Excerpts of this event are available in the Winter 2001 issue of Civic Catalyst.
Moderator:
Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Speakers:
Bill Keller
Managing Editor
The New York Times
Ann Marie Lipinski
Senior Vice President and Editor
Chicago Tribune
Gary Pruitt
President and Chief Executive Officer
The McClatchy Company
Introduction: By Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Journalism is no longer monolithic. No one size fits all. Sure, all journalists share core values – accuracy, independence, fairness and objectivity. And most share some aspirations: They want to uncover wrongdoing, spotlight injustices, make a difference in their communities – even help community life go well.
But they no longer share identical goals for their news organizations. Increasingly, large national news organizations define “news” differently than smaller, regional news organizations do. And, regional newspapers, empowered by technological advances, are navigating future strategies that are very different from national newspapers. They even see some different roles to play in their communities.
In part, national newspapers deal with a demographic community, a community of elites, perhaps, or of special interests. Regional news organizations, on the other hand, more often focus on geographic communities – towns or metro areas that contain many smaller neighborhoods or ethnic groups or communities of interest.
We invited three news leaders who are building these roadmaps to tell us where they are heading over the next five years. How will they position their newspapers to be vital to the community and successful in the industry?
Be specific, we said. Give us five goals for the next five years. And, for starters, we will presume that we all embrace vigorous reporting and quality journalism.
Bill Keller, Managing Editor of The New York Times, a national newspaper and the best journalistic brand in the world, sees a search for more interesting niches, national zoning, growth here and abroad – all leveraging The Times’ tremendous base of talent.
The Tribune Company, on the other hand, is constructing a powerful national network. Ann Marie Lipinski, The Chicago Tribune‘s new top editor, plans to build on corporate synergies and strong storytelling. “Great newspapers will thrive not by imitating other great newspapers but by speaking in a cadence unique to their readers and unique to their markets.”
While at McClatchy, an unabashedly local media company, Chief Executive Gary Pruitt plans to leverage each newspaper’s biggest asset: Being the sole mass medium in each of its markets. He envisions supplementing news with direct marketing, niche products and direct mail. McClatchy Web sites will be news venues, database caches and community portals – all guiding us through the data smog and “moving us from the Information Age to the Knowledge Age.”
All three are bullish about the future of newspapers. And all saw newspapers embracing a critical civic role. Says Keller, “I think that an ability to define communities across lines of interest and ideology is the best reason to believe that newspapers – however the words are actually delivered – will survive.”
Bill Keller
Managing Editor
The New York Times
A little more than a year ago, the digital division of The Times had a party at a downtown sushi emporium to celebrate the acquisition of a software design company called The Buzz. At this soiree, Joe Lelyveld, the executive editor of The Times, was introduced to the head of The Buzz, who looked at Joe with an expression of pure wonder and said, “This is great, I’ve never met a content person before.”
And I don’t think that he meant, “Boy, that’s the coolest line of work he could imagine.” I think he meant something like: “People still do that?”
A year or so ago, the digital guys had all the juju in the media business. They were the creative, risk-taking, future-building, paradigm-smashing visionaries. They moved at Internet speed. And, by implication, we were old media – pathetic figures who stood in the rear-view mirror of progress, bleating something irrelevant like, “Yes, but how will you make money at it?”
It seemed, then, that the only salvation for us sad-sack content providers was to rush eagerly into this new world of convergence. A world in which newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet all flow together, somehow, into something that nobody could quite explain but in which everyone passionately believed.
In the conventional wisdom, this was a world in which news consumers would be served by a couple of great media conglomerates, reporters would become interchangeable, multi-tasking gerbils and the news would become digitized video nuggets accessible on your Palm Pilot. The defining intelligence of American journalism would be Yahoo. As my English wife would say, Ya-bloody-hoo.
In the past year, a number of things have become clear about this emerging world and I hasten to assure you I believe there is an emerging world and this is not going to be just the whining of a Luddite. One thing that’s happened is that the markets have rendered a verdict on new media as a business proposition and the verdict is, to say the least, skeptical. The market would like to see some revenues, if you please. And until it does, it’s going to hold you, or at least your stock options, underwater. That’s one reason that The Times‘ plan to issue a tracking stock to underwrite our digital operations has been put on hold.
