July 2019 - Editor & Publisher Digital Edition

Preparing for 2020 News organizations ramp up for an election cycle certain to be dynamic, fast-paced and combative JULY 2019 | EDITORANDPUBLISHER.COM

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The good old days are what got us to this point: bankruptcies, buyouts, diminished revenues. To continue with business-as-usual will just get us more of the same. In order to survive, to thrive even, we must change what we offer our customers. New products based on their needs, not our

capabilities. New solutions rooted in digital technology. We must be innovative, fearless, unsentimental. PRINTÂŽ 19 will be a forum on this brave

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A Section

Features

Departments

PREDICTING THE TEXT

Entering Uncharted Territory

CRITICAL THINKING

Talk to Transformer web app automatically responds to prompts . . . . . . . . . . p. 8

PROTECTING THE BADGE

USA Today Network investigation exposes high-ranking police officers with records of serious misconduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 9

PAYING IT BACK

Now debt free, Sonoma Media Investments focuses on investing in quality journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 12

Newspapers find creative and imaginative pathways to discover new revenue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 32

Preparing for 2020 News organizations ramp up for an election cycle certain to be dynamic, fast-paced and combative . . . . . . . p. 38

How can the media improve its coverage of climate change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 15

DATA PAGE Desktop vs. mobile internet advertising revenue, topics that work best on different platforms, pay models across media types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 18

PRODUCTION Don’t miss out on projects by not having the right equipment in place . . . . .p. 26

TRANSPARENCY MADE SIMPLE

NEWSPEOPLE

McClatchy creates feature to help journalists include background information p. 13

New hires, promotions and relocations across the industry . . . . . . . . . . . . .p. 44

REAL WORLD EXPERIENCE

SHOPTALK

University of Kansas journalism students provide coverage for a city without a newspaper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 14

Facebook’s ‘fake news’ problem won’t be solved by banning trolls . . . . . . . . .p. 50

PHOTO OF THE MONTH

Sydney Schaefer/Watertown Daily Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 16

Columns INDUSTRY INSIGHT

BUSINESS OF NEWS

DIGITAL PUBLISHING

To slow decline, newspaper print editions should act their age . . . . . . . . . . . . .p. 20

A journalist’s job is to report, not to persuade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 22

Journalists should do more digging when it comes to quoting studies . . . . . . . .p. 24

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editorial

Cuts Like a Knife

R

ight before Memorial Weekend, GateHouse Media announced a major round of layoffs that would affect properties around the country. GateHouse is currently the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. as far as titles go with 156 daily papers and 464 weeklies under its umbrella.

Business Insider reported the number of people losing their jobs could be around 200, but Mike Reed, CEO of GateHouse’s parent company New Media Investment Group, denied the figure. Later, he admitted to Poynter that the restructuring would indeed affect a couple hundred people, but most of them would be reassigned to new positions.

To Reed, 200 didn’t seem like a lot. He told Business Insider, “We have 11,000 employees, a lot to me is 2,000.”

Whether it’s 200 or 2,000 employees, these cuts hurt the business.

A week before GateHouse’s announcement, Angie Muhs, executive editor of the State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill. resigned “in hopes of sparing more layoffs,” according to a story by the Associated Press.

The State Journal-Register is owned by GateHouse. Muhs had served as the paper’s editor since 2014.

“It’s sad she felt she had to do this because GateHouse says its focus is local news,” said staff writer Dean Olsen. “We’re waiting for them to show us how they’re going to fulfill that mission.”

GateHouse also let go the editor and arts editor of the Massachusetts-based Worcester Magazine, leaving only one editorial staff person in charge of putting out the paper— reporter Bill Shaner, who tweeted “Pray for me” after he announced the newsroom departures.

According to media analyst Ken Doctor, these cuts are becoming the norm as the industry heads to even more consolidation. In a Nieman Lab article, Doctor theorized that a Gannett/Tribune or a Gannett/GateHouse combination now seems plausible.

“Consolidation means whacking one company’s big headquarters cost, and that savings buys the surviving CEO time to strategize forward. With a big rollup, we might, at 4 |

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least in the short term, see fewer newsroom layoffs,” Doctor wrote.

That wasn’t the case in early May when the six-year-old New Orleans Advocate purchased its 182-year-old rival, the TimesPicayune from Advance Local. As a result, the entire Times-Picayune staff was let go, and both papers would continue as a single operation.

And it was only three years ago when Tribune Publishing rejected Gannett’s unsolicited $815 million offer (Tribune also rejected an offer from McClatchy late last year).

Now the shoe is on the other foot; Gannett, publisher of USA Today and more than 100 local media properties, was able to fend off a takeover bid from Alden Global Capital’s MNG Enterprises Inc. (aka Digital First Media) not too long ago. Still, consolidation is not off the tables. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were recent merger talks between Gannett and GateHouse.

According to the article, “Should GateHouse and Gannett reach a deal, the combined company would be the largest U.S. publisher by number of titles and circulation.”

As Doctor predicts, these types of mergers may not be that far in the future (he calls it “megaclustering”). It seems like in order to survive, these newspaper groups need to literally become one. It’s a somber situation, but in order to stop the cutting, it may be a necessary choice.

One example is Lee Enterprises joining forces with Warren Buffett’s BH Media Group, Inc. last summer. Although Berkshire Hathaway remains as owner, Lee now manages the group’s 30 daily newspaper and digital operations, 46 weekly newspapers and websites, and 32 other print products.

“Although the challenges in publishing are clear, I believe we can benefit by joining efforts,” Buffett said at the time in a press release. “Operating together will strengthen both of us.”

But it was a different tune in April when the billionaire said in an interview with Yahoo that most newspapers were “toast.”

Whether or not that includes his own papers, that still hurts to hear.—NY

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6/18/19 1:19 PM

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2019 CALL FOR ENTRIES Begins June 4

Honoring the Best in Digital Media The EPPYTM Awards, presented by Editor & Publisher, honor the best in digital media across 30 diverse categories, including excellence in college and university journalism. Now in its 24th year, this international contest has broadened its scope and also includes categories for investigative features, mobile apps,

videos, webcasts, advertising/marketing, photography and community service.

Entries to the EPPYTM Awards are judged by a panel of notable figures in the media industry, chosen by the staff of Editor & Publisher.

For more information, please contact: Entry deadline: Aug. 23, 2019 Martha McIntosh at martha@editorandpublisher.com eppyawards.com

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comments )))

PTSD is a Very Serious Issue I thought this was a very topical and important question to be asked and answered. (“Critical Thinking: Should U.S. Newspapers Be Legally Responsible for the Mental Health of Their Journalists?” May 2019) I have to say that Windsor Burkland, 21 and still in college, had the fairer and more well thought-out answer to a very critical subject in this day and time. PTSD is very serious— and should be taken as so. Margaret McKenzie (no age given) is way out of touch with reality and maybe living a couple decades ago. If she really feels this antiquated in her thinking, I would hope the people that work with/for her will see that she’ll not support them with whatever mental issues they might encounter in their reporting future— nor obviously in the past with The Conway Daily Sun. In fact, they may be too afraid to say anything.

PHYLLIS BRITTON Advertising Director Arkansas Times

What Counts as an Injury?

Newspapers are no more or less responsible for injuries incurred in the workplace than any other employer. (“Critical Think6 |

E & P | JULY 2019

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ing: Should U.S. Newspapers Be Legally Responsible for the Mental Health of Their Journalists?” May 2019) For journalists to claim otherwise is selfaggrandizing service to their own egos. Construction workers risk injuring their backs. Courts must determine the extent to which a claimant’s back injury is work related and how much might be a result of other activities. Few journalists witness much real horror.

Combat journalists are the exception and even among combat journalists, the real horror can be rare. Journalists walking around nursing perceived psychological injuries might not be up to the job. In many cases, their “injury” is cognitive dissonance between the idea they think they can think a better world into being (according to their unique view of what would be better) and the reality that their job is to observe and report.

JOAN SWANK

Submitted on editorandpublisher.com

Number of Digital Readers Should Be a ‘Wake-Up Call’ Problem is that the people responsible for this are print centric and have not transitioned well to online. (“Keeping Citizens Informed,” May 2019) As of my last contact, there really is no mechanism for online outlets to be an Illinois Press Association member as their membership fee structure is based on cost of advertising on paper pages. Maybe it’s possible now. Maybe they have changed how they calculate membership fees and how membership levels are structured. Many of the weekly paper publications are not doing a very good job of reporting in-depth local news. At best, they are putting on paper what most electronic device savvy consumers have already known for nearly a week. Regurgitating press releases and running images that most of the community has seen on a social media

platform is not going to generate ad revenue from younger people as they take over local businesses. Most of them never pick up a print paper and always get news via the web. Seventy-five to 80 percent of online news is now viewed by someone using a phone. That number is real and it should be a wake-up call. I believe that the news bureau is a great addition and resource for those that can utilize it, but having a password protected web page for content distribution to weekly print publications is almost comical.

MICHAEL WEAVER

Submitted on editorandpublisher.com

Engagement Efforts Pay Off This is a terrific column. (“Asking Readers for Help,” May 2019) It captures one of the innovative ways our newsrooms are responding to fewer resources and building trust with their local communities. The Seattle Times started our engagement effort in 2012 as part of a Gates Foundation grant to launch ED LAB (now in its eighth year)—a dedicated staff devoted to robust education coverage. Gates insisted we implement a fulsome engagement effort and work with the nascent Solutions Journalism organization to develop a solutions approach to our education coverage. Skeptical as I was at the outset, I am now a huge advocate. The combinations of these two innovations are now part of newsroom fabric and they have made us a far more impactful newspaper/ public service organization then we could even imagine eight years ago. Our local “Civic Value” today is downright awesome, thanks in large part due to these innovations.

FRANK BLETHEN Publisher Seattle Times

Submitted on editorandpublisher.com

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Connecting the complex facets of publishing with vision and purpose

2019

PUBLISHER The accelerating pace of change

in today’s information age requires a greater need for effective leadership. A successful newspaper leader must not only strategize from the trenches with practicality and realism, but also think with foresight

OF THE YEAR Submit Your Publisher of the Year Nomination Today Official nomination form available online: e d i to ra n d p u b l i s h e r.co m /p oy

and imagination.

We are looking to honor a publisher who has risen above the rest

Submission Information:

and accomplished what seems like

Please complete the online form and include a short synopsis of why the nominee should receive recognition.

Include specific leadership successes, innovative program development, and obstacles and challenges overcome.

the impossible, outmaneuvering the competition, outthinking the future and maintaining profitability.

We are seeking your assistance in recognizing a leader with business acumen, technical savvy, and a deep understanding of what needs to be done to stay successful — along with the fortitude and tenacity to implement change.

Eligibility:

• Submission time period: Now through Sept. 20, 2019.

• All entries will be treated with strict confidence. But the selected publisher should be prepared to be interviewed by Editor & Publisher for the special “Publisher of the Year” issue.

• “Publisher of the Year” recognition is open to all newspaper publishers worldwide, from papers large and small.

Nomination Deadline: Sept. 20, 2019

the A section VOLUME 152

FOR THE MONTH OF JULY 2019

ISSUE 7

> Look Ahead

Predicting the Text Talk to Transformer web app automatically responds to prompts

By Evelyn Mateos

R

eporters, fact-checkers, engineers, scientists and more have all concerned themselves with artificial intelligence (AI) for some time now, but Adam King, a machine learning/AI engineer decided to lighten things up a bit with his recent experiment called Talk to Transformer (TalkToTransformer.com). The new web app lets anyone enter a text prompt to which the AI software will automatically complete.

While King created the site, the underlying technology comes from OpenAI’s algorithm named GPT-2, which was released earlier this year. According to King, OpenAI choose to hold back the full language model but released a smaller version, which he noticed was still interesting and entertaining.

“It quickly occurred to me that my appreciation of it didn’t require any understanding of how it worked, and so someone should make a website to enable the general public to play with it,” King said. } Adam King Modifying the open source implementa8 |

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tion of OpenAI’s model (called 345M for the 345 million parameters it uses), the website only took about two weeks to put together.

Talk to Transformer launched in early May. King said he faced two challenges: making the website computationally efficient to accept many queries at the same time and enabling the app to generate the text incrementally so users weren’t sitting around waiting for output.

