How much local? AJC: reorganizing two content desks

The AJC has been through one of the most innovative newsroom reorganizations in the US, as previously discussed by the America Journalism Review and Columbia Journalism Review.

The AJC started by adopting a stance still hard for newspapers to accept. “But we did decide to quit chasing marginal readers in print. Instead we would tailor the newspaper for people who we know still want a newspaper, while working to grow our Web site to be metro Atlanta’s leading source for breaking news and information,” said Shawn McIntosh, director of culture and change at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and ajc.com.

The News & Information department, the largest, is staffed until midnight, seven days a week, with reporters and content gatherers. Most of the content is immediately delivered to the Digital department, to be published and packaged on the Web. The Digital department is composed of multimedia editors, interactivity editors and other Web-only staffers.

The Enterprise department gathers reporters in specialty areas including watchdog and investigative reporting, obits, profiles and criticism. Most of this content is destined to the Print department and is used exclusively for the paper. The Print department gathers designers, copyeditors, but also newly created section editors, who don’t oversee reporters but instead focus on producing the ‘best’ sections possible. “New positions include “big type writers,” who work on key headlines and captions to draw readers into pages and sections,” wrote McIntosh.

“One key change in the reorganization was to more clearly define our content-gathering mission as local,” he said.

Most of the paper’s national and international news is wire copy, which frees resources for more in-depth local coverage. “For example, an Enterprise reporter was in Hawaii in October to follow the story of a local soldier accused of murdering a detainee in Iraq.”

But four months into AJC’s reorganization, editors and journalists are still in the midst of transition. And the questions remain: how locally focused should a local newspaper be? What is required to reinvent the newspaper to serve loyal readers, rather than chasing occasional ones? How do we continue to build our digital reach to become more of the mass medium that our long-term strategy calls for?

Source: Nieman Report