For a while yet, new media will be dependent on the kindness of old media.
Another thing that’s happened is that content has begun to gain more respect. There’s a growing realization out there that an awesome distribution network is only valuable if you have something of value to distribute. I don’t believe for a second that AOL bought Time Warner just for its cable operation.
Perhaps the most significant flaw in the conventional wisdom was that the fascination with the conglomerates in the industry, the constant attention focused on mergers, joint ventures and synergies has somewhat disguised an equally important trend in the other direction.
I don’t pretend to be a media visionary, but it seems clear to me that there is an accelerating “nichification,” if you will, of the media.
The proliferation of cable, the 1,000 flowers of the Internet, the first stirrings of broadband, the new program-it-yourself technology like TiVo – all of these things are creating countless niche alternatives to the big network, mass-market, prime-time Goliaths of news.
Scale still matters of course. It matters a lot if you’re trying to show a return on investments. But scale isn’t everything. So rather than a small number of media conglomerates jockeying for the faceless masses and offering the same intellectual junk food, I imagine there will be, more than ever, intense competition to find interesting niches and occupy them.
For a paper like The Times, which is in a considerably better situation than most other papers, this presents both threats and opportunities. The threat is that our readership will be nibbled away by niche publications, namely online. But the opportunities are for us to use our tremendous base of talent – reporters, editors, critics and columnists – to move into new niches and serve our existing market in new ways.
Far from finding this prospect alarming, I think of it as a cause for celebration, full of promise. We’ve defined our niche as people like the loyal readers of The New York Times – curious, educated, engaged, culturally alert. You know who you are.
We think this is a pretty big niche, much bigger than the few million who now read The Times. The kind of journalism we do may be distributed in the form of ink-on-paper or in the form of bits and pixels, but I don’t foresee a day when it won’t have a rather large market. On the contrary, I think the proliferation of raw, untested information sources on the Internet puts an added premium on what we do, which is to assign smart people to sort out the riot of information and make sense of it.
Where will we be in five years? I should say, I suppose, that all of this is just me speaking and not some authorized voice of The New York Times.
In five years, for starters, I have no doubt that there will be newspapers printed on the byproducts of forest management. I’m quite confident that our circulation will be substantially greater than the 1.1 million daily and the 1.7 million Sunday that we now sell. Growth will be more dramatic outside of the New York region as we continue to open new print sites across the country. We have about 15 sites now outside of the New York area but we’ll also be growing in this region.
This rosy scenario is not necessarily true of newspapers as a whole. Some of our growth, sadly, is cannibalizing the readership of local and regional papers that no longer give demanding readers what they want.
In the past few years, The Times has prospered as a newspaper, I believe, by avoiding false choices. Are we a national newspaper or a regional newspaper? Well, we’re both and we must be both. We’ve added reporters and subscribers in both arenas. And this is important because we derive a lot of our identity, our energy, our authority from having roots in the financial and cultural capital of the world.
Are we a time-sensitive, breaking-news organization? Or are we producers of thoughtful, in-depth stories? Well, we’re both and we have to be both. To do things in-depth you need people covering the day-to-day stuff, following the flow of events. So we’ve invested in more reporters on the ground, and we’ve invested in the kind of time-consuming, labor-intensive projects that most papers can’t afford to do.
In five years, our newsroom will have changed into a more multipurpose workplace, continuing a trend that’s already begun. We’ll extend our journalistic franchise more extensively into the Internet and television, but we will maintain a distinction between quick reports that satisfy an immediate appetite to know what’s going on and the deeper work that demands more time.
In five years, we may have moved selectively into some kinds of national zoning, either by region or by subject matter. Our digital news operation already sends e-mails to readers tailored to their interests. This has become standard procedure in news on the Web. We send out e-mails on international news, books, cinema and technology for people who want those subjects.
Zoning a national print newspaper is a much more difficult proposition and one with some serious journalistic and business perils. But I can imagine that features will be added or emphasized to suit local interests or even categories of readers- Pacific Rim news for the West, Latin American and Caribbean news for the South, college news for campus towns and more localized entertainment listings.