“OpenAI themselves seem to like the site so I’m happy about that,” King said. “A lot of people are (also) reaching out thanking me for making the site. They seem to enjoy the model as much as I did.”

The young engineer shared that the website is likely to remain a “very simple toy.” But as more intelligent language models come out, he will upgrade the site. He reminds E&P that OpenAI’s full GPT-2 model has 4.5 times more parameters than what we see on Talk to Transformer and is much more coherent.

In fact, King thought it was important to note that “GPT-2 was trained simply to predict what comes next on a web page, but in order to do so it incidentally learned how to translate between languages” due to the multiple pages online that have text in other languages. This is a massive example of “unsupervised learning,” King explained.

This language-model technology is already well beyond what we are seeing in King’s creation, potentially posing a threat to journalism.

“GPT-2 is a bit of a problem for journalism in that it can mass produce false stories that are hardly detectable as being computergenerated,” King said. “Finding what’s true and what’s not will become more difficult.”

“GPT-2 was trained simply to predict what comes next on a web page…”

editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 1:36 PM

the A section

Protecting the Badge USA Today Network investigation exposes high-ranking police officers with records of serious misconduct

C

itizens across America should be able to trust law enforcement, but a recent USA Today Network investigation called Tarnished Brass (bit.ly/2ZyQsju) has found the opposite, exposing hundreds of officers with troubling records. The investigation discovered that not only is there a system that keeps them safe, but it allows those officers to climb through the ranks and eventually become police chiefs.

Tarnished Brass is an ongoing investigation, and so far includes articles (the first one was published April 24), a searchable database of more than 30,000 officers that have been banned from their profession in at least one state, and thousands of pages of underlying public records. Email blasts are also sent to read-

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ers who have an intense interest in policing in America.

There is also a video account of one man who became a po} John Kelly lice chief in Ohio despite having a criminal conviction and a series of serious misconduct investigations.

The idea for the project originated in 2016. Local newsrooms were interested in the topic based on the issues they were seeing in their communities and the difficulty of obtaining information.

“Every USA Today Network newsroom is involved in some way,” John Kelly, director of data journalism, said.

“Starting with assisting in the gathering and sharing } Chris Davis of records.”

However, it was a core group of about 20 journalists from USA Today and the network’s local newsrooms that requested, obtained and digitized hundreds of thousands of pages of public records from various police departments, sheriffs, prosecutors and state agencies. Kelly said the Network is also partnering with outside media organizations as well.

While Kelly said it’s tricky to say how many records they have acquired so far, he said they had “an accounting of misconduct or alleged misconduct for at least 225,000 distinct incidents involving at least 85,000 police officers digitized.” The Network still has a substantial and unknown amount of records left to digitize.

The project has received mostly a positive response, even from those in law enforcement. Kelly said that the stories are well read, the database is heavily used, and they have received more than 550 tips on police misconduct from readers.

Vice president of investigations Chris Davis added, “How local governments police our communities is and always has been one of the most basic things covered by journalists. That has gotten more and more difficult as secrecy around police misconduct has increased. We see this as a fundamental way for reporters to be able to hold their governments accountable.”

USA Today Network has committed reporting resources to Tarnished Brass through 2019 and the database will continue to be updated.—EM

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the A section Tornoe’s Corner

OF THE MONTH In an effort to bring stories to life in a unique way for readers, the Washington Post recently released an eight-minute animated, virtual reality film based on the true story of a first grader’s journey of trauma and loss following a school shooting. The 360-video can be viewed on desktop and mobile at wapo.st/12seconds and on all VR headsets, including the Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR and HTC Vive.

The video, titled “12 Seconds of Gunfire: The True Story of a School Shooting,” was based on reporting by John Woodrow Cox during the Townville Elementary School shooting in 2016. It was directed

by Post design editor Suzette Moyer and senior developer Seth Blanchard, and illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook.

“The story is so powerful emotionally, and this presentation makes it even more compelling,” Lynda Robinson, Post enterprise editor, said in a press release.

“When users are fully surrounded by the virtual environment, they feel the story and experience the child’s emotion in ways they never could in text alone.”

This is the newspaper’s second venture into virtual reality; the first was in 2016 and featured an interactive journey that took users through Mars.–EM

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LEGAL BRIEFS Man Accused of the Capital Gazette Attack Pleads Not Guilty Jarrod Ramos, the man accused of killing five employees at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md. in June 2018, has changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity.

The Associated Press (AP) reported that lawyers for Ramos said in April that he was not criminally responsible “because of a mental disorder” and because he lacked the “capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct.” Generally, a judge or jury would consider whether the defendant is not criminally responsible after the trial, said the AP, but the state will conduct its own evaluation to determine whether Ramos is not criminally responsible. Prosecutors are seeking life in prison without possibility of parole. If Ramos is ultimately found not criminally responsible, he could be confined to a mental health prison facility. A trial is scheduled to start in November.

County Board Settles Lawsuit with Wisconsin Newspaper Over Records According to the Baraboo News Republic in Portage, Wis., the Sauk County Board voted in May to settle a lawsuit against the newspaper over the release of documents.

The newspaper sued the county in November 2017 contesting the government’s refusal to release certain documents and its redactions to others. The documents mainly involved the case of a man found dead on property the county deemed a public hazard, as well as controversies over the hiring and firing of administrative officials.

The county settled to hand over the documents to the newspaper and pay $35,000 to reimburse a portion of its legal fees. The county’s insurance provider will compensate another $10,000. editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 2:39 PM

the A section From the Archive

511 The number of days Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were jailed in Myanmar after being convicted of breaking the Official Secrets Act. The journalists were released in May.

 A. Matt Werner, editor and publisher of the Sheboygan (Wis.) Press, is shown at the wheel of “The News Hound,” a doggy-looking racer, which Press employees constructed. The Tin Can Race was held in conjunction with the Soap Box Derby competition co-sponsored by the Press. This photo originally appeared in the Aug. 15, 1959 issue of E&P.

> Wise Advice “What will your prior work experience bring to your new role as chief innovation officer for Local Media Association and as you help media organizations?”

I spent my career in a mix of newspapers, television and electronics companies, as everything from copy editor to art director to president of digital. All of those jobs required different modes of thinking, creativity and effort. But all moved quickly, required the ability to be both strategic and reactive, and by nature forced me to focus on people skills and

 Jay Small editorandpublisher.com

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negotiation.

Everyone in local media faces disruptions in some form, and does so with limited resources and time to cope. I hope I can draw on my experience to help media leaders choose the right paths—and they will find more than one—to a successful future for local news.

In January, Jay Small became chief innovation officer of Local Media Association, which serves more than 3,000 newspapers, broadcasters, digital news sites, directories and research and development partners. He previously served as president of Cordillera Digital, a division of Cordillera Communications that led digital strategy, sales, marketing and operations for TV stations nationwide. Small also held senior digital posts at The E.W. Scripps Co., Belo Corp. and Thomson Consumer Electronics.

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the A section

Paying It Back Now debt free, Sonoma Media Investments focuses on investing in quality journalism

} Darius Anderson

} Executive editor Catherine Barnett embraces reporter Martin Espinoza after the Press Democrat won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in April 2018. At left, reporters JD Morris and Christi Warren celebrate along with director of photography Chad Surmick, middle left, with city editors Brett Wilkison and Steve Levin, middle right, and reporter Kevin McCallum. (Photo by Kent Porter / Press Democrat)

W

hen Sonoma Media Investments acquired the Santa Rosa (Calif.)

Press Democrat, Petaluma Argus-Courier and North Bay Business Journal from Halifax Media in 2012, the newspaper returned to local ownership for the first time in 27 years. It also accrued about $15 million in debt and equity funding to purchase the publications. Since then, Sonoma Media has worked to fortify and invest in the newspaper and clear all its debts. In April, the company accomplished that goal.

Darius Anderson, owner and founder of Kenwood Investments (which created Sonoma Media), wanted to strengthen local journalism in his hometown and create the largest network in the North Bay. So, when the Press Democrat and its affiliated publications became available, Sonoma Media immediately purchased them.

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Because the company was doing well, it was able to pay investors back in small increments over the course of seven years.

The next step was to recruit the right investors. “I looked for profiles of prominent individuals in our community that cared about the greater community good,” Anderson said. In the end, the group included the likes of Sandy Weill, the retired CEO and chairman of Citigroup, and Jeannie Schulz, the widow of Charles Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip.

Anderson made sure that these investors understood their role—that they would not interfere with any editorial content. Instead,

they would focus on the business practices and financial decisions. The company would meet once a quarter with these investors to discuss advertising, circulation, general mainte-

nance issues and the like.

This separation allowed the newsroom to meet the needs of the community, leading to successful coverage and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. Reinvestment in the right management and the right staff, such as wage increases and competitive health care plans, while utilizing technology and making sure resources were used effectively all made for a wellrun organization.

It wasn’t too long before the company was able to maintain advertising dollars, strong circulation revenue and became “cash flow positive.” Because the company was doing well, it was able to pay investors back in small increments over the course of the previous seven years.

In January, the company also sold what Anderson called “non-essential assets,” which in this case was excess property that previous owners had purchased with the intention to build a second printing press.

The sale made the retirement of all remaining debt to investors possible.

Anderson said his formula for success included being in the right market. He also added, “Refocus on local assets, understand your customer base and what their needs are, hire the best possible journalists, cover all the issues that are relevant to readers, and make sure that you have a clear vision on where you want to go.”—EM editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 1:37 PM

the A section

Transparency Made Simple McClatchy creates feature to help journalists include background information

A

s of late, transparency is almost imperative for news consumers. McClatchy has taken this into consideration and developed what it calls a “background card,” which allows news organizations to embed the card into articles and easily explain who they are, how they do their work and why they do it.

After brainstorming sessions between McClatchy’s product and design team and the Kansas City Star as well as conversations with the Fresno (Calif.) Bee newsroom, the company created the card, which allows users to include the background information directly to their content management system.

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In April, McClatchy launched the feature through one of the News Co/Lab’s company-wide webinars.

“Our reporters and editors, especially in Kansas City and Fresno, have been sharing ‘behind the story’ information for many of their enterprise-type ‘big’ packages,” Ryan Tuck, McClatchy’s product manager for news strategy, said in a News Co/Lab article. “But they had been doing so somewhat manually, via separate stories that they linked from the main packages.” Now the tool is more flexible and built into the reading experience.

Although the “background card” is primarily used as a transparency tool, it’s also being used in other creative ways. For example, the Idaho Statesman invited further engagement by asking readers to share their feedback and suggest follow-up coverage and stories.

While the feature seems to be going well so far, according to the News Co/Lab article, McClatchy still considers the project a work in progress and plans to develop it further based on metrics and use.—EM

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the A section

Real World Experience University of Kansas journalism students provide coverage for a city without a newspaper

} The Eudora Times social media team: (from left) Nargiza Negahban, Terrell Henderson, Natalia Ramos-Thaw and Annalise Baines

A

s an assistant professor at the University of Kansas’ School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Teri Finneman understands that nothing can replace actual real world experience. So, when the professor learned that the nearby city of Eudora, Kan. no longer had a local newspaper, she knew this was an opportunity for her students to take the skills they learned in the classroom and apply it to a real newsroom—one they call the Eudora Times.

The idea originated from Finneman’s time at South Dakota State University, where the journalism school had partnered with a local newspaper. When she arrived in Kansas last fall, Finneman knew she wanted to start a similar program.

“In the process of deciding what I wanted to do…it (occurred) to me that Eudora is a town of 6,000 people and they didn’t have a newspaper,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe that a community of that size didn’t have its own newspaper anymore.”

Finneman headed to Eudora’s city hall to inquire about a partnership, where her social media students would cover some of the events in the community and post photos and videos to the city’s Facebook page.

“It became apparent very quickly how much the people in this community really, really wanted news of itself,” Finneman said. In response to the enthusiasm, Finneman decided to get her multimedia class involved about halfway through the semester.

As Finneman assigned them stories, she realized she needed a

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} The homepage of the Eudora Times

place to put all of the content they were producing. Over the course of a day, she managed to put together the website (eudoratimes.wixsite.com/news), which went live two months prior to the end of the spring semester. During that time, students wrote a total of 16 stories for the site.

That semester acted as a pilot semester, and come fall Finneman plans on involving more students. She also told E&P that podcasting may be in the } Teri Finneman future.

