Reader Bob Lovell, who calls himself a bit of a Chester County curmudgeon, may have a crystal ball at his side.
Or maybe it’s just his experience speaking, the lessons he learned from all those years as a manager for a local Fortune 500 company.
Whatever the method, Lovell has, from his perch near the Brandywine, hit the bull’s-eye when it comes to the challenges facing The Inquirer and the steps the paper is about to take.
After my last column, detailing the pressures between profit and product throughout the newspaper industry, he wrote:
“I suppose the main Inquirer question may be: If we can’t do all the things we do and do them well within budget restrictions, what should be the focus of our resources?”
And his reasoning leads directly to the point of it all: “So that we may excel at those things which most strongly define us as a newspaper.” Well said, dear reader.
The executives at the paper have been having those same conversations for several months. The answers will emerge, beginning next Monday. The picture will be different, depending upon where you live.
In the Pennsylvania suburbs, the number of local daily zoned B sections — sections that emphasize coverage of a county or part of a region — will decrease from three to one.
The separate zoned sections for Chester County, the northern Pennsylvania suburbs, and the western Pennsylvania suburbs will become a new zoned section called Local News. This section will include a local digest, a quick read of important news from Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware and Chester Counties and the Main Line.
In addition to the daily coverage, each Thursday the paper will publish five Neighbors sections in the suburbs. These will be in addition to the five Neighbors sections now produced every Sunday.
City readers will continue to receive a zoned section that will be largely unchanged. However, its name will change from City & Region to Philadelphia.
South Jersey readers will see no change in their papers on four of the five weekdays when readers get a zoned section. On Thursdays, however, that section will be zoned three ways — providing news that is specific to Camden, Gloucester and Burlington Counties. On Sundays, the three Neighbors sections will continue.
Along with the change in format will come a clear shift in news coverage strategy. Instead of pursuing intensely local stories that capture an issue in only one town, journalists will dig into local issues and broaden their reporting so stories have meaning to people across county lines.
These stories, on topics such as education, the environment and family issues, will be the backbone of the coverage, along with aggressive pursuit of breaking news. Over the next few months some reporters’ beats will evolve and new beats will be created. The rest of the paper’s core news and features coverage will remain unchanged.
The changes will allow The Inquirer to get the paper to readers earlier in the morning — before they leave for work — and provide the news in an easy-to-use format.
But in the new approach, what had been extensive daily coverage in Chester County, a costly venture, will become part of the suburban zone. Coverage of suburban Pennsylvania high school sports will change, too, becoming more regional.
Editor Robert J. Rosenthal and some staffers said they see the overall plan as a way to put the paper’s best foot forward, given a reduction in staffing.
“We need to be asking, ‘How can we put out the best paper consistently?’ ” Rosenthal told the staff in a meeting last month. “We need to have a sustainable strategy in a shifting environment.”
In a memo, he wrote, “We will cover our local area in a different way, but no less thoroughly. Our local coverage will have to be more thoughtful and creative. We must find ways to develop stories that connect with people across county boundaries.
“They may be trend stories that illuminate government policies; environmental issues, medical problems or changing social mores that affect everyone. … They may be classic yarns that transcend geography — universal stories of people and their triumphs, follies and frailties.
“Our challenge is to generate these kinds of stories consistently. We must put them at the center of our work . . . so that they become our signature as a newspaper.”