In five years, I foresee a big growth in our international presence. We’ve begun experimenting with branded inserts into foreign newspapers, something that works for The Wall Street Journal. We’ll expand our distribution of television products and, of course, the Internet is ipso facto a global medium.
In five years, we’ll be a significantly bigger presence in television. We now produce documentaries and some collaborative ventures, most recently with ABC’s 20/20 and Nightline. Next year, we’ll have upwards of 35 hours of our own produced programming on the air, which is not very much but it’s three times as much as we did this year. You don’t have to be a network or attached to a network to develop a significant presence on TV.
In five years, we expect to be, as we are now by most measures, the dominant newspaper site on the Internet. And I hope we’ll be one of a handful of news sites, including the TV sites, that dominate the landscape of news and information on the Web.
My colleague, Martin Nisenholtz, who runs our digital division, says that in five years we’ll be a little bit closer to a time when all information in every format will be available everywhere to everyone. He is a media visionary.
In five years, that will be a comparatively small elite with this kind of access, but we’ll have a sample to study and will be able to see how that changes the landscape of the news business.
We’re already playing with a variety of ways to compliment and exploit our in-depth news reports online. These include wireless news alerts, webcasts designed specifically for broadband users and a lot of information services tailored to the needs and interests of individual users.
The fragmentation of the news audience and the proliferation of niches have a potentially scary side. Maybe this is a romantic notion but I think there are other things that humans want from their content providers besides a periodic delivery of news about subjects that already interest them.
I think audiences want to plug into a social experience, to look in on what the neighbors are up to. I think they want to plug into a civic experience to get a sense of what’s important for them to know about the world and their own country. I think they want some serendipity, some novelty and some surprise.
And I think that an ability to define communities across lines of interest and ideology is the best reason to believe that newspapers – however the words are actually delivered – will survive.
Ann Marie Lipinski
Senior Vice President and Editor
Chicago Tribune
From the time my daughter, now 6, could speak she would play newspaper. She invented a newspaper called Bostona – for reasons neither her father nor I have ever been able to determine – where she pretended to work as a reporter.
One day when she was about 3 1/2, I came home to find that she had been promoted to managing editor, until recently my title at the Tribune. “Well, congratulations.” I said. “And what does the managing editor of Bostona do?”
“Oh,” she said in her most world-weary voice, “I talk to people about their problems.”
I think of that answer often and find it as worthy a description of my job, and perhaps that of my fellow panelists, as any I have ever heard. Dwindling circulation, rising newsprint costs, increased competition for staff, declining ad revenue. And that’s not even talking about the journalistic challenges.
But with all that, I remain an editor who is bullish and enthusiastic about the future of newspapers. It turns out I’m at the right company, one that recently spent over $6 billion to buy a group of newspapers, including Newsday and the Los Angeles Times, betting the future on a medium seemingly more aligned with Gutenberg than Gates. But a year into the dot-com decline, ink-on-paper is still looking pretty good.
I’d like to highlight a few things that will help keep newspapers looking pretty good. So five of those, if I may.
The first: one of my favorite photographs in the Tribunearchives is a shot of Clarence Darrow making his closing argument at the Scopes monkey trial. In the frame is a lone radio microphone with the call letters WGN. That stood for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” the late Colonel Robert McCormick’s brazen claim for his beloved Chicago Tribune.
McCormick would probably regard a woman as editor of the Tribune about as highly as I regarded his use of a printing press to advance a suspect political agenda, but I’ll give him this: For a conservative Midwestern newspaper publisher, he was a great technological visionary.
While his fellow publishers were banding together to lobby against the upstart medium called radio, McCormick created a radio station. And when television – an even greater threat – came along, McCormick went and got himself one of those stations, too, branding it with the same call letters.
I recount this to explain the bemusement with which I and my Tribune colleagues regard questions about new technology overtaking print. As focused as we are on growing and nurturing the newspaper, we also understand that each medium has a role to play in both our corporate and our journalistic successes.