“We’ll probably think of some kind of theme that we can use and have a (different) theme each semester,” she said.

Finneman also mentioned she and her students will work on increasing the number of multimedia components in the stories as well.

An opportunity like this—to get out of the bubble of a university and meet different people—is an “invaluable experience” for the students, said Finneman.

“When you’re working as a journalist, you have to interview people of all different ages from all different stages of life,” she said.—EM editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 1:37 PM

critical thinking

If you have a question you would like to see addressed, please send it to evelyn@editorandpublisher.com.

J-school students and industry vets tackle the tough questions

“How can the media improve its coverage of climate change?”

A:

Climate change is the impossible challenge of my generation. How do you even begin to cover an impossible story?

The questions being posed by climate change are unlike anything humanity has ever seen—therefore, the approach to covering its story has Michael Moore Jr., 30 to be unlike anything being done in senior, University of South journalism. The digital age of journalFlorida, St. Petersburg, Fla. ism has changed things: infotainment Moore was editor of his camhas been ushered in as a regular part pus newspaper, The Crow’s of the news cycle as ratings, clicks Nest in 2017 and secretary of his campus’ chapter of the Onand ad revenue dominates newsroom line News Association (ONA). thinking while we continue to struggle He is also the president and with the notion of how to sustainably founder of ONA’s podcast and audio journalism learning pay for quality reporting. committee. After graduation, This is particularly important to Moore will cover aging for the recognize when talking about a story Sarasota Herald-Tribune. that people don’t want to hear, but need to hear: climate change.

As gatekeepers, it is our obligation to give readers, viewers and consumers the hard truths that they need regardless of ratings.

Climate change has often been talked about as a “ratings killer”—if that’s the case, then we need to continue to figure out more ways to make these stories compelling while figuring out how to pay for them.

That means more nonprofit news organizations, As gatekeepers, it is our more fellowships and more foundations. The future of obligation to give readers, our planet is at stake: it’s viewers and consumers the worth investing in. hard truths that they need But it’s not all about money.

We, as reporters, regardless of ratings. need to do a better job at putting a human face on these stories. People look at it as humans versus nature, or as right versus left, but at the end of the day this is the story of humanity, the consequences of said humanity, and if nothing changes, the fate of humanity.

People relate to the human element in stories. Climate change is already affecting communities all over the globe and will only continue to do so as its impacts are amplified—let’s all strive to do a better job at telling those stories. editorandpublisher.com

+Critical.indd 15

A:

In May, the Guardian changed its style guide to instruct reporters to use “climate crisis” instead of climate change.

But the problem with climate coverage isn’t the terminology—it’s the scarcity of it.

This spring’s deadly spate of tornadoes and floods are just the latest Meaghan Parker, 47 executive director, Society of examples of extreme weather becoming Environmental Journalists, more frequent and more severe. But Washington, D.C. few stories connect these disasters to Parker became the executive our changing climate. A Media Matters director in 2018 after serving study of U.S. major network television six years as a member of SEJ’s coverage identified only one story—out board of directors. Previously, she was the senior writer/ of 127—that linked 2018’s heat wave to editor and partnerships direcclimate change; and found zero televitor for the Wilson Center’s sion stories on climate change during Environmental Change and Security Program. the previous year’s hurricane season.

For a change to occur, more reporters must become familiar with basic climate science, and more editors and producers must understand that climate change is not just an environment story. But industry trends continue to push struggling local newspapers to lay off “luxury” beats like environment, TV news to ignore science coverage, and veteran environmental journalists to decamp to niche outlets.

Without climate science education for the reporters and their editorial gatekeepers, local news outlets may continue to fail to cover the crisis in their own backyards.

Training opportunities—like the covering climate change workshop at the upcoming Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference—bring together scientists and reporters to not only learn about climate science, but how to explain it so that the public can understand, and how to pitch it so that editors will buy it.

Other successful approaches include independent online news sites, like Southerly magazine, that delve into the local impacts of environmental change. Science-journalist partnerships like Climate Central’s work with local meteorologists bring climate change into living rooms from Albany to Phoenix. And personal stories—like the Groundtruth Project’s short films on Somalia and the Philippines— document the human toll of climate change.

Science-based, objective local journalism is our best weapon in the climate crisis. In today’s polarized politics, ceding public science education to advocacy campaigns threatens to undermine the legitimacy of climate science and will simply preach to the converted. The best way to improve climate coverage is to increase it in the first place.  JULY 2019 | E & P

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photo of the month

NAP BUDDIES ď ˝ Sydney Schaefer/Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times Aurora Place, 2, lies on top of one of the many hundreds of goats her family owns at Hidden Pastures Dairy Farm in Glenfield, N.Y.

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editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 1:37 PM

Send us your photos! E&P welcomes reader submissions for our Photo of the Month. evelyn@editorandpublisher.com.

editorandpublisher.com

+ASection.indd 17

JULY 2019 | E & P

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data page Desktop vs. Mobile Internet Advertising Revenue Full year results; in billions

MOBILE INCREASED ITS REVENUE SHARE TO 65.1% IN 2018.

Desktop

Mobile

2009

$22.7

N/A

2010

$25.4

$0.6

60

2011

$30.1

$1.6

50

2012

$33.2

$3.4

40

2013

$35.7

$7.1

2014

$37.0

$12.5

2015

$38.9

$20.7

2016

$35.9

$36.7

2017

$38.2

$50.1

2018

$37.6

$69.9

80 70

30 20 10 0 2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

Source: IAB/PwC Internet Ad Revenue Report, May 2019 *IAB compiles a database of industry participants selling internet/online and mobile advertising revenues; 2009 excludes mobile because data was not available

Who Talks to Local Journalists?

Based on a survey of 34,897 U.S. adults

% OF U.S. ADULTS WHO HAVE EVER SPOKEN WITH OR BEEN INTERVIEWED BY A LOCAL JOURNALIST 23%

White

1% No answer

No

78%

Yes

21%

19%

Black Hispanic Ages 18-29 30-49 50-64 65+

14% 17% 19%

23% 25% 27%

College+

23%

Some college HS or less $75+ $30K-$74,999K <$30K

14% 26% 20% 17%

Source: Pew Research Center, survey conducted Oct. 15-Nov. 8, 2018 *White and blacks include those who report being only one race and are non-Hispanic

18 |

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editorandpublisher.com

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Topics That Work the Best on Different Platforms Based on the most viewed topics on the Parse.ly network by referrer

FACEBOOK

GOOGLE

INSTAGRAM

Law, govt., politics Health and fitness Science Television News

Tech and computing Law, govt., politics Science Business Television

Television Health and fitness Arts and entertainment Style and fashion Clothing

TWITTER

PINTEREST

REDDIT

Law, govt., politics Sports Tech and computing Football Science

Desserts and baking Arts and entertainment Dining out Tech and computing Vegetarian

Law, govt., politics Tech and computing Science News Business

Source: Parse.ly data/Axios

Pay Models Across Media Types

Distribution of Pay Models (All Outlet, All Countries)

Based on an analysis of 212 news organizations (170 in Europe and 42 in the U.S.)

Based on an analysis of 212 news organizations (170 in Europe and 42 in the U.S.)

Free access

Freemium

Newspapers

Weekly newspapers and news magazines

31% 48%

Metered paywall

33% 33%

33%

14%

3%

5%

100% TV

0%

0%

0%

3%

0%

3%

23%

21%

3%

Hard paywall

FREE ACCESS

113

53.30%

FREEMIUM

49

23.11%

METERED PAYWALL

44

20.75%

HARD PAYWALL

6

2.83%

HAS A PAY MODEL

99

46.70%

HAS NO PAY MODEL

113

53.30%

TOTAL

212

100%

94% Digital-born

53% Total

Source: “Pay Models for Online News in the U.S. and Europe: 2019 Update” report, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, May 2019 editorandpublisher.com

+E+P DataPage.indd 19

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industry insight

Older and Wiser To slow decline, newspaper print editions should act their age

By Matt DeRienzo

F

lat is the new growth, many would say, when it comes to declining volume of daily newspaper print circulation, especially as success has been found in raising prices among the most loyal subscribers.

So maybe it’s time for publishers to radically lean in to serving and retaining their most loyal print readers—the elderly.

I’ve read a lot of lengthy, handwritten or typed-and-snail-mailed letters from print edition subscribers in their 70s and 80s, usually written in response to a price increase or renewal notice. After nominal objection to price, their real passion spills out.

Why can’t we deliver the paper to their doorstep like we used to (they’re not as mobile as they used to be and worried about an 20 |

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icy driveway in the winter), or get it there at a consistent time to fit their early morning breakfast routine?

Why are our bills so confusing? Why is putting the paper on hold while they’re in Florida such a frustrating process now?

Why do they have to wait on hold to talk to someone from out of state who doesn’t seem familiar with our newspaper and can’t actually make a decision if they have a special request? Why can’t they get someone in charge on the phone?

Why do we keep making the size of type smaller (since we haven’t changed anything, it might actually be that their eyesight is getting worse)? Can’t we hire a proofreader and do something about all those typos and grammar mistakes?

Newspaper publishers have gone through

stages of dealing with the print decline— trying to make print editions appeal to a younger audience with youth sections, edgier content and splashier and more colorful layouts; trying to incorporate all kinds of tie-ins and promotion of online content in the print edition, hoping that the combination of experiences breeds loyalty; and neglecting print altogether as they focused on growing a less lucrative digital audience.

Fast-forward and you have a remaining core group of print subscribers who are older than ever, and print editions that are mostly frozen in whatever stage of tweaking when publishers stopped thinking about their evolution. You also have a limited but perhaps significant pool of older, engaged people in your community who have canceled their subscriptions in recent years editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 1:43 PM

because we failed them.

It’s time to zero in on what they want in a print edition, and that means questioning some assumptions about print’s relationship to the broader digital news ecosystem.

A Pew Research Center study of daily print newspaper readership found that as much as half of this audience reads the news in print only. So assuming that they’ve already read a story that just missed the previous day’s print edition could be wrong.

Assuming that they get their world-nation news elsewhere could be wrong. Most likely, they’re looking for as well-rounded a picture of the news of their community, region, state, nation and world in print as possible.

Maybe the formula for print subscriber retention includes increasing newshole to provide more national wire content and late previous-day box scores (that we all pay for anyway) and increasing the size of type to be friendly to aging eyeballs.

What other kinds of content will inform

and delight an older print audience? History and nostalgia, longer features, puzzles.

They have leisure time to spend on these things that a younger audience does not.

Why aren’t we treating the obituary pages, from a design and editing perspective, as one of the most important sections of the newspaper? We might joke about it, but what could be more important than the deaths of loyal readers’ contemporaries?

And if a Tim Conway or Doris Day dies, it deserves major treatment. These are the stars of our readers’ youth.

The same kind of thought process could be applied to local news and information.

It will likely lead to quite a divergence between newspapers’ print editions and digital presence, but end up serving both audiences more effectively.

The cost implications of the distribution and customer service element of the problem could be more difficult to fix given how much publishers have changed the

Out-think

cost structure to hold on to profits in recent years. But if our most loyal readers are canceling because of it, we’ve got to admit that we’ve made that tradeoff and are choosing to wind down the print business one frustrated senior citizen at a time. 

Matt DeRienzo is vice president of news and digital content for Hearst’s newspapers and websites in Connecticut.

He has worked in journalism as a reporter, editor, publisher, corporate director of news for 25 years, including serving as the first full-time executive director of LION Publishers, a national nonprofit that supports the publishers of local independent online news organizations.

Selling Newspaper Businesses.

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• The Pine County Courier, Askov American, Hinckley News, Star Gazette, Evergreen shopper, and Minnesota Flyer (all in Northern Minnesota), were sold to Northstar Media Inc. • The Mobridge Tribune, The Potter County News, and The West River Eagle (all in South Dakota) were sold to Mobridge Publishing, LLC. • The Staples World (in Minnesota) was sold to RMM Publications.

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business of news

Offering Balance A journalist’s job is to report, not to persuade

By Tim Gallagher

T

he first line in the sand I ever drew with a publisher occurred when he said he was hearing from his colleagues that our news pages and editorials were too liberal. We were about to conduct a 1,000-person marketing survey and I wanted to ask the “Is the newspaper liberal or conservative?” question and later ask if the respondent identified as liberal or conservative.

