This is the third in a three-part series on one of this year's main newspaper trends: the integration of newsrooms. We studied how three major newspaper companies around the world are implementing their own versions of the integrated newsroom - Telegraph Media group in the UK, Fairfax Media in Australia, and Gannett Co. in the US. 

 
For a long time – too long – print newspapers forgot or dismissed the importance of their online edition, readers’ submissions and tips, and the typical newsroom grouped good old print journalists alongside their typewriter, or laptops. Even among newsrooms that understood the significance of change early on, a complete website was only considered as a top-of-the-line innovative complement, a mark of distinction. Web staffs were often relegated to darker corners of the newsroom, if not to another building altogether. This has changed, or is changing, almost everywhere.
Papers started to merge their print and web staffs, including multimedia platforms, implementing continuous news desks and getting everybody to collaborate. That was the birth of the integrated newsroom.

So is Gannett’s IC just a sophisticated way to distinguish itself from an integrated newsroom – the models put forward by the Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald seen in parts 1 and 2?

In a way, yes. Yet the IC is a “name change that may seem rather small at first glimpse, yet in terms of traditional newspapering, is truly a movement in the force,” wrote David Ledford, executive editor of the Wilmington News Journal. Let us see if the IC is truly a movement in the force, according to Carroll.

An ordinary integrated newsroom

What is an Information Center?
The IC is a “major transformation,” which will be “delivering news and information on all platforms,” “with an intense focus on local information and interactivity,” said Carroll. There is a premium on engaging readers, understanding them better, increasing their participation, and soliciting feedback. Instead of a newsroom, the Information Center is a platform agnostic 24-hour news aggregator and distributor, which channels any and all bits of news to the appropriate platform, with focus on the reader and local coverage.
This may look like a classical description of any newspaper’s integrated newsroom, but Gannett’s main focus – and this is what distinguishes the IC – is on the last part: readers and local coverage.

Why now?
Because “the whole industry is disrupted,” said Carroll, due to the emergence of new media and participatory journalism, which often offered better solutions than newspapers did. “For many reasons our impact has eroded,” Carroll added.
The decision to implement such a structural change came after Gannett realized the whole press industry needs to be much more responsive. “There has been an innovation imperative” strategy developed in the company’s headquarters and offices.
It’s time to “not walk but run,” she said.

In the past, newsrooms tended to be “set up for a once-a-day print paper,” said Carroll, a model out of line with modern social and readership trends. Web editions will now be updated 24 hours a day. News will be distributed instantaneously, when it is useful to the reader. Noticing that most of its web traffic occurred between 8AM and noon, Gannett is now reinforcing its web staff during morning hours to play into the readership’s habits.
Print editions will also be updated, to a lesser extent – for logistical reasons – but at least these will give fuller and more actualized news than in the past. Regular updates for both print and online proved to systematically attract readers.
In these aspects, Gannett’s IC is little more than a modern newsroom – continuous and integrated.

Within offices, the biggest investment was technological. The IC’s primary financial costs came from implementing online features, acquiring high-tech devices and developing mobile capacities in small, local newsrooms. Newspapers also created new desks, such as Multimedia or Data, to focus on the ICs objectives.
In terms of human resources, ICs have been reorganized to emphasize some positions that were left out from traditional newsrooms, such as librarians and archivists, who now have a more active take in the production.
Multimedia training sessions are organized for staffers – meant not as much to diversify their skills as to expand on them: photographers learn more about videography, managing editors about effective use of new technologies and resources, traditional reporters about online editions.
All staffers, in general, will collaborate and network more closely than they have in the past. While they remain specialized, the IC really increases the focus on the redirection and channeling of news bits: every staffer becomes a pivot piece of information, until the information has reached the appropriate platform and distributor.

These changes are all very welcome, but they don’t sound as revolutionary as to require a memo to all employees from CEO Craig Dubow, nor do they seem to really differ from The New York Times or Washington Post implementations of continuous news desks and multimedia staffer training. In fact, these are the same new features that we uncovered in the Telegraph and Sydney Herald’s integrated newsroom models.

Less ordinary: more local and reader-friendly

The IC’s success, and where it hopes to truly ‘move the force’ and be more than an integrated newsroom, is based on readers’ collaboration, community conversation and local services.
The IC aims to implement simple pragmatic features on a local level, such as improved databases, automated online calendars, mobile services and sharing video capacities. When US-13 north was closed down due to an accident, the Wilmington News Journal sent out a mobile alert to subscribers, letting them know of the incident. According to editor Ledford, this saved a number of people from wasting hours on the freeway.
Streaming continuous news on online editions, an experiment carried out beginning 2006 in The Wilmington News Journal, delivered amazing results. Within a year, the website’s unique page views rose 15 to 20%, and the average time spent on site soared 66% said Carroll. According to Ledford, ‘individual clicks’ on the website’s news content rose from 4 to 6.5 million From September to October 2006, after the paper established its 24-7 news-gathering plan.
Gannett’s papers especially boost their reliance on community interaction and participation, for example through local blogs – DesMoinesRegister.com counts 40 bloggers and another 27 at dmjuice.com.
The News-Press in Fort Myers enjoyed success using another one of Gannett’s IC strategies, dubbed ‘crowd-sourcing’. More than interaction with the community, or participatory journalism, the News-Press was able “to enlist the community in a major investigation into local public utilities,” wrote Mackenzie Warren, editor of the Fort Myers-based News Press. The newspaper started with an ordinary investigation on controversial public utilities and called its readers to participate, investigate, or simply comment. This ‘crowd-sourcing’ technique engaged the public so much that within six weeks the city cut assessment fees by 30% and renegotiated the public utilities’ project. Warren added: “not only did… ‘crowd-sourcing’ unleash the power of people to speak out, it unleashed the power of people anywhere to respond.” 