If you visit me in Chicago, your trip from O’Hare Airport to my Michigan Avenue office will take you past the WGN television studios on the northwest side of the city, the Chicago Tribune printing plant on the near west side of the city, the WGN radio studio on the first floor of Tribune Tower, the Tribune Internet offices down the hall from me, and the Tribune‘s own Chicagoland Television Cable cameras right outside my door.
This week, a Tribune investigative series on mob influence in the Chicago police department that was a year in the making by one of our finest investigative reporters found a home in most of those Tribune venues, significantly expanding the audience for a brilliant story beyond our newspaper subscribers.
My bosses and the gurus on Wall Street can and have made the business case for what is glibly known as “synergy,” but let me make the journalist’s case. Finding things out and telling people what we know is the essence of what we do. McCormick understood this and, like him, newsrooms need to seek new ways to tell their stories, both within their news pages and beyond, in ways that deepen and do not compromise our social purpose.
Secondly, a couple of months ago an editor from a well-known daily newspaper, which may or may not publish in our nation’s capital, came to Chicago and took me to lunch. He was researching a book about the newspaper industry and wanted to talk to me about the Tribune. He asked about staff levels and why they weren’t exactly the same as at his newspaper. He asked about the A-section and why the space configurations were different from his newspaper. And there was a similar line of questioning about the newspaper’s Internet operations and editorial ratios.
By the end of it, all I could think of was that great musical question posed by Professor Henry Higgins, “Tell me why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times are all great and wonderful newspapers, none of which is ideal for the readers of Chicago. Just as the Tribunewould be presumably ill-matched to the needs of those markets.
There is such a sameness across the land in the ways in which newspapers are both good and bad – the monotony of syndicated columnists, no matter how talented; the gray and pat coverage from Washington or the campaign; the predictability of the portfolios divided into world, nation, metro, business and sports.
Great newspapers will thrive not by imitating other great newspapers but by speaking in a cadence unique to their readers and unique to their markets.
There are certain core values that all great journalistic enterprises must embrace – honesty, fairness, accuracy. And those are not geographically bound. But there are many ways to achieve journalistic excellence and few of them have anything to do with parroting the other guy.
The third point is a short one and let me try this out on you. I’m kind of grappling with the language myself, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I attended an interminable two-day – it felt like two weeks – conference on journalistic excellence. There was a half a sentence up on the board which stated: “The next great newspaper will…”
And all these answers were flying up. There was one that struck me and that I’ve thought about and it may be the only thing I wrote down over the two days. One person finished the sentence this way: “The next great newspaper will need to personify itself as the number-one citizen in the community, the one who beats up the bully, who cries at the tragedies, who provides the big ideas to create economic development, who is the school teacher/tutor for children when their schools fail them.”
I’m not a big fan of what has come to be called public journalism. There’s some redundancy in that to me. I’m not sure I even understand what it means. But I do like this notion of the newspaper as the leading civic voice of a community.
In 1993, the Chicago Tribune undertook a yearlong series of stories called “Killing Our Children,” which set out to chronicle the homicide of every child under the age of 14 in our six-county metropolitan area. We published more than 200 stories before the end of the year, the work of 150 reporters and photographers.
What you felt over the course of that year was a sense of a steamship turning course, of an entire city becoming engaged around a single important subject.
The Tribune did the same thing with a series of stories on the death penalty in Illinois that resulted in a pro-death-penalty governor calling a moratorium on the death penalty in our state.
Looking forward, I look back to those and know that the next great newspaper, and our newspaper if it will continue to be great, needs to find more of those occasions, more of those moments where it can stand up and either gather up all the lone, lonely voices out there speaking independently on a subject or put an end to something that nobody else is talking about. In that sense, it does become the leading citizen of a community, no matter how small or how large the community.
The third thing, and many people in this room know him, comes from Bill Kovach. Ten years ago, when I was crossing to the dark side from reporting to editing, becoming metro editor of the Tribune, I got a long and wonderful letter which I keep in my top desk drawer from Bill Kovach, who was a great newspaper man and at the time was curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.
He gave me many, many wonderful pieces of advice. One I want to talk about today, because I think it’s more prescient now than it was at the time. He wrote, “You are now a manager, and under the rules of the game as it’s played today, you are expected to be a businessperson as well as a journalist. You can’t escape that but you can avoid thinking like a businessperson.”