As I had hoped and expected, there was a 1-to-1 correlation between the respondent’s identification and the view of the newspaper. All conservatives thought we were 22 |

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liberal, and all liberals thought we were conservative. Drop the mic. The publisher never brought it up again.

Sadly, however, recent research is showing that there is nothing we can do to change the perceptions of our readers on many issues. They believe what they want to believe and no amount of research, reporting or “fact checking” can change their minds. The public “perceives reality in starkly different realities,” according to research by Professors David Barker and Morgan Marietta. They have been studying the divide since before the election of Presi-

dent Trump and have written a book called “One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy.”

The news for journalists is not good. We are not part of the solution because, well, there isn’t much hope for a solution. The professors argue, “Without agreement on where we are, deciding collectively where we ought to go is practically impossible.”

Fact-checking and trying to present a balanced view of both sides does not convince the public that journalists are disinterested because of two reasons.

The first one is “intuitive epistemology.”

The public comes to an issue with a perception firmly in mind and listens only to evidence and reports that bolster that view, ignoring arguments to the contrary.

The second reason is that the fact checkers themselves often have an inherent bias and fact checkers often disagree when they check the facts. Outright lies are easy to editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 1:50 PM

check, but when politicians are deliberately ambiguous, then fact checking is more ambiguous. (To add to the problem, less than a third of the public believe fact checkers are unbiased.)

It would be easy to dismiss this, as I did years ago, as what naturally occurs when people of different political jerseys look at the other side. But Barker and Marietta’s research shows the nation is divided along moral issues. “It is the degree to which (the voter) prioritizes compassion as a public virtue, relative to other things like rugged individualism.” People see what they look for in the first place.

“In other words, people do not end up with the same answers because they do not begin with the same questions,” wrote Barker and Marietta.

To back this up, they note that the belief the vaccines cause autism is shared equally among people who identify as Democrats or Republicans. The real driver is different

core values, not partisan identity.

So what is a newspaper to do?

First, I would try to understand that the journalist’s job is not to sway public opinion, but to report as many indisputable facts as possible. (“The Senate voted 53-47 to pass the bill.” “The deceased was shot by a person with a .45-caliber handgun.”)

In the more challenging cases, I still believe there is virtue in trying to balance a story, trying to represent as many sides as possible, even acknowledging the nuances.

I believe we could be more transparent in our reporting—offering the readers links to the research we have used.

Finally, we can just acknowledge the divide and split our editorial pages with this in mind. USA Today and others have famously done this.

Our web presence allows us an approach more radical. On controversial issues, we could simply split the difference and line up pieces with a “pro” version and a “con” ver-

Because publishers must always be prepared for the unexpected

D V M & A

sion on the most divisive issues. Journalists cannot force readers to review “the other side” but they can offer it.

We should continue to fact check (even if most readers won’t believe it), and we should continue to offer multiple viewpoints on issues (even if most readers won’t believe half of them.) The issue for journalists is not to change minds, but to offer the disinterested view of the issue. 

Tim Gallagher is president of The 20/20 Network, a public relations and strategic communications firm. He is a former Pulitzer Prizewinning editor and publisher at The Albuquerque Tribune and the Ventura County Star newspapers. Reach him at tim@the2020network.com.

SMALL NEWSPAPER GROUP

HAS SOLD

ROCHESTER (MN) POST BULLETIN 24,000 daily circulation and related publications and websites

TO

FORUM COMMUNICATIONS

Helping publishing executives generate insights for better, faster and more informed business decisions since 1884

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+E+P BizNews.indd 23

We are pleased to have represented the Small family in this transaction.

Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April

Santa Fe, NM t: 505.820.2700 www.dirksvanessen.com

JULY 2019 | E & P

| 23

6/18/19 1:50 PM

digital publishing

Survey Says…

Journalists should do more digging when it comes to quoting studies

By Rob Tornoe

“

A new study…”

There are many problems in the world of journalism worth attacking—fake news, a lack of minority representation, how to adequately fund robust digital reporting. But a festering problem that exists in newsrooms across the country is our continued willingness to promote and share less-than-scientific surveys for the sake of social media success.

Back in May, many editors were pitched what likely appeared to be a fun study that purported to show that half of the adults in America have used the pool as a substitute for taking a shower.

Funny. Gross. Relatable. Unlikely to offend.

Not surprisingly, a number of highprofile outlets took the bait. CBS News, the New York Daily News, the Detroit Free Press, the Times-Picayune—they all ran stories with some variation of the headline, “Half of Americans use swimming pool in lieu of shower.” A quick Google search is littered with video reports that ended up on

24 |

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scores of local news shows across the country, likely seen by millions of people.

But odds are good the target of most of these stories was social media—specifically Facebook—which has the might and algorithmic know-how to reward stories like this with massive amounts of traffic.

The New York Daily News’ version of the story was shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle. CBS News garnered nearly 800 shares for its version of the story.

Unfortunately, editors and writers looking for a quick hit didn’t take the time to read the fine print of the study. Jessica Huseman, a ProPublica politics reporter and adjunct professor at the Columbia Journalism School, did some quick digging and discovered the unscientific survey of just 3,100 people was conducted online by Sachs Media Group, a public relations firm that counts the chlorine industry among its clients.

Included in the survey is an offer for free chlorine test strips from the website of the

Water Quality & Health Council, which Huseman revealed is sponsored by the Chlorine Chemistry Division of the American Chemistry Council. Even WebMD wrote up the survey as a story, which it later took down after Huseman’s 2 a.m. tweetstorm.

“After reviewing the source, we have decided to take down the article on our site.

Thank you for flagging,” WebMD wrote in response to Huseman’s findings. CBS News added an editor’s note to the top of their story, noting that an earlier version “failed to report that the PR firm that conducted the survey was working on behalf of the chlorine industry.”

“I did more reporting on this survey on my phone in 10 min at 2 a.m. than any of these reporters who got paid to write that,” Huseman wrote on Twitter, adding that if the results of a poll “seem weird” or ask questions no one really cares about, then chances are good “it’s a crap poll or industry sponsored.”

Unfortunately, the attention Huseman editorandpublisher.com

6/18/19 1:49 PM

was able to garner on Twitter likely reached just a small fraction of the people who read, shared or liked the pool story without even giving it a second thought.

“Questions can be phrased in ways to tilt results the way a group wants,” NPR host Scott Simon said about the chlorine incident on a recent episode of Weekend Edition. “But professional pollsters who work with news organizations have an interest in offering surveys that illuminate the range of diverging views people can hold in a huge and varied country, regardless of results.”

Ironically, the same week this survey was released and quickly disseminated by a number of national news outlets, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an overlooked report that revealed pool chemical injuries led to an estimated 13,508 emergency department visits in the U.S. between 2015 and 2017. According to the CDC, most of those injuries occurred at a private residence, and two thirds happened between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day. The bathing in the pool survey got a lot of attention, but wasn’t alone in its ability to dupe reporters. In May, many of the same national outlets also ran with stories based on an unsourced survey purporting to rank the sexiest accents in the U.S. Nevermind that the original post appeared uncredited on a website called Big 7, which describes itself as a Dubai-based travel website. Big 7 didn’t source the methods or questions for its survey (other than to say it asked its purported 1.5 million social media followers) and appears to work on behalf of travel resorts and cities willing to pay for sponsorships.

The list appears designed to grab the attention of the nation’s top media markets with a ready-made local angle that doesn’t have any association with divisive topics like politics or Donald Trump. Not surprisingly, the random post garnered news coverage from outlets across the country, as varied as Marketwatch to the Charlotte Observer and nearly everything in between.

(Seriously, when you finish reading this column, Google “sexiest accent” and just check out the hundreds of outlets who wrote it up for their own unique audience.) editorandpublisher.com

+e+p digitalpub.indd 25

Is this the Pentagon Papers? Hardly.

Watergate? Not really. But it reveals the problems that occur when downsized newsrooms are forced to write with a social media audience in mind and traffic quotas hanging over their heads. Standards suddenly slip away, and we quickly aggregate studies done with inappropriately small sample sizes or unprofessional polling because it’s a slow day and we need to meet our post quota.

“There is no pressure on the media to focus on reporting the ‘best’ studies, since people have a hard time separating the good studies from less-good ones,” Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University, wrote in her 2019 book “Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool” “Media reports can get away with saying ‘A new study shows…’ without saying ‘A new study, with very likely biased results, shows…’ ” Oster wrote. “And other than the few of us who get our dander up on Twitter, people are mostly none the wiser.”

So how can staff writers better guard against unintentionally promoting a bogus or biased survey? Huseman offered three simple suggestions to writers tempted by the next too-good-to-be-true pitch:

B C D

GREEN SHOOT M E D I A

Quality Content

That Drives

Revenue

Look at the actual questions.

Find out who funded the poll.

Do not just rewrite a press release about a survey.

Seems simple enough, right? If not, expect to hear some complaints on Twitter… and little else.  Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.

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6/18/19 1:49 PM

production

BY JERRY SIMPKINS

PROMOTING COMMERCIAL GROWTH Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t miss out on projects by not having the right equipment in place

26 |

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6/18/19 1:52 PM

A

fact of publishing life in 2019 is that most of us continue to struggle to maintain circulation and advertising revenue.

Some properties are less fortunate than others, and many have found that commercial printing helps keep the bottom line up and the organization a little more healthy. It’s certainly no secret that smaller newspapers who five or 10 years ago could support a press and mailroom operation simply can no longer justify a staff that runs an hour or two a day, and equipment that requires expensive replacement parts and maintenance, just to print a small daily or weekly paper.

Times have changed and whether we like it or not, the choice is to change with them or quietly wither away.

It’s apparent that most publishing companies have at least started the move to a digital format; some with more vigor than others, but most are getting on the bus. As this venture gains steam, circulation draws will continue to suffer and maintaining production operations isn’t going to get any easier or more practical. As we all know, producing a printed newspaper is expensive.

Looking at the hard facts, there are limited options to maintain these costly operations.

Some publishers choose to hold on until the bitter end which normally results in a fire sale or simply shutting down the publication. Either way, this option ends up with everyone losing, including the communities who have grown to rely on their hometown newspaper.

One very effective yet often painful choice is to consolidate operations into a central print site. This normally results in eliminating staffs from smaller less profitable sites and finding efficiencies through consolidation of publications into a larger central printing division. While it can be a fairly traumatic event for some papers, done right it can preserve overall stability and paint a bright picture for the business.

Regardless of if you’ve decided to go the route of consolidation or you’re simply looking to fill open windows on your press, you better have a solid plan for growth involving staffing, sales and equipment.

With that said, let’s take a look specifically

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} A saddle-stitcher to produce stitched and trimmed booklets can be a welcome addition to any property, providing numerous opportunities for commercial growth as well as offering in-house stitching services to help out the advertising department.

at what equipment and hardware options can help grow your business.

Finding the Best Fit Different types of presses and equipment lend themselves to commercial work. Many newspaper companies already have some of their equipment on their floor. Other equipment you’ll need to look at investing in if you want to expand into a profitable hybrid (publications and outside commercial work) operation.

I’ll start with what I call the chicken or the egg challenge. What comes first— the equipment to do the job or the work to pay for the equipment? This is a tough choice. I’ve been in situations where we’ve been approached by a huge commercial account with serious revenue possibilities, only to not have the right equipment in place and lose to another printer who is in a better position to handle the job. But the other side of that is buying a piece of expensive specialty equipment before you have the jobs to fill it and then not being able to sell enough work to support it. While I wish I had the answer to this quandary I do not; I don’t think anyone does.

I suggest you study your market, get to know the capabilities of other printers in the area and the requirements of print customers in your target area. Make some educated projections as to what revenue is out there and what the possibilities are that you can se28 |

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+Production.indd 28

cure it. Perhaps call on several potential accounts to discuss what they’re looking for and inquire what you might be able to do to gain their business. Then after some careful projections and cost analysis, take your best educated guess; it may be the only option to the chicken or the egg quandary.

Here are some press options.

Cold web/offset: Most newspaper print sites have what it takes to get into the commercial printing business sitting right on their floor—a cold web/offset press. Sometimes this is all you need to get into the business and possibly all you’ll ever need to turn a profit. If you have a solid sales plan and print a quality product, you may not need much more to succeed. However, if you want to expand and pickup additional print revenue, you’ll have to add equipment that will allow you to grow ac-

cordingly.

