We Need to Do It or They’ll Do It Themselves
Glenn Ritt
Vice President, News and Information
The Record, Hackensack, N.J.From March of last year to March of this year daily newspapers in the New York metropolitan area lost 100,000 in circulation daily and 300,000 Sunday.* I was thinking about those incredible numbers while in Minneapolis recently where 3M held its annual meeting that was attended by 4,000 shareholders. 3M dedicates 6.7 percent of its multi-billion dollar budget to research and development. With that investment they produce 500 new products a year that are put into the marketplace. And while many of these products fail, they anticipate deriving $1.5 billion in sales from these products during their first year in the marketplace.
Well, the journey along the R&D route at The Record is far more modest, but it began about three years ago when we invited about 200 diverse leaders of North Jersey to participate in a SWOT exercise, identifying the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, the threats facing our region. Simultaneously, we created about a dozen task forces that entered the newsroom — from educators to clergy, from travel agents to singles, from youth to police chiefs, from Koreans to Latinos. The upshot of both these initiatives was the capability to identify five very broad, deep common audiences that would surely determine our newspaper’s future: parents, teenagers, immigrants, those over 50 years of age, and those seeking faith and values in their daily lives.
Two months ago, I left The Record editorship to concentrate on new media and innovation to extend our news and information franchise . . . Increasingly, I see myself more as a guide to my colleagues, internally and externally, than an oracle to my audience.
I want to emphasize, it wasn’t disillusionment that forced my hand. The newsroom can only help us connect. There are valid reasons why newsrooms can go only so far before they may jeopardize real or perceived credibility. But the newsroom is only one room, albeit the largest, in an ever-expanding house that must accommodate many kinds of journalism, media and constituents . . .
Two years ago, a contingent of mayors came to me and implored The Record to help them get the attention of legislators and the governor on key local issues. Nobody in Trenton will even listen to us, they complained. Simultaneously, our own quality-of-life polling had their constituents making the same complaint about the mayors. It was obvious the newspaper was perceived as an agent to bring natural but increasingly distant political partners together. With the help of Pew, it led to “Local Live,” an hour-long, interactive weekly cable program that connects people to issues and their leaders.
Now a group of entrepreneurs is designing a parallel on-line model called County Leadership Forum that synthesizes Record issue stories, archives, live chats with leaders, hyperlinks to bibliographical sources, updated message boards, live video, voting and polling on the issues. By the way, the Web authors average 16 years of age.
A second venture begun last March has really changed my professional and personal life. I was searching the Net for examples of virtual communities that represent threats; not Digital Cities, not Sidewalk, not Starwave. No, these came from Bergen County’s government, from the local utility, and especially a high school called the Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology, a magnet school attracting students from 70 different districts.
Until then, The Record related to all these institutions only as news sources and topics. But this magnet high school turned out to be authoring municipal and county Web sites replete with the kind of bread-and-butter news and information that for a hundred years was the exclusive franchise of the company who owned the printing press. Today, the Academy and The Record are partners in a joint venture under a two-year contract. And I think you’ll find that teenvoice.com is as complete a site for teens by teens as you could locate on the Web.
It represents The Record’s total commitment to the teen niche. We’ve turned over our entire digital content, stories, graphics, photography, to this staff of 64 14- to 18-year-olds. Beyond oversight for libel, defamation of character, and trademark infringement, we try desperately to keep our hands off of it. We recognize that they’re the experts for teens technologically, graphically, and most importantly, contextually. We not only have to serve this community, which essentially shuns newspapers, but we have to learn how it thinks, how it manages information, how it utilizes news since they’re going to remain loyal to this medium when they become adults.
But it’s not just about the product. It’s also about the culture and process. Next fall this business venture will be organized around an electronic journalism curriculum taught by the Academy and The Record. We’ll teach journalism, and ethics, graphics, and photo and Web design. But we’ll be teaching much, much more, according to the modules created by the kids: team building; group dynamics; listening; verbalizing; leaving egos at the door; brainstorming and the creative process; cooperative interaction versus I, me and mine; embracing change; and interfacing with all our communities.
How many newsrooms around the nation are trying right now to create this kind of collaborative environment to stay competitive?
Faith and Values is a third experiment that returns us to traditional print. A task force of religious leaders meets with me every quarter. Last year, we created the concept for a publication. When the idea took root, the newsroom was extremely reluctant to collaborate, and this time I didn’t force them to join. Instead, dozens of leaders representing Catholics, Protestants, Koreans, Chinese, Muslims, Hindus, African-American Baptists, all serving more than 500 houses of worship, constructed a mission statement, goals and a business plan.
Here’s how the mission statement finally read after nine hours of conversation: To raise and enhance the profile, understanding, and appreciation of the role of religion, spirituality, ethical values in the workplace, culture, lifestyles of our region. But how the group evolved this mission is the fascinating event for a civic journalist, because I watched them develop a language and priorities that would make us all very proud.
Let me list in chronological order the board’s goals from the minute that they met to when they completed their journey: Show how religious values touch the community. Provide information and interpretation of religious events. Promote hope. Become a learning center. Become a resource center. Make connections. Be interactive. Get down to the grass roots. Provide a strong civic voice. Empower people to help themselves. Unearth solutions from common wisdom. Fix it. Solve it.
Now we intend to connect houses of worship digitally with The Record. They can get a password-protected E-mail account and everything that they send to us can be automatically converted to html and become a Web site. The site can be . . . a bilateral connection between a house of worship and the newspaper, or a multilateral network for communication in any direction. At its most basic level, it gives the newspaper unprecedented connections with community organizations and it makes those organizations journalists in their own right.
At the same time, these journeys introduce new risks and questions requiring fresh answers. Who’s a journalist in a digital world? Is it credible if non- journalists create it? What do they know that we don’t? What role does the press play? If we don’t participate, are we ignored? And how can goals shared between the newspaper and the community succeed?Yet answering these questions satisfactorily or not, in my mind, is not an optional exercise. We do it or they do it themselves.
* These numbers do not include the introduction of the Sunday New York Post in the New York market.