“You can, in fact, turn it to your advantage and the advantage of the news department and your readers. You can do this by listening to the business people, their problems and their plans. More importantly, learn more about their problems than they know. Usually they reactmore than they think. Use every tool at your command to learn about circulation in your area and about advertising. Be informed so you can’t be misled or bulldogged into doing something you know is wrong.”
Underlying all of this is the fact that, in the modern world of journalism, there are many voices promoting, protecting, defending, and expanding the commercial interests of the newspaper. Only one voice represents our First Amendment rights.
There are many times I have longed for the simplicity of my predecessors’ lives – editorships free of business realities. They thought it was tough to compete with six different newspapers in town, all of which were being read by millions of people reading three and four newspapers a day. I’d take that on any day.
As Bill noted 10 years ago, that’s an unrealistic notion any longer, and most editors I know have become, if not quite the experts in circulation and advertising exigencies that Kovach envisioned, smart enough on the subjects to hold their own.
What so many of us have failed at is the cross-training, the education that goes the other way. The cross-training that might have prevented, say, the Staples Center incident at the Los Angeles Times. At the Tribune, we have recently begun something called news disciplines – two- and three-day training sessions on journalistic values that are mandatory for every company executive, from the chairman on down.
Every day a good editor walks through the doors prepared to teach and lead. And that leadership, in the coming five years and beyond, will be just as relevant outside the newsroom as it is inside. An editor’s ability and interest in articulating the journalistic mission to non-journalists may be the most important business contribution and journalistic contribution we can make in the coming years.
The fifth one, and this is an old-fashioned one, but it’s the everything-old-is-new-again and is, maybe, the most important thing from a day-to-day editing perspective. When a reporter goes home at the end of the day and her husband asks what she did, she may well respond that she wrote a story. But in most cases, that would be a lie.
We write lots and lots of reports and lots and lots of accounts, but we rarely write newspaper stories, things that we would define from our earliest reading experience as having beginnings, middles and ends, characters, plots and other tools of engagement. We all recognize those when we hear them. We read them to our kids every day, but we very rarely read them in our own newspapers.
Last year on a Monday in mid-August, nearly 20,000 more people than usual bought a copy of the Chicago Tribune in Chicago. There was no pressing news that day. God knows, our city’s sorry baseball teams had done nothing to draw readers to the newsstands.
The reason for the circulation spike was part two of a four-part series that recounted a year-old story of the shooting death of a rookie Chicago police officer and the toll that his death had taken on his partner and the police force.
Although it was a shooting that was well-reported at the time, the series, “Partners in Peril,” offered a brilliantly told reconstruction of the drama playing out beneath the surface of the news headlines – a gripping tale of a naive cop’s fantasy of police work set against the reality of urban crime.
It was a newspaper story with a beginning, a middle and an end and a cast of characters as riveting as those found in fiction. A human drama so engaging for readers that even Sunday-only subscribers from the Chicago Tribune felt compelled to buy the paper throughout the week to read the resolution.
One reader sent us a letter describing a scene he witnessed that Monday morning. He wrote, “I sat in stunned silence at a restaurant on West Randolph Street. I had bought the Tribune to catch the second part of your story and was reading intently when I looked up and saw different customers reading the same article. I tried to follow their eyes and then it dawned on me that there was this total hush in the room. This was usually a very noisy place at 6:30 in the morning.”
“I saw the owner of the restaurant sitting at his usual table. He looked up at me and asked if it weren’t the saddest story about this policeman.”
I replied, “Yes, it is the saddest story I ever read.”
Not everything we report can or should deserve such treatment, but we need to get much better in the coming five years – and the five years beyond that and the five beyond that – at recognizing the right opportunity. Reporting and story telling, the oldest, most old-fashioned tools in our tool belt, can silence a downtown diner on a busy Monday morning.
Gary Pruitt
President and Chief Executive Officer
The McClatchy Company
This has been an interesting year for newspapers. We’ve seen the Tribune Company buy Times Mirror, Gannett has bought Central Newspapers Inc. and we’ve had more consolidation than in any other year in the history of the newspaper business.