First, evaluate the paging and color capabilities of your current press. If you need additional towers or even a few mono units for paging, that can be a fairly inexpensive addition. There are plenty of good used units available if you look in the right places. I realize not many newspapers are adding press units nowadays, but if you want to bring in outside work you’re going to have to have the right equipment and that takes an investment.

Heatset web: For those of you who have worked on a heatset press, you’ll understand why my fondest memory is the searing heat and burning my arm every time I had to re-web. Sarcasm aside, heatset has its advantages over cold web and can be a profitable addition to a print site.

In heatset, printing ink dries rapidly with the assistance of forced-air heat verses cold web in which the ink never really dries, only coming “close” through normal evaporation and absorption.

Heatset virtually eliminates ink setoff and rub-off that is common with cold web.

Heatset printing seems to be the process of choice for most preprint advertisers. Grocery stores and big box stores tend to gravitate toward heatset for their weekly circulars. While these mega accounts tend to go to the larger more established printing companies, there is still room to upsell to heatset at many of our properties.

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Photos courtesy of Jerry Simpkins

Often some of our mailroom equipment can also double as a quarterfolder. Granted, it can be slow-going and there may be limitations on the thickness of the product, but at least it’s an option.

Stitch and trimmers with a cover feeder can be used to quarter-fold some thin products, some Cheshire or Kirk Rudy mailing units can also be used to quarter-fold. Before you turn away those quarterfold jobs, explore all your options.

Stitcher trimmers: If you have a stitcher trimmer, you’ve got a leg up on the competition.

These units give you the opportunity to marry } While this older Kansa quarter-folder base may not be ideal for large quantities, it serves the purpose on many small jobs gloss (enamel) covers with and allows a property to offer services that may not be available from other printers. plain stock guts (insides) or run stock groundwood products as booklets. You can produce coupon booklets and even use a guillotine cutter to UV printing: A single-wide Didde Glaser press can be a wonbust-cut them down to size. This is a great way to not only pick-up derful addition to any print operation. UV inks dry on contact outside printing but also gives you the option to produce booklets though a photo mechanical process. This process allows you to for your own properties. It’s a fairly easy product for your advertisprint, without smudging or rub-off on any type of paper. Enamel ing department to sell and essential to have available for outside paper is a big seller to most customers and the final print quality commercial customers. can rival sheet fed printing at a much lower cost.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a stitcher trimmer in A Didde single/narrow-web can provide numerous print opplace, there are other options. At a property I was once at in Wistions. Regardless of if you’re printing multiple signatures for a consin, we had an inline glue system on each web of our communistitch and trim booklet, covers to wrap around an cold web offset ty press and a quarter-folder on press. We purchased a Rock-built inside, or fliers to be trimmed into 8.5x11, the quality and versatilin-line unit which allowed us to produce glued and trimmed flexie ity a UV press provides can seem almost endless. booklets inline at press speed. It served our purpose well and kept Folding: Many presses in “newspaper sites” do not have us one step ahead of the competition right off our cold web press. quarter-folding capabilities. I think it’s safe to say that most daily newspapers and many weeklies are flat folded (broadsheet) and the thought to include an inline quarter-folder never entered the Taking Chances thought process during the original press install. That is going to I could go on forever listing equipment that could help you grow make it tough (but not impossible) to bring in outside printing revenue in your printing operation. Figuring out what equipment that requires quarter-folding. you need to satisfy existing customers is the easy part; it’s getting There are somewhat affordable options available from several out in front of the need can be the hard part. Anticipating the vendors for offline quarter-folders. Most of these units are much equipment you’ll need based on what business opportunities may slower than folding directly on press and also require additional present themselves is a challenge. Forecasting revenue and buildhandling of the product, but at least there is an option, and with ing it into a budget to produce a positive return on your investone of these units, you’ll not have to turn away the quarter-fold ment is even more challenging. work you once did.

Newspaper companies today are understandably tight with

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THE LATEST FROM… dotPhoto

How does dotPhoto help publishers store, organize and sell their collection of photographs?

Everyone wants to buy photos that are in newspapers. Sometimes it’s a nice photo of them or their family; sometimes they want to download a photo and use it for an illustration. You never know what people are going to need. dotPhoto makes it easy for newspapers to sell photos online.

Simply establish a free account at dotPhoto.com/news, set prices and upload photos. You can be paid by PayPal or check. You can upload as many photos as you like. We have customers with more than 100,000 photos. Each photo can be up to 30MB. Photos can be watermarked to prevent guests from copying photos from the screen. Ask for dotPhoto’s “white glove” service, and they will set up your entire account including a single link to your website where viewers can shop for photos. Send us your logo, and we’ll substitute your logo for the dotPhoto logo when your guests visit. dotPhoto prints standard sizes from 3.5x5 to 30x40 posters, plus many photo products including postcards, acrylic cut-outs, curved metal prints, beach towels, T-shirts, wrapped canvases, refrigerator magnets, mugs, pillow cases and much more.

Set your own pricing or choose our recommended pricing. Many readers now want to purchase the original files, so dotPhoto encourages newspapers to charge higher prices for originals, which can be downloaded after payment. dotPhoto pays newspapers 80 percent of the markups, so there’s less printing, mailing and credit card processing costs.

Unlimited storage is free. Once a year, a $19.99 service free is deducted from commissions. That small fee covers storage and service, and it’s far lower than competitors’ annual fees. dotPhoto handles all photo-related customer service and if there is any problem with—for instance, delivery—dotPhoto reprints and mails at its own cost.

Glenn Paul founded dotPhoto in 1999, sold it in 2009 to MyPhotoAlbum, and acquired it again in 2016 as part of Scorpio Photo.

Paul is a former president of the Association of Imaging Executives.

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dollars. Profits are not what they used to be and most expense budgets have been cut drastically in order to compensate for downturns in advertising and circulation to maintain profitability. Approaching your boss and asking for a sizable investment in equipment in anticipation of commercial growth may not seem to be the smartest move, but in fact, it may be the best move you’ll ever make. Newspaper presses that are idle are not making money.

It’s time to fill those presses with outside work from other properties that haven’t been quite as fortunate as some of us are.

Different companies have different views of an acceptable payback period for a capital investment. Check with your supervisor to find out what your company regards as an acceptable ROI before you start looking at any equipment. I have found many organizations regard a three year ROI as a good target. In other words, if you spend $100,000 on a piece of equipment, you have to provide a solid plan to profit that same amount or more over the next three years to gain approval for the initial capital purchase or otherwise it may be denied. This is tough to do unless you have a contract signed by an outside company needing your services over the next three years. Without making a convincing argument or without the understanding and support of your top management, often you can’t get off the ground on projects and growth will be stifled.

One way to show the need and start bringing in revenue without the initial investment is to outsource part of the work to someone in the area with the right equipment. If you don’t have the equipment for the job, establish a relationship with another printer to outsource mailing operations, enamel cover printing, stitching and trimming, folding, etc. Perhaps you can print the cold web work on your existing press and ship it out to be stitched and trimmed if you don’t have a stitcher. If you can stitch but can’t print enamel covers, then have covers printed outside and stitched and trimmed in house. Send finished jobs out to a mail house if you don’t have an inkjet system, whatever it takes to bring in the customers and provide them with one-stop printing services.

You’ll have to share the revenue for awhile, which is better than not being able to land the job in the first place. But when you’re finished, it could help you to make a convincing argument that obtaining the necessary piece of equipment can not only save you paying an outside company but can also provide you with equipment that may help to bring in additional work.

Remember, sometimes you have to roll the dice. Granted there may be some options in between that I’m not presenting here, but the way I look at it is either you take some educated and calculated chances and get aggressive about growing your revenues or you will let others around you take that chance, leaving you in the dust. Complacency can sneak up and bite you. As the saying goes, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”  Jerry Simpkins has more than 30 years of experience in printing and operations in the newspaper industry. Contact him on LinkedIn.com or at simpkins@tds.net.

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Entering Uncharted Territory Newspapers find creative and imaginative pathways to discover new revenue

By Evelyn Mateos

} Jockeys and their horses race for the finish line in the Steeplechase of Charleston at last year’s event.

I

n May, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet spoke before the INMA World Congress of News Media audience and shared his dismal prediction concerning the future of journalism—that most local newspapers were going to die in the next five years.

“The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news,” he said. “Their economic model is gone.”

It’s true that the traditional economic model may be gone, but many local and national newspapers are using their ambition and creativity to explore new and exciting business models with hopes that it will create sustainable revenue for many years to come.

E&P spoke with several of these newsrooms to discuss their clever ideas.

Going the Distance In an effort to introduce something new to readers, the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. looked to its past—more specifically, the city’s longtime love for horse racing. In January, the newspaeditorandpublisher.com

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} Attendees of the 2018 Steeplechase of Charleston are seen enjoying themselves.

per acquired the Steeplechase of Charleston, a National Steeplechase Association sanctioned race meet.

The association was founded in 1895.

Chris Zoeller, Post and Courier chief revenue and marketing officer, said the event is more than just a horse race: it’s a style, it’s tailgating and rich history. “(It) has been rooted in history for so long…and we thought what a } Chris Zoeller perfect way to align ourselves with an event that celebrates this history, beauty, strength and community to reach new audiences,” she said.

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Entering Uncharted Territory

stakeholders and the National Steeplechase Association to better understand how other sanctioned events are conducted.

“The thing that kind of stuck out for us is that there were a lot of ticket revenue and sponsorship opportunities,” Zoeller said.

And because they are a media company, there were a lot of other opportunities to help better promote the race and bring in a larger audience and attract out-of-town visitors.

This year’s race will take place Nov. 17, and Zoeller told E&P there is a designated Steeplechase leadership team already in place, including a contracted race director whose job it is to work with the National Steeplechase Association. The newspaper also has a contract with a production team who worked on the event last year and is maintaining all of the relationships with the vendors. The previous owner is on board acting as a consultant, and the newspaper also has in place an event marketing team. In addition, there is one Post and Courier staff member designated to work on the event—senior director of partnership development Sterling Eason. Her role is to work with the sales team and drive new paid relationships on a regional and national level.

Zoeller is optimistic their first year as owner will be successful.

“I think we, along with the community and other media companies, have traditionally thought of ourselves as a media company,” she said. “We can be so much more. We have powerful reach. We have talented people. We have the ability to produce quality experiences, quality events and quality content. We need to take more risks otherwise we’re not going to grow.”

Bringing Authentic Stories to the Screen The Alabama Media Group recently created Advance Originals, an independent development and production company arm of Advance Local. The goal of Advance Originals is to pitch, develop and produce compelling content for television, digital streaming services and feature films.

“This is a different path to revenue,” Michelle Holmes, head of Advance Originals, said. “This is someone financing this content, which means essentially that we’re selling both intellectual property and we’re developing—we’re potentially producing.”

Holmes said as a news organization, the Alabama Media Group has hundreds of years of stories to source from and reporters on the ground daily finding new ones—stories that can be told in this new innovative way.

“What (Advance Originals) is really focused on is stories of real authenticity,” Holmes said. “We’re really connected to different kinds of stories—stories that might get overlooked elsewhere.” The production company aims to not only use their own content as a base, but work with other great ideas that are “out there in the world.”

One of the stepping stones to the creation of Advance Originals was “Chasing Corruption,” a weekly series that follows video journalist Ian Hoppe and a team of reporters across the nation meeting some of America’s toughest watchdog journalists to discuss stories they uncovered. The show was sold to Facebook Watch 34 |

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} The goal of Advance Originals is tell authentic stories through video production.

and launched mid-September 2018.

Shortly after, the company began developing plans for Advance Originals.

“We brought in a veteran Hollywood producer to run ‘Chasing Corruption’ for us and then once we had the talent here, we recognized that we had everything already in house to do the kind of work that we believed offered a signifi} Michelle Holmes cant revenue opportunity for us,” Holmes said.

While “Chasing Corruption” was a major influence on the genesis of Advance Originals, the idea also stemmed from an experimental project that was released in 2017. Known as “Whitman, Alabama,” the project invited Alabamians to recite verses from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” on camera, and it really helped set up the company on a national scale for video production, said Holmes.

Currently, the company is working with a Hollywood management firm to develop projects from their Advance newsrooms as well as original programming with a variety of partners.

