers. The Independent has even started a contest through which the reader who catches the most typos wins Independent paraphernalia.

Non-profit reportingRealizing the financial difficulties of launching his own Web-based newspaper for his community, Bass decided that the Independent would have to be a non-profit publication. “Everyone is still experimenting with for-profit,” said Bass, “but the non-profit model of journalism is going to be very important.” He used the example of National Public Radio, referring to a “huge new class of plutocrats” that, viewing journalism as a public utility, are willing to make donations.

He’s not sure how experiments such as his with the non-profit model will unfold, but he’s pretty positive that final versions will be a mix of professional newspapers and non-profit websites, emphasizing that the 20% profit margins that newspapers have enjoyed for decades will disappear.

One of the problems with local online journalism to date is advertising. Bass, who had some experience managing a print sales staff, felt that other Web news entrepreneurs “wildly underestimated the economics of ad sales” and decided from the get-go never to sell ads on the Independent because it requires lots of work and maintenance for small amounts of money.

Furthermore, sponsors for his non-profit paper were hard to convince at the beginning; it took Bass a few months to gather his first $100,000.

Today, he has seven sponsors signed up for four and five-figure annual contracts. One of his main sponsors is a foundation that promotes universal health. Realizing the dangers of editorial pressure from such sponsors, Bass made it clear that the foundation would not be able to choose articles for the Independent but that he and his staff would help to bring awareness of the universal health care issue to the community.

How Web reporting differs from printOf course, if Bass had some more funding, he would hire more reporters, “but not a ton more, because then I’d have to manage them all,” he said half-jokingly. At the moment, the Independent is running with 4 journalists but supplements its own work by linking to that of others.

On average, the Independent puts out 8 or 10 stories a day with 3 or 4 top stories (full-length, originally reported articles) and the rest called “Extra Extras” (“a mix of round-ups, small items, links to other media and studies, and original full-length stories of our own”).

At the same time, Bass and Co. receive local newsfeeds and scan local press releases to which they link, ultimately providing “a lot more local news than the daily or the radio.” In this sense, Bass believes that the “competitive model of media” is dying.

“Different publications link to one another. Readers don’t care much about who broke the story anymore,” said Bass. “We’ll still like to break a story but we won’t try to monopolize news because that’s impossible.” To prove his point, Bass took the example of New Haven’s daily, The Register.

The Independent links to two or three local stories from the printed paper per week but Bass prides his own publication on the fact that the Register occasionally links to him. He asks, “Why not link to them when they cover a story that we didn’t? Citizens just want the info and we play the role of a filter to that info. It’s less important to tell readers what to think than how to think.”Apart from linking and reporting, Bass has also launched a vlog initiative.

Once a week, he strolls out to his backyard compost pile with a video recorder and goes through the main stories. Whereas the Independent’s reporting is generally objective, Bass uses the vlog as an outlet to express his own opinion, putting his “pundit hat” on (literally) to opine on the week’s most significant issue.

“Readers love the vlog because it’s goofy and playful. It’s certainly not a professional production but in general readers are open to the amateur side of things.”Reporting online for the community And when it comes down to it, the readers and their community are what the Independent is all about. “They love it, they feel like they own it, like it’s theirs,” said Bass of his reader’s ties with his brainchild. Since its launch, the Independent’s page views have grown four-fold, currently receiving an average of 4,000 per weekday.

This number spikes when there is a story of national interest happening in the area. For example, the recent Connecticut Senate race was highly contested and followed around the US, especially during the Democratic primaries. Bass has been covering one of the candidates, Joe Lieberman, for 20 years making the Independent the place for some of the best Lieberman commentary.

During the run-up to the state Democratic primaries, the Independent was receiving 13,000 daily page views. For this reason, Bass predicts that hyperlocal sites will increasingly become the core sources for a national audience during such events.

Bass is also conducting experiments to improve the community service of the site. The Independent’s most popular feature, one that would be impossible without the Internet and one which makes it “a real part of the community”, is a database of local crimes put together with the New Haven police department.

He has also solicited reader reviews of local events, but the initiative has not had the success of the local crime database. “Generally, our readers want us to write and they react.”

To date, most readers are still passive users, but some post comments and others have gotten involved with contributions. Bass has learned that the look of the site intimidates readers thinking of contributing because they think it’s too professional.

He doesn’t want the Independent to become a blog, but from what Bass learned about the Independent’s appearance, he’s in the process of “putting out something that has more of a traditional feel in an unconventional format.”

Unconventional indeed. But as we are still in the early years of a journalistic revolution spurred by the Internet, hyperlocal online newspapers such as Bass’ Independent will be projects to keep an eye on. There’s a great chance that someday soon they’ll be the norm for journalists and communities everywhere.(The Editor’s Weblog/John Burke)