People have come to believe that mid-sized media companies with regional newspapers cannot survive. That our position is untenable. That the position of mid-sized newspapers or regional newspapers is destined to decline.
We disagree with that as a company. We plan to survive – not only survive, but thrive – through a combination of business savvy and journalistic commitment.
You heard from three very different companies, The New York Times, a national paper, the best newspaper and best journalistic brand in the world. The Tribune Company, which has created the spine of a national network. Maybe the full skeletal and nervous system aren’t complete, but I don’t underestimate them.
At McClatchy, we don’t have any national pretensions at all. Our future resides in 10 local markets, such as Minneapolis, Raleigh and Sacramento. In each of these markets, which are growing one-third faster than the national average, we’re the leading local media company. Newspapers are our core business but we supplement with direct marketing and, finally and importantly, the leading local Web site.
Newspapers are a funny business, aren’t they? People have been predicting their demise for the past several decades. They’ve always been wrong and I think they’re wrong today. But we all know the evidence and it sounds compelling:
- Circulation is declining at newspapers around the country. At McClatchy, we’ve had 15 consecutive years of circulation growth, so I don’t think you need to take it as inevitable that circulation will decline. But as an industry, circulation is declining.
- The number of other media outlets is exploding and growing. The number of TV stations, cable stations, radio stations, magazines, weekly newspapers, Web sites, skywriters probably, are just growing like crazy.
- The number of daily newspapers is declining – the only major medium that’s declining.
- And newspapers as a medium are losing advertising share to other media.
So, seemingly, the inescapable conclusion of all that is that newspapers are in decline, if not dying. But I could take these same data and reach the exact opposite conclusion. I think the financial and empirical evidence would support me.
As other media outlets proliferate, their audiences are fragmenting and each individual outlet is actually losing market share. The overall medium may be gaining share but individual outlets are actually losing share.
Newspapers are less subject to that fragmentation because there’s generally only one daily newspaper in each market. I know New York is a larger, bigger place. But in our markets, there’s one daily newspaper in each market so it’s less subject to that kind of fragmentation.
Guess what? We’re the sole remaining mass medium in each of our local markets. And our lead over the number-two media outlet, which is usually a network-affiliate TV station, is actually growing.
So we may lose share as an industry to TV over time but on a revenue-per-outlet basis, if you take the total revenue and divide it by the number of outlets, newspapers are doing quite well and, in fact, better than most TV stations.
Maybe an example will help. When Seinfeld was the number-one program in America in 1995, it had a big share of audience. But that share of audience 20 years earlier, in 1975, would not have placed it in the top 20 shows on TV. It would have been the 21st most popular show in the United States in 1975. And 1995 was the year Seinfeld had its largest audience share.
It would have been right behind a show called Dukes of Hazzard. I didn’t know if anyone in a sophisticated New York audience would acknowledge that they’ve ever heard of a show called Dukes of Hazzard, a show about people in the South running around in jacked-up cars.
It shows you the fragmentation. I told that story to our papers in South Carolina and they looked at me dumbfounded and said, “So big deal, Dukes of Hazzard is a much bigger show than Seinfeld.”
You do have to know your market. The example didn’t work for them. But there are huge marketing advantages that come from being the sole remaining mass medium in any market. It becomes more important than ever for newspapers to maintain or grow their circulation, because it’s the key differentiating aspect for newspapers compared to all other media.
Also, mass media status not only serves a business purpose but an important public service aspect of bringing cohesion to a community, which otherwise might not have a common basis for civil discourse or community action because there’s no other institution that has that same reach in each local market.
But you know, as bullish as we are about newspapers, we also know newspapers aren’t enough anymore.
We’ve got to supplement the mass reach of the newspaper with the targeted reach of direct marketing, using niche products and direct mail. This is not very glamorous work and you’re not going to win any Pulitzers doing this.
I think it was Oscar Wilde who said you don’t destroy what you love; what you love destroys you. And if anyone ought to know, it’s Oscar Wilde, right?
But if we focus solely on producing quality newspapers with big advertising, because that’s what we love, we’re going to lose share and we’re going to decline. We’ve got to do some of that nitty-gritty direct marketing work to preserve our economic ability to do the quality journalistic work.
