With little fanfare, The Bee has embarked on the road to its future – a digital, multi-media, interactive, around-the-clock news universe.
Everyone knows the final destination. It’s the place where newspapers aren’t on paper anymore but still provide readers with news and information, and make a profit, too.
No one’s been there, or knows what it looks like, or how long it takes to get there, and maps to it don’t exist. It’s waiting to be invented.
Yet every major newspaper company in America is scrambling down the same path on a quest for long-range survival and relevance. They are driven in part by declining circulation and the prospect of online competitors coming from all directions stealing away readers and advertisers.
Sticking only to the old way of doing things, of printing a lot of one-way information once a day dictated by a rigid publication and delivery schedule that ends on the subscriber’s front porch, begs a slow death, say the experts.
I know that sounds like hyperbole. After 33 years in the newspaper business, my exaggeration detectors are sensitive.
Yet an honest look at the current state of newspapers and the impact on them and their readers by the constant push and pull of rapidly developing technology tells you the media world has changed forever and with it readers’ habits.
And, as crazy as it might sound, that could be a good thing, if newspapers are smart, creative, flexible and feisty enough to take advantage of the new challenges and opportunities.
After all, most newspapers – including The Bee – are dealing from an enviable position of strength. They are highly profitable and dominate their markets, including the Internet, with news staffs far larger than any of their competitors and the reach and expertise to produce unique content available nowhere else.
“People have different expectations now about when, how and where they get their news,” explained Rick Rodriguez, The Bee’s executive editor. “These are interesting times for the newspaper business. Everyone is trying new things. For many years, there was only one model of how to do things.
“The newspaper for quite a while will continue to have the most prominent role, but we’re evolving into a company that delivers news and content online, uses reporters doing podcasts, develops our own video, and partners with TV stations to let people know what we’re doing.”
The initial steps in that new direction were taken two weeks ago, when the paper began what it calls “a continuous news desk.”
What that means is that six people, from an assistant managing editor to a rotating photographer, will coordinate, report and update news at the paper’s Web site, sacbee.com, from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. the next day, Monday through Friday, with plans to have it working seven days a week in the future.
Already, the impact on the Web site has been dramatic. Once a straightforward, seldom changing, boring regurgitation of what was published in the morning’s paper, it is now publishing short, breaking stories throughout the day. Some live only a few hours online; others make it into the next day’s paper.
It’s a fledgling start, and the news is fast and short, but the key is that it has begun. For a paper traditionally as stodgy and risk-averse as The Bee, that’s a huge step.
“I don’t think there’s any turning back from this,” said Ralph Frattura, The Bee’s director of interactive products. “This is what we’ve wanted to do from the beginning. We’re 10 years into its life (of sacbee.com) and this is taking a big step forward … the quality and quantity of the content coming in is remarkably different.”
The Web site is also being redesigned, a process that should be complete by March or April and will include asking the public to test the tentative site, Frattura said.
For all the opportunity provided by new technology, the overall success of the paper’s efforts will rest on a cultural change inside the newsroom. Reporters and editors long tied to the rhythms of print publication will need to adjust and contribute to this additional way of disseminating news and information.
Not so long ago, that would have been a difficult sales pitch. Many newsrooms were skeptical – some even disdainful – of online journalism and its perceived lack of depth. It didn’t help that papers such as The Bee separated their online operations from the newsroom.
The techies worked at the Web sites, the journalists in the newsroom and crossover was rare.
But that culture is changing rapidly. I sat in on recent meetings held by Rodriguez and Ken Chavez, the paper’s first assistant managing editor of interactive media, as they talked to the newsroom’s staff about the continuous news desk, how it will affect everyone’s work and its importance to the paper’s future.
I came away impressed not only by the positive reception from the nearly two dozen editors and reporters at the meetings but also by the quality of ideas they suggested to improve sacbee.com’s content and make the site more efficient and easier to use.
They get it. They know change is inevitable.
Another thing made clear is that this new way of doing things, however it evolves, will largely be done by reallocating existing resources and people and not by adding new positions. That’s also the industry’s new ethos.
What that means, in part, is that a merger between the newsroom and online operations is probably inevitable. Certainly a number of other papers, most recently USA Today, have made the decision to create a single news operation.
That probably doesn’t arouse readers’ interest. They just want The Bee to give them relevant news and information.
If not, someone else will.