“To be able to create programming for new audiences and diversify well beyond an advertising model (is what) it’s really about,” Holmes explained. “We need to rely less on the advertising model and begin to diversify into new models. And for us, that’s what this is.”

Victorian Vacation The Ferndale (Calif.) Enterprise is a 141-year-old weekly newspaper located on the city’s historic Main Street. Positioned behind the newspaper’s office is the Ferndale Victorian, a seven-room Airbnb. The historic home has a lot to offer guests: a cozy pub, an original clawfoot bathtub, prime location and a copy of the Enterprise’s annual Souvenir Edition, which features the newspaper’s editorandpublisher.com

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} Pictured is the pub in the Ferndale Victorian with a Lawson Beacon sign from the 2001 movie “The Majestic,” which was filmed in Ferndale.

The Victorian home has had hundreds of guests visit over the years and has even garnered a few Enterprise subscriptions as a result.

“I think it’s been successful because we are avid fans of our community,” Titus said. ”We love telling our guests about our special town and filling them in with the ‘insider’ information on where to go and what to do.” } The Ferndale Barndominium is located behind The Airbnb also the Ferndale Victorian and was transformed in allows Titus to talk 2016 from a barn to a one-bedroom/one-bath “newspaper” with her space. guests, such as the importance of journalism, why facts matter and why one should support their community newspaper.

“We get to educate and show our guests the value of a community newspaper and put a face to journalism and newspapers,” she said.

} Caroline Titus stands in front of the Ferndale Enterprise office.

Locked In to Innovation

history as well as all awards the paper has collected over the years.

Caroline Titus is the Airbnb host, publisher, owner and staff of the Enterprise. After her husband lost his job, the couple moved into the 135-year-old home. Titus’ oldest daughter was aware her parents needed extra income so she suggested the idea for the Airbnb.

Titus and her husband built a wall to separate the newspaper office from the rest of the home and turned an old laundry room into a studio apartment where they can stay when there are guests in the main house. The Enterprise began offering the Airbnb in 2015 with the main house, and in 2016, the old barn on the property was converted into a second Airbnb. Currently, a night in the main house costs $175 per night and the barndominium costs $155 per night.

Running a newspaper and an Airbnb requires multitasking, Titus said. “Often times, I’m writing a story, creating ads, editing— and putting a load of laundry into the dryer or getting ready to welcome guests.”

While it’s a juggling act, the Airbnb allows Titus to supplement income in order to keep an aged, small weekly newspaper going in this remote part of California.

Escape rooms are still extremely popular due to the thrill of adventure the game provides. In Dubuque, Iowa, the Telegraph Herald built its own version for local thrillseekers and named it Escape Room Dubuque.

The escape room houses three experiences, which the Telegraph Herald changes every three to four months. The current experiences include Escape the Island, The Hunter’s Trail and The Cryptic Manor. Each experience can hold four to 10 players and costs $25 per person. According to Telegraph Herald publisher Steve Fisher, the escape room had 10,880 visitors in 2018.

The idea came from newspaper’s building maintenance manager, Dan Bellows, who went on a family vacation and visited an escape room. From there, Fisher, Bellows, Michelle Schmidt, director of promotion and community relations, and Bob Woodward, vice president of strategic planning and business development, developed a business model. Fisher said by June 2017, they began work to find a location to lease and to develop the room } Steve Fisher

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Entering Uncharted Territory

} The Telegraph Herald’s Escape Room Dubuque invites people of all ages to come in and find clues to help them break out.

concepts. That November, they were up and running.

Escape Room Dubuque manager Renee Pregler was hired not too long after the launch to maintain the escape room and keep it operating separate from the newspaper. She then hired a staff to help operate the escape room as well.

According to Fisher, the Telegraph Herald has had an entrepreneurial spirit for quite some time, but this innovation is the first thing they have done that is a separate enterprise.

“I think it’s positive that we’re doing things that are looking at replacing our traditional advertising revenue,” Fisher said.

Creating Solutions Faced with challenges when utilizing commercial or open source content management systems, the Washington Post chose to develop their own modern publishing system called Arc Publishing.

“It took many different components to stitch together all the different pieces of a publishing platform that a large publisher needs,” Matthew Monahan, director and head of product for Arc Publishing, said. “Once you look at the full stack of what any large enterprise scale publisher’s running, it’s actually a much more complicated answer than what’s your CMS.” According to Monahan, the Post began building portions of the software platform that eventually became Arc Publishing about eight years ago with a team of engineers and designers. Most importantly, the team had people from the Post newsroom, such as key editors, to help really get to the heart of what the issues were that they were trying to solve.

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into the newsroom starting in early 2013. Then, by integrating the suite of tools together, and by offering the system and several tools as a-la-carte items to other news organizations, the Post found a new source of revenue. In September 2015, the Willamette Week in Portland, Ore. became Arc Publishing’s first client. According to the Post, Arc Publishing currently serves between 175 and 200 websites.

One satisfied customer is the Philadelphia Inquirer. George Kurtas, chief information officer, told E&P that they were using a particular platform for a long time before making the switch to Arc and did so for several reasons, but the biggest reason was because Arc was the most modular.

“We were on a quest to provide the newsroom with a tool that allowed them to focus on the content and not the tool, and this platform does that,” Kurtas said. “It gives them the opportunity to just worry about what they’re writing and not what they’re using to write.”

Investing in a project like this can be risky, even for a paper like the Post. But as most newspapers look at year-by-year declines in print revenue, “without some sort of drastic action, the end state is clear,” Monahan said.

For the Foodie Several years ago, the USA Today Network launched their Wine & Food Experience. The event showcases food, wine, beer and spirits from local and national chefs and mixologists through cooking demos, seminars and panel discussions.

The first event took place in 2015 in Scottsdale, Ariz. Based on reader responses, the USA Today Network believed they could build a strong

} Doug Wilson

} Guests align for a tasting opportunity delivered by Martha Stewart Wine Co. in Indianapolis, Ind. at the 2018 USA Today Wine & Food Experience tour.

(Photo by Doug McSchooler) editorandpublisher.com

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} Martha Stewart takes The Culinary Stage at the USA Today Wine & Food Experience in Chicago, Ill. (Photo by Chan C. Smith)

} A guest grabs a photo at the USA Today Wine & Food Experience in Louisville, Ky. (Photo by Brian Johnson)

connection with the community by hosting a culinary event. According to Doug Wilson, vice president and general manager of USA Today Network Events, reader feedback consistently supported the strength of their local dining coverage, which included restaurant openings, reviews, events and other related content.

Based on the success of the Scottsdale event, the Wine & Food Experience expanded to seven markets in 2017 and to 10 markets the following year in cities like Brooklyn, N.Y., Detroit, Mich., Indianapolis, Ind., Cincinnati, Ohio, Louisville, Ky., Las Vegas, Nev., Scottsdale, Ariz., Los Angeles, Calif., Chicago, Ill. and Naples, Fla. The tour stops in each market for one day, and this year, it will begin on Sep. 7 and end on Nov. 23.

According to the event website, tickets are $85 for “Grand Tasting” tickets. Presale ticket prices fluctuate in each market, starting at $50. There are also VIP and additional add-on tickets available as well.

Aside from building a stronger connection between brand and reader, Wilson said this was a new source of sponsorship and consumer revenue as well as an opportunity to create a new platform for advertisers to engage with the audience.

“News, marketing and sales had to be all-in for this to be a success,” he said. “News and marketing worked together on a promotional package that leveraged the strength of our editorial with the powerful reach of our advertising assets. This significant value was very appealing to participating chefs, restaurants and sponsors.”

Wilson added there were other factors involved with the event’s success: the mix in national culinary and wine celebrities, their ability to recruit the best restaurants and chefs in every market, the development of an upscale atmosphere where patrons can discover new foods, recipes and wines, the creation of branded elements for sponsors to participate in, a fair ticket price, and an experienced public relations and event production company.

“We make a concentrated effort to compile attendee, restaurant and sponsor feedback to improve our event each year,” Wilson

said. “It is the critical that the entire team—news, sales, marketing and event operations—work together to produce a successful event. It definitely takes a village to execute a national culinary tour on this scale.” 

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6ROG Daily Newspaper; 3 weeklies Log Cabin Democrat Conway, Arkansas

Cribb, Greene & Cope is pleased to have represented GateHouse Media in their sale to Paxton Media Group.

John Cribb Randy Cope Jeffrey Potts John Thomas Cribb jcribb@cribb.com rcope@cribb.com jpotts@cribb.com johnthomas@cribb.com 406.579.2925 214.356.3227 916.673.9778 406.570.5595

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News organizations ramp up for an election cycle certain to be dynamic, fast-paced and combative

By Gretchen A. Peck

n the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the press received some rather harsh criticism about its national coverage. Type in “press failures of 2016,” and Google will unkindly deliver a long list of critical analysis about the media and how it handled the Trump vs. Clinton battle for the White House.

Disillusioned voters blamed the press for a failure to present Trump as a viable nominee, let alone as their likely future president. Some declared that journalists missed the story of the Trump voter entirely.

That type of criticism—that the press had missed the Trump story—wasn’t entirely fair, according to Peter Wallsten, senior politics editor at the Washington Post.

“If you look back at the Post’s coverage, we saw Trump as an interesting and important story from the beginning, and we had reports out across the country,” he said. “But I think if there was a mistake across the media, it was that people made assumptions.

I’m not saying that it is a mistake that the Post made, but I do think there were assumptions about whether Trump could win or not. To the extent that it was a phenomenon of 2016, we are reminding our reporters that an important part of our philosophy for covering politics is to not make assumptions and to not be predictive in our coverage.”

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The press has also been lambasted for burying the ledes and focusing too often on personality and the outrages du jour rather than on the candidates, their policy positions and the direct impact on the lives of the American people.

Asked how the reporters and editors at the Washington Post plan to strike a balance between personality and policy in its 2020 coverage, Wallsten said, “We see personality as an important aspect of political coverage. The stories do very well. Also, those stories can tell you a lot about the candidates and their character and what kind of president they would be.

“For instance,” Wallsten continued, “we had a piece that we published on Cory Booker and his relationship with an Orthodox Rabbi. It’s a fantastic story, and in some ways, that’s a personality story, but you learn so much about Cory Booker and the kind of person he is when you read that story. Those sorts of stories can engage readers— and readers who aren’t necessarily interested in the political story.”

Covering policy is essential, too, Wallsten said. “You have to write about policy in an engaging way. A story that illustrates how we want to take on policy is a piece (we did) about Elizabeth Warren. We took a deep dive on her idea of a ‘wealth tax,’ and how that was the center of all her policy proposals. We added up the cost of all of her policy proposals, and then looked

at whether it was realistic that a wealth tax could pay for it. It was a deeply substantive story—also, very readable…Campaigns are a contest of ideas, in addition to being a contest of personalities, and we see both as crucial for our coverage.”

Collaborative Efforts For some news businesses, collaborations have been born out of necessity—the need to “do more with less.” For others, collaborative journalism makes sense logistically and for the benefit of the content.

Julie Pace is the Washington Bureau Chief for the Associated Press (AP). Over the course of her career, she’s covered four presidential elections, and now leads a team of political reporters and editors who are based all across the country.

“One of the things that was a real priority for me this cycle was to ensure that our political team wasn’t just based in Washington and New York,” she said.

The AP’s greatest strength, she said, is that it has talented political reporters in every state. For 2020 coverage, Pace’s goal was to integrate all of those reporters, to encourage greater collaboration and communication, and operate as a single national political team.

The AP’s 2020 team will be guided by what Pace referred to as three pillars: “You want to cover the ins and outs of the campaign operation and the candidates them-

“We are trying to arm people with the information they need to cast an educated vote.”

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selves—how they’re strategizing and how they’re positioning themselves. You want to aggressively cover their policy rollouts— what they’re saying about what they’d do as president. And then the third piece of it— and I think this is equally important—is that you want to cover the voters.”

Based in Des Moines, Iowa, Annah Backstrom Aschbrenner is the USA Today Network’s 2020 campaign editor. She’ll be directing a team comprised of reporters from all across the country, working in tandem to fully cover the 2020 campaigns

} Julie Pace, AP Washington Bureau Chief

} Kristin Roberts, McClatchy vice president of news

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and election. As the campaigns kicked off, reporters were assigned to each of the candidate’s campaigns, and in the cases where a candidate has some local or regional context (Amy Klobachar and Minnesota, for example), local reporters will greatly contribute to coverage as well.