According to Carroll, everybody is “excited and enthusiastic,” and the reaction was “tremendous and immediate.” Of course, this view comes from one of the Information Center’s loving parents.
Readers, who were confined to reading a print paper at home or from a computer screen, are now involved and can participate. “Suddenly they are part of the community again.” And they supposedly benefit from more personable local coverage, as mentioned above.
The IC can also prove to be helpful in order to attract advertisers, as its focus on community and local issues makes the newspapers that much more effective in targeting niche audiences. If a local paper links to a community portal for, say, mothers, then advertisers know exactly what kind of audience they’re selling to.
As for journalists, many of them were once passionate about either reporting, the first amendment, or their communities, but then became disillusioned with the realities of the job. The goal is to “rekindle and expand upon those passions,” said Carroll. Journalists can now “enjoy being part of the community conversation again.” There has been a significant increase in the number of mobile journalists, who now have a full-time job living amongst and communicating with the subjects they cover.

You don’t get a whole population involved and engaged with an integrated newsroom; you might with the IC. Gannett’s main strength and interest in establishing the IC is its unique and well-bound network of regional and community newspapers, which are often the main source of news, and of communal unity, for the population.

The IC project is company-wide, and doesn’t affect only newspapers. It also will eventually include the participation and structural transformation of Gannett’s broadcasting division.
Gannett ran pilot operations on 11 test sites, three of them which were full scale implementations of the IC (Des Moines, Sioux Falls, and Brevard).
The results of these test sites apparently revealed three main incentives to continue the IC experiment: regularly updating both online and print editions makes both platforms more attractive to the reader, asking for the public’s participation results in even more than expected, and expanding local coverage gets public approval. 
By May, all or nearly all of Gannett’s 90 local papers should be up and running said Carroll. USA Today, Gannett’s flagship newspaper, won’t be submitted to the same regime – this might sound paradoxical. Because USA Today is a national publication, with a wingspan and aims that differ from the majority of Gannett’s local papers, explained Carroll.
That doesn’t mean USA Today is excluded from this change, as Gannett’s flagship newsroom is already more integrated than that of its smaller papers. In a way, USA Today will be Gannett’s black sheep integrated newsroom, since it can’t nearly provide such minutious local coverage and attention to its specific readers.

Integrated newsroom, Local Information Center: a shallow debate
The pros and cons of this new editorial model

Are ICs a subtle way to declare the disappearance of print?
No. In fact “increased focus on online has helped print” develop, and vice-versa. The ideal objective is to “create more of a synergy between online and print,” said Carroll.
For example, the print sections ‘letters to the editor’ now can include comments and discussions left on the online forum. Print editions can refer to community databases that are then available online. And the growth of user-content has provided newspapers with more leads, user submissions and suggestions that improve the quality of print.
The Local Information Center does change the actual role of print though, to the extent that print isn’t considered to be the primary news platform anymore. It’s still an essential one, but it’s far from being the only one. More and more, print will be an in-depth condense of major news, rather than the generalist news source it used to be traditionally. “We’ll publish in print the best of it (news), the most insightful of it,” wrote Carolyn Washburn, editor of The Des Moines Register. Some sort of an in-depth summary of the whole of the news, available online.

Name changes and appellations have never substantially improved or destroyed a system. Adaptation – or lack thereof – is responsible for that. And Gannett is trying to stay ahead by changing its whole editorial process and way of seeing its role as a news bearer. Precisely, newspapers aren’t solely news distributors anymore, they are now the richest sources of cross-interest information for the local population they reach out to. In this respect, Gannett differs from the evolution of the newsrooms at Fairfax Media and the Telegraph, which we studied previously.

Of course, transformation always begets challenges: “not everybody loves change,” said Carroll diplomatically. She wasn’t too keen on describing the adversities and problems that come along with the establishment of ICs, but did mention a “concern about being spread too thin.” “I’m sure it gets messy,” she added vaguely, possibly referring to lost jobs, or die-hard traditional newspaper-people clinging to their old model.
Yet Carroll emphasized the “imperative to continue to experiment,” in order for Gannett, and “as an industry, to be much more nimble, more competitive.” A necessary optimism and outlook beyond rather than behind. “Embracing the future,” said Carroll.

Now, we realize that most points of view expressed here are those of Gannett partisans. If you do have other view or stories about Gannett’s implementations, we want to know more about those too. Some journalists, as reported by Amy Gahran from the Poynter Institute, feared Gannett’s initiative was putting an end to professional in-depth journalism: here we simply let Gannett’s voices rebut.
It’s rosy, but it’s also the kind of positivity and impetus for innovation that newspapers need in this day and age. Best of luck to Gannett’s Information Centers, and to the other newspapers that follow suit in their adaptation to changing times.


Source: Editors Weblog - Jennifer Carroll, VP New Media at Gannett

For a list of links to other stories about the Information Center, click here.