So the paradox is: I’ve got to compete at the low end to preserve the quality of our top end.
And finally, of course, the third aspect of being a leading media company in each of these markets is to have the leading local Internet site. Everyone has a different view of what the Internet will bring and what it will be.
Last year, we had Kevin Kelly, an editor of Wired magazine, speak to our editors and publishers. I asked him if he thought the Internet was going to be like TV, a powerful medium with a tremendous impact on our society? Or did he think it was going to be even more important, like Gutenberg’s movable type, and transform society as we know it? I figured he would take the latter view.
I underestimated him. He said, “I don’t think either. I think the Internet is the most important invention since the invention of fire.”
I told him I didn’t think fire was invented, I think we discovered fire, that nature or God invented fire. But if you’re an editor of Wired magazine, the Internet probably is fire, right? That’s the biggest thing ever.
That same day I read a column by Dave Barry in The Miami Herald. He wrote that the Internet was the most important communications innovation since the introduction of call-waiting.
So those were the two extremes – call-waiting or fire. We, as a company, kind of take the middle course, that broad middle course. We think the Internet is going to be a very powerful and viable consumer medium. But at McClatchy we have no national pretensions about the Internet. It’s purely a local game for us. We’re not going to compete with AOL or Yahoo or MSN. We’re going to have the leading local Web site by any and every measure – revenue, traffic, quality.
And I’m not sure how lucrative that space is going to be. We’re losing money to date. But there’s starting to be a there there. We’ve got about $17 million in Internet revenue this year and it will grow to about $25 million next year. By Internet standards, that’s starting to be pretty good. Both Tribune and the New York Times Company are far ahead of us, although the companies are working together on their Internet strategies.
But we come to this game with big advantages on the local Internet side. We’ve got the biggest newsroom, by far, in our markets. We’ve got the largest sales force on the advertising side. We’ve got existing advertiser relationships. We’ve got a profitable classified base that we can leverage onto the Internet. We’ve got the promotional capability of the newspaper to push that Internet site.
All of those work to our advantages locally for the Internet. The combination of these three factors give us strong growth potential in our markets and an advantage over the other media companies.
But let’s talk a little about what journalistic strategies are going to be employed given that Internet competition. You’ve got to look at how people use the Internet first, I think.
Number one is communication. That’s still the killer app on the Internet – e-mail, chat, instant messaging. It’s the number-one use of the Internet.
Second, people seek news and information. Importantly for me here, data show that 21% say their top activity is finding local news and information; 63% of Internet users say that seeking local news and information is very or somewhat important to them. We need to hold onto that.
And of course, third in Internet use, is e-commerce, which is beyond the scope of my talk today but I can tell you it underscores the importance of newspapers doing well in classifieds.
Strategies emerge from that Internet empirical data. We need to take advantage of people’s desire to communicate and connect to one another.
As newspaper companies, we were unable to do that in the past. Talk radio did it – kind of people pooling their ignorance. But what we hope to have are forums, live interviews and chat rooms to elevate the level of debate both on the Internet site driving to the paper and back.
Also, we will do more and more work in community publishing and self-publishing as we allow any bona fide non-profit group, from the symphony to the PTA to kids’ soccer teams, to post information, schedules, bulletins, and have forums on our sites.
On the news gathering and information side, the Internet also gives us options that we never had previously. We don’t think it’s going to be terribly viable long-term just to put the newspaper online. I think it’s going to devalue the print product and it doesn’t play to what the Internet does well. When it comes to providing an overview of the important events and the serendipity, the newspaper is the diamond and the Internet is the cubic zirconia.
The Internet does a lot of things better than newspapers but you’ve got to be selective. Simply posting the newspaper online is not the way to go.
However, we must get away from the once-a-day news cycle and think more in terms of 24/7, putting breaking news, shorter news and headline news on the Internet. That’s how people are using the Internet on a daily basis in their jobs, to get little bits of information – stock quotes, breaking news, all of that. We’ve got to be there 24 hours, seven days a week and break the once-a-day cycle.
Also, e-mail alerts and personalized e-mail papers based on individual interests are becoming more and more important.
Databases are going to become increasingly important because you can use the Internet for the quick headline hit of the day or you can delve into very deep research. And we have access to lots of public records, lots of archives – databases that will provide information beyond the scope of what’s available in the printed newspaper and provide greater access to such information as schools test scores and housing prices.
We’ve got to move even beyond news sites and create local portals that do all the things that Yahoo does nationally but we do locally, offering that wide array of services that people find useful on the Internet.
We partner with local TV stations. We partner with local radio stations. We work together on a portal site. The New York Times has a great one in Boston, Boston.com. But we offer more than entertainment on these sites. We have headline news, entertainment guides, news, dining guides, Web search, local search, business directories, mapping and free e-mail. So we’ll have two sites: a portal site and a news site.
But I’ll tell you, the real revolution over the next five years will be the transition of analog to digital. All information is going digital. Everything is going to bits. When information goes to bits, it can be delivered very easily to all kinds of different platforms. There are people constantly working, feeding digital information into all kinds of different platforms – PDAs, pagers, cell phones and computers. It’s easy, it’s streaming and it’s in the air around us right now as we speak.
Eventually it’s going to be in us, I think, as we see a blurring of man and machine, but not in the next five years.
I do think newspapers are going to be around too. They’re going to be maintained as a mass-reach vehicle. It will be ever more valuable to maintain that mass reach as everything else proliferates, for business reasons and public service reasons.
But we also think the print product is going to become much more utilitarian, serving as kind of a guide through this data smog.
One of the most valuable newspaper services in the future will be limiting the range of information that readers need to explore by sorting and prioritizing better than and more explicitly than we have done before.
I don’t think the future of newspapers is mundane and utilitarian. At the same time we’re guiding and directing, newspapers are going to have to provide increasingly sophisticated journalism to set us apart from the ubiquitous, commodity headline stories that are everywhere.
This places a premium on reporters and editors knowing what to focus on and how to get beneath the obvious and how to tell stories compellingly. As an industry, we’ve talked for some time about our relative advantage in providing perspective, analysis, context and interpretation.
I think we’re going to have to multiply that several times over in the coming years. As a result, I think reporters will generally tend to be more specialists in the future than generalists to meet that demand for more sophistication in reporting.
I do think it’s a great time to be a journalist. Journalists are the purveyors of meaning, content and context amid all the noise out there, abilities that will be more valuable, more essential in the future than ever. Our society needs the help of journalists, not exclusively, but the help of journalists to lead us from the Information Age to what we hope will become the Knowledge Age. And we’ll all be better off then.
Bios
Bill Keller was appointed managing editor of The New York Times in September 1997. He joined the newspaper in 1984 and served in various positions, including foreign editor, chief of The Times bureau in Johannesburg and Moscow correspondent.
Keller won a Pulitzer Prize in March 1989 for his coverage of the Soviet Union.
Prior to joining The Times, Keller had been a reporter for The Dallas Times Herald. He also wrote for the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report and The Oregonian.
He received a B.A. from Pomona College and completed the Advanced Management Program at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Ann Marie Lipinski was named senior vice president and editor of the Chicago Tribune in February 2001. She joined the newspaper as a summer intern in 1978 and served in a range of positions, including executive editor, managing editor and associate managing editor for metropolitan news.
As a reporter, Lipinski was one of three Tribune reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for the series, “City Council: The Spoils of Power.” The following year, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where she studied for a year.
Prior to the Tribune, Lipinski worked as a summer intern at The Miami Herald and was co-editor of Michigan Daily, the student newspaper, while attending the University of Michigan.
Gary Pruitt has been president and chief executive officer since 1996 of The McClatchy Company, which publishes 11 daily newspapers and 13 non-daily newspapers, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the News & Observer in Raleigh and the Sacramento Bee.
He joined the company in 1984 as general counsel. In 1991, he became publisher of The Fresno Bee. Prior to his appointment as CEO, he served as vice president of operations and technology and president and chief operating officer.
Pruitt received the 1999 Isaiah Thomas Award from the Rochester Institute of Technology for outstanding contributions to the newspaper industry. He holds a B.A. from the University of Florida and a master’s degree and law degree from the University of California, Berkeley.