“We’re approaching this from all angles, to make sure that we’re utilizing the resources we have all over the country—ideally, getting a better perspective and painting a more accurate picture of the thoughts of the country,” Backstrom Aschbrenner said. “I think the USA Today Network has a unique opportunity because of the scope of the network. We have large papers in Iowa, in Wisconsin, in Michigan and Ohio, and several papers in Pennsylvania, and those are states that will be in ultra-focus in 2020. I feel like we have a little bit of a leg up when it comes to coverage. We’re not visiting these communities; we live in them.”

At USA Today Network’s newspapers and across its 2020 coverage team, trust and accuracy are part of every conversation, Backstrom Aschbrenner said.

“After 2016, there has been some lack of trust in the media, and all of us are cognizant of that and take the responsibility very seriously. We are educating an electorate,” she said. “We’re not just covering the churnand-burn of the day; we are trying to arm people with the information they need to cast an educated vote.”

Fresh Perspectives

“It’s a mix of campaign veterans and other reporters who have never covered politics and bring a valuable fresh perspective.”

In speaking with editors and reporters covering 2020, another trend emerged.

There is a sense that it’s not enough to simply not repeat past perceived mistakes; they’ve got to be proactive and innovative in how they’ll cover campaigns and the election.

“We’ve built the biggest campaign team that the Washington Post has ever fielded,” Wallsten said. The reporters tasked with 2020 election coverage are members of distinctive teams, yet there will be overlap and collaboration among them. For example, the Post has a core campaign team, with approximately a dozen reporters and three editors.

“We’re particularly excited about this group, because it’s a mix of campaign veterans and other reporters who have never covered politics and bring a valuable fresh perspective,” Wallsten said.

The newspaper’s Congressional and White House reporters will also provide 2020 coverage and context. There’s also the muscle of the investigative team, which Wallsten said has “embarked on a editorandpublisher.com

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vigorous vetting of all the candidates and their backgrounds, their records and their policies.” They’ve also added a seven-day-a-week politics breaking-news team and a new campaign newsletter.

Post reporters will be tasked with covering candidates and particular campaigns, but Wallsten noted that flexibility in how reporters are assigned will allow the news team to “change it up as the dynamics require.” Though some candidates may garner more attention than others by virtue of those dynamics, the edict at the Post is to cover even the race’s lesser-known ones.

“We recently had a big story on Andrew Yang and the phenomenon around him. We have another story that’s going to run on the front page about Marianne Williamson and her campaign,” Wallsten said. “We’re not intimidated by the big field. We actually relish the big field. It makes for an engaging, lively campaign— that gives us a lot to write about.”

Kristin Roberts, McClatchy’s vice president of news, joined the company in the wake of her work heading up 2016 presidential coverage for Politico. Leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, Roberts transformed how the news organization would newly cover campaigns and public policy. Under her leadership, McClatchy launched The Influencer Series, a four-state program that surveyed more than 200 community leaders across political JULY 2019 | E & P

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ideologies, economic circumstances and professions. The series unfolded over the course of six months, and it allowed McClatchy reporters to deeply explore policies important to the publisher’s audiences.

“By the time we got to the end of 2018, we had delivered a body of journalism that was directly relevant,” Roberts said. “The response to that was so strong that we’re going to be building out that model for 2020.”

What the initiative revealed was that readers wanted two different things pre- and post-election.

“The political media, generally, gave them a lot about the candidates themselves—about their personalities and what they were saying, about what they were tweeting, about the intrigue inside their campaigns,” Roberts said. “We know } (Left to right) Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan, executive editor Marty Baron and national security editor that our audience in 2016 wanted Peter Finn look on as senior politics editor Peter Wallsten speaks during the Pulitzer Prize announcements in April that because it was a traffic bonanza.

2018. (Photo by Matt McClain/Washington Post) We know it was being consumed.

But what our readers and viewers tive solution.” were telling us after the election was: ‘This wasn’t serious. We Though McClatchy’s titles may not have the deep pockets of needed a serious conversation around policy.’” major market national and international newspapers, it can leverThe dialogue between McClatchy’s political reporters/editors age the collective power of all of its political reporters, across the and readers/voters continues. The Influencer Series does too, company and really connect the dots for readers between policy under a fresh rebranding as the Priorities Project. Live events are considerations, and how those choices will impact their lives at the also fundamental to the project. In November 2019, McClatchy local level. will host another such event, which will mimic the previous one “Over the course of the last 2.5 years, the leadership of the comheld last November. pany and the leadership of all the newsrooms have worked very “We brought together 50 influential leaders (to Florida). We hard to make those 30 news organizations into one organization,” split them into working groups, which were each tasked with a set Roberts said. “The product of that is an ability to leverage the of recommendations for the state legislature on the policy problem strength of the political reporters in 30 news organizations.” that our audience had identified as among the most pressing this year,” Roberts said. “It was an extraordinary experience because we set up working groups that included people who would never Waging War on Disinformation work together in any other setting. We had people on the guns Just recently, an altered video of Speaker of the House panel who came from completely opposite ends of the spectrum on Nancy Pelosi was making the rounds on social media, designed to gun-control issues, on school safety issues. And they were able to mislead viewers/voters about her physicome up with a set of agreed principles and suggest solutions for cal and mental wellbeing. state lawmakers to pursue. We did that for multiple topics. That At the Washington Post, “a fair turned into a white paper, and then, we printed it up and handamount” of time is spent detecting, cordelivered it to every member of the state legislature in Tallahassee. recting and rooting out disinformation.

It was a mind-blowing experience, where we were able to demon“(Disinformation) is a big new strate not only the convening power of McClatchy and the Miami development that we’re dealing with,” Herald, but our ability to bring together a group of people who Wallsten said. One of the reporters on would be at odds with one another, and come up with a constructhe 2020 campaign team will even be 42 |

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partly focused on disinformation.

“We’re not just talking about foreign interference,” he continued. “We’re talking about all sorts of information that can spread quickly on social media-and at times is spread by candidates, politicians, and even the president. We need to be prepared. We have a fact-checking operation here that is fully engaged in that and has really set the standard for calling out politicians when they speak untruths.

“The fact-checker is going to be a big part of coverage this cycle. Not only do we want to call out the disinformation, we also need to be prepared to deal with it when it comes to us over the course of our reporting.

There is, no doubt, going to be efforts to try to get us to publish inaccurate information, and we have to be ready for that. Part of that is being absolutely rigorous in the vetting of information and sources.”

McClatchy’s Roberts largely sees factchecking as a journalism “niche” that sprang forth from the 2016 election aftermath. Third-party fact-checking organizations continue to help voters sort fact from fiction, and Roberts noted that they’re partnering with tech companies like Google and Facebook to combat the glut of digital disinformation.

At the Associated Press, at least two reporters will be tasked with fact-checking and reporting on the origins of 2020-related disinformation.

“We’re putting actual sources behind it,” Pace said. “We recognize that it’s not something that we can just ask our political reporters to do, even though they need to be on guard for it. We have to put people on this project. It’s that crucial to our coverage of the election.”

Election security, as a subtopic, will be part of the AP’s reporting mission, too.

“We know, for sure, that there will be other attempts to meddle and interfere in the election. The challenge for us is that there will be probably be different players besides just Russia,” Pace said.

“There will probably be different techniques beyond what we learned about in 2016. How do we stay ahead of the curve? How can we make sure we’re in a place where we are understanding what is happening and are able to inform the public about what is happening?”

She continued, “One of the challenges is also trying to understand the real impact on the election. In 2016, we now know—because of the intelligence community and Bob Mueller has put it plainly—Russians interfered with the election. They did so to try to help Trump win. But what we don’t know is what the impact of that was. We don’t know if Trump won because of this effort. We don’t. But we have to try to figure out the impact, and that’s really a complex reporting endeavor…A lot of groups don’t have an incentive to talk about this, but we have to be really aggressive on that front in this cycle.”

Advising the Press

“Not only do we want to call out the disinformation, we also need to be prepared to deal with it when it comes to us over the course of our reporting.”

editorandpublisher.com

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Campaign and election seasons are sprawling, and the trail leading to Nov. 3, 2020 will be long, bumpy and hazardous for the press.

Already with several female candidates in contention for the Democratic nomination, there may be evidence to suggest that women candidates aren’t getting as fair a shake in the media as their male counterparts, according to an ongoing study being conducted by Storybench, which (at press time) had analyzed the full text of 1,397 articles.

Polling is also potentially hazardous for the press—not necessarily reporting on polls, but rather, allowing polls to sway coverage decisions.

Roberts said, “Avoid national polling and making all coverage decisions based on national polling. I have been warning reporters and editors alike for years about their over-reliance on polling to make their decisions about campaign coverage. National polling and state polling are weak. In fact, state polling is weaker than national polling. Relying on them is going to serve media organizations poorly and the public

poorly in turn.”

Wallsten explained some of the edicts in place at the Washington Post as its journalists journey toward 2020: “Keep our eyes open, and be ready for everything, and to not be predictive in our coverage, but to capture the dynamics as they are, as they’re happening—to keep our eyes and our minds open to every and any possibility.

“I think that’s been a signature aspect of our coverage for many recent elections,” he continued. “It is part of why we’ve been able to often capture dynamics earlier than others. And it also explains the fact that we’re covering the whole field, and we see everyone and every new dynamic as a way to sort of use the election to write about what’s happening in America.”  JULY 2019 | E & P

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Steve Riley, who has served as the Houston Chronicle’s interim editor since last October, has been named executive editor. He succeeds Nancy Barnes who resigned to become senior vice president for news at National Public Radio. Before joining the Chronicle, Riley spent more than 30 years at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., where he served as senior editor for investigations, deputy managing editor, metro editor, sports editor, government editor and reporter. Riley began his career in Mississippi as a reporter for the ClarionLedger in Jackson, The Sun in Gulfport and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo.

The News Media Alliance has elected Mark Aldam, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Hearst, as its chairman of the board of directors for the 2019-2020 term. Aldam, who previously served as vice chairman, succeeds Terry Kroeger, president and chief executive officer of Smith Kroeger Marketing Communications. Other Alliance officers elected include: Kirk David, chief executive officer, GateHouse Media, vice chairman; Terry Egger, chief executive officer and publisher, Philadelphia Inquirer, secretary; and Antoinette “Toni” Bush, executive vice president and global head of government affairs, News Corp, treasurer.

James Martinez has been appointed news investigations editor for the Associated Press. In this new role, Martinez will work on fastbreaking investigations that spin off from breaking news. In the past, Martinez has served as deputy national editor, leading the day-to-day national news report and managing a team of editors.

AP Photo

Alison Young has been appointed to the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri’s Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting.

She will replace Barbara Cochran, who is retiring. Young will start her new role on Aug. 1 and will oversee the university’s Washington program, which places students in internships in the nation’s top classrooms and advertising and public relations firms. She will also produce the annual Hurley Symposium in Public Affairs Reporting. Young has been a reporter on USA TODAY’s national investigative team for most of the last 10 years. She has also served as a board member and past president of Investigative Reporter and Editors.

Janice Page has been named arts editor for the Washington Post. Page joins from the Boston Globe, where she served as deputy managing editor for arts and newsroom.

In her new role, Page will drive coverage of the fine arts, including visual art, classical music, and dance and theater. Previously, Page served as a reporter and arts and entertainment editor at the Los Angeles Times and as the executive producer of the Boston site of MSN/Sidewalk.com. She got her start

Andrew Cutler has been named editor for the East Oregonian. Previously, Cutler served as a manager of communications and public relations for Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative. Prior to that, he spent five years in La Grande, Ore. as the editor of The Observer and the last three years with the additional role of publisher.

Cutler’s newspaper career includes stints in many states but began in late 2000 at the Argus Observer in Ontario, Ore., where he first started as a senior sportswriter.

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in features at the Providence (R.I.) JournalBulletin, where she was a lifestyle editor, a reporter, a critic, and the arts and entertainment editor during her three-year tenure.

Local Independent Online News Publishers has named Chris Krewson executive director. Most recently, he served as vice president of strategy for Spirited Media, which until recently was the parent company of three independent news sites including Billy Penn. Krewson was the founding editor when Billy Penn launched in 2014. Prior to his five years at Spirited Media, Krewson was the top digital editor at both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He is also the former executive online editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and held a variety of digital roles at the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. Krewson began his career as a reporter at the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pa. Dean Miller has been promoted to editor of The Leader in Port Townsend, Wash. In his new role, he will write a column and direct the news staff, focusing on hard news and the maritime industry. Miller formerly served as senior vice president of content at Connecticut Public Broadcasting, taught in the journalism department at Western Washington University and was director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University from 2009-2015. Prior to that, he editorandpublisher.com

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By Evelyn Mateos evelyn@editorandpublisher.com

ACQUISITIONS

The Rochester (Ind.) Sentinel has been purchased by Paxton Media Group from owner and publisher Sarah O. Wilson. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. Wilson’s father, the late Jack K. Overmyer, bought the paper in 1976 and passed ownership to her upon his death in 2010. The newspaper is Fulton County’s oldest continually-operated business. Formed on Sept. 18, 1858, it is the consolidation of mergers involving The Rochester Standard, The Union Spy, The Rochester City Times, The Rochester Republican, The Fulton County Sun, The Daily News and The News-Sentinel.

Paxton Media is a family-owned company headquartered in Paducah, Ky. It publishes daily and weekly newspapers in more than 50 communities in the Midwest and South.

The Delta County (Colo.) Independent, which had been published by the Sunderland Family for more than 30 years, has been sold to Wick Communications. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The Delta County Independent is Wick’s second Colorado property. The 137-year-old publication joins the Montrose (Colo.)

Daily Press, also 137 years old, as a member of the Wick publication family. The family-owned and operated media corporation based in Sierra Vista, Ariz. owns more than two dozen newspapers and specialty publications in 11 states.

Forum Communications announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the Rochester (Minn.) Post Bull etin from Small Newspaper Group. The sale does not include the downtown office and plant facility. A closing of the transaction is expected in the second quarter of this year. No terms of the

was executive editor at The Post Register in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Scott Embry and Chris Zoeller have been named to new management positions at The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. Embry has been promoted to president of King & Columbus digital marketing agency. In his new role, he will lead its expansion into new markets in South Carolina. Previously, he was director of advertising for the newspaper. Embry has more than 17 years of media industry experience and joined the Post and Courier in 2016. Zoeller will expand on her current role as chief revenue and marketing officer to include direct responsibility for the advertising department. In 2005, she joined the newspaper’s parent company, Evening Post Industries, as assistant advertising director at The Eagle in Bryan, Texas. She has been with the Post and Courier since 2015.

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NewsPeople

transaction were announced. The Post Bulletin is the largest daily newspaper in southeastern Minnesota, serving 60 communities in nine counties. The newspaper is published five days in the afternoon and Sunday mornings. It had been owned by the Small family since 1977. Forum Communications, based in Fargo, N.D., owns 36 newspapers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The company also has television and radio holdings, a commercial printing division, internet businesses and websites at each of its operations.

GateHouse Media has acquired the Newton New Jersey Herald from family-owned Quincy Media. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Quincy Media began as Quincy Newspapers Inc. in 1926 when two Quincy, Ill. newspapers merged to create the Herald-Whig. It has since moved into broadcast news and changed its name to Quincy Media in 2016 with properties in 16 television markets. GateHouse Media, LLC, headquartered in Pittsford, N.Y., publishes hundreds of weekly newspapers and more than 150 dailies.

The Reading (Pa.) Eagle has been acquired by the MediaNews Group. The Reading Eagle has a Sunday circulation of 51,000 and serves the greater Berks County market in the southeastern region of the state. The newspaper was owned by the same family since it was founded in 1868. MediaNews Group owns a number of newspapers in the region, including the Pottstown Mercury, the Daily Times in Delaware County, the West Chester Daily Local News and the Norristown Times Herald, among others.

Mark Pickering, editor of The Pantagraph in Bloomington, Ill. and deputy regional editor of the Lee Enterprises’ Central Illinois Group, has retired. He spent more than 37 years with the newspaper. He started his career as a reporter and editor at the Mount Vernon (Ill.) Register-News before joining The Pantagraph in 1981.

Pickering is also a longtime board member of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, Illinois Press Association and The Pantagraph Goodfellow Fund.

Matt Sandberg has been named publisher of the Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho. He will also be responsible for the operations of the Elko Daily Free Press in Elko, Nev. Most recently, Sandberg was director of marketing and innovation for Swift Communica-

tions in Frisco, Colo. He has also served as publisher of the Summit (Colo.) Daily News and Ski Hi News in Grand County, Colo. and director of sales for the Vail (Colo.)

Daily and Summit Daily News. He began his publishing career as a sales consultant with the Summit Daily News in 2003.

Jake Volcsko, general manager of the Bucks County Courier Times in Levittown, Pa., Intelligencer in Doylestown, Pa. and Burlington County Times in Willingboro Township, N.J., has stepped down from his role to accept a new position as vice president of digital operations for Connecticut Public Radio and Television. He was named general manager of the three news organizations in October and oversaw daily operations of both digital and print operations, as JULY 2019 | E & P

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NewsPeople well as served as digital media and marketing director. In his new role, Volcsko will lead a new digital operations unit and be responsible for organizing, staffing and leading the new Digital Service Bureau. He will play a major role in strategic decisions on digital expansion, future partnerships and investments, new products and audience growth.

Rich Macke has been named publisher of the Star-Herald and Gering Courier in Scottsbluff, Neb., and the Hemingford (Neb.) Ledger. He brings 34 years of experience in the newspaper business to his new roles. In the past, Macke took on publisher’s duties in Port Arthur, Texas. These duties included overseeing three publications and a commercial printing business. In November 2014, in addition to his duties as publisher, he was asked to take on the position as group publisher.

Eric Schwartz has been named regional executive editor of Lafromboise Communications, the company that owns and operates the Nisqually Valley News in Yelm, Wash., The Chronicle in Centralia, Wash. and The Reflector in Battle Ground, Wash.

In his new role, Schwartz will manage the newsroom of the Nisqually Valley News and collaborate and assist with editors. Most recently, he was the director of digital operations for the company after previously working as editor of The Chronicle from 2013 to early 2018.

Mike DeLuca has been named president and group publisher of Hearst Connecticut Media Group. In this new role, DeLuca will oversee Hearst’s network of media companies in Connecticut, which includes eight daily newspapers, 14 weekly newspapers, 21 websites and four magazines. In 46 |

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Michelle Mueller had been named senior vice president of human resources for the Star Tribune Media Co. in Minnesota. She brings 25 years of experience to the company, where she will assume responsibility for all of the company’s talent-management initiatives, including the strategies, policies, and programs to improve organizational effectiveness, employee/labor relations, compensations and benefits. Mueller joins Star Tribune after serving in several HR executive capacities for Thompson Reuters. Previously, she was a director of human resources for Delta Air Lines/Northwest Airlines. addition, DeLuca will continue serving as chief executive officer of LocalEdge, a Hearst Media Services Co. Most recently, aside from serving at LocalEdge, DeLuca was the executive vice president of advertising sales for Hearst Newspapers and responsible for managing the alignment of advertising revenue generating functions, including sales, marketing and customer experience.

Lakeway Publishers of Middle Tennessee recently announced several staff promotions.

Josh Peterson, publisher of the Manchester Times, has been promoted to the } Josh Peterson new position of Coffee County, Tenn. news director. He will be responsible with managing coverage for both The Tullahoma News and Manchester Times. Joe Martin is being promoted from digital media director to group advertising manager where he will work to coordinate marketing strategy across all Lakeway’s Middle Tennessee publications. Deborah Wimsatt, accounting manager for The Tullahoma News and a 29-year veteran of the newspaper, is being promoted to general manager.

Connecticut Public has appointed Tim Rasmussen to chief content officer. In his new role, Rasmussen will oversee all content produced and distributed by Connecticut Public, including Connecticut Public Radio, Connecticut Public Television (CPTV, CPTV Create and Spirit) and all of Connecticut Public’s digital and online

platforms. He joins the company from ESPN, where he served as director of photography, digital and print media. Prior to that, he served as assistant managing editor, photography and multimedia at the Denver Post.

Barry Lewis, executive editor of the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., has resigned to take a position outside of the industry. He was with the newspaper for 20 years, beginning as the Sullivan County editor and later becoming the Sunday editor.

In 2014, he was appointed executive editor.

Prior to the Record, Lewis served as city editor of The Advocate in Stamford, Conn. and editor of The Chronicle in Windham, Conn. He was also previously editor of the Tri-State Gazette in Port Jervis, N.Y. Kristin Roberts has been named McClatchy vice president of news. She will lead a newly-expanded news group that comprises the company’s 30 newsrooms across 14 states, news operations and McClatchy Studios. Roberts is the first woman to lead news in the 162-year history of the company. Previously, she served as McClatchy’s executive editor for politics and regional editor for its eight East Coast newsrooms. In addition, McClatchy has expanded the leadership role of Scott Manuel, vice president of customer and product, adding McClatchy New Ventures Lab and partnerships with such platform companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple to his management portfolio.  editorandpublisher.com

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COMMUNITY NEWS EDITOR, DIGITAL AND PRINT: The Tracy Press is looking for just the right person to be our editor. Successful candidate understands the value and importance of providing local information to the community. Basic skills in newspaper editing, headline writing, website interface will be a plus.

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Must understand the community expectation for consistent multimedia presentation of news and events. Editor is also a writer and reporter who represents the Tracy Press in the community. ®

Please send resume to wfleet@tracypress.com.

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Phone: 800-887-1615

Help Wanted

Help Wanted

EDITOR: The Norfolk Daily News - an independent, family-owned news organization serving the northeast quarter of Nebraska - is seeking an editor to guide its approximately 15-person newsroom and play a key role on its leadership team. The Daily News, which has been owned by the same family for more than 125 years, is known for its commitment to community advocacy and a conservative worldview, and is seeking an editor who embraces those foundational pillars.

The Daily News publishes not only a six-day-a-week afternoon newspaper, but also a variety of digital products that continue to grow in scope. Its next editor will have a track record of journalistic excellence and a broad knowledge of the issues, challenges and opportunities in the evolving world of community journalism. The Daily News is seeking an individual who is equally comfortable in meeting with high-ranking elected officials as well as individual subscribers. The editor will especially be knowledgeable and excited about the digital side of journalism and how best to distribute content to effectively reach Nebraskans of all ages.

To apply, contact Bill Huse, publisher, at whuse1@gmail.com.

MISSOURI STATE EDITOR: The Missouri State Editor will lead the GateHouse Media newsrooms in the state, as well as the Columbia Daily Tribune newsroom, located in the vibrant town of Columbia, home of University of Missouri, one of the leading journalism programs in the country. This editor will develop systems of collaboration with journalist in markets that range from rural to suburban. We are looking for someone with vision, passion for strong journalism and experience as an editor, ideally in a regional capacity, plus the ability to inspire and grow the journalists throughout the state.

Primary responsibility: The Missouri State Editor leads newsrooms throughout the state of Missouri, driving audience growth at the Columbia Daily Tribune and throughout the state.

The state editor serves as a coach and project manager. They are focused on driving results, growing audience and seeking best practices. This agile thinker will be focused on high-interest, high-engagement journalism with an entrepreneurial spirit. They will change newsroom culture from passive to progressive.

Responsibilities include but not limited to: • Serves as the editor for the news operations, overseeing staff at the local level in Columbia.

• Supports and drives GateHouse Media’s news initiatives.

• Develops and maintains strategies and specific content initiatives to promote audience growth, working with other newsroom leaders throughout the state of Missouri and throughout GateHouse Media to assess successes and identify challenges through audience metrics.

• Initiates and directs special projects for their newsrooms.

• Communicates with other department heads to further editorial mission.

• Demonstrates news judgment and initiative to produce community-based stories beyond meeting and event coverage.

• Leads community engagement efforts.

• Implements strategies that will provide operational efficiencies, promote cooperation and expand shared resources among newsrooms.

• Provides editorial guidance and content; works with other leaders to develop cost and revenue strategies that advance profitability.

• Develops and expands digital footprint for news operations, including monitoring practices and submissions required for GateHouse’s internal quarterly evaluation, Inner Circle.

• Improves selection of syndicated and other shared content, ensuring optimal use of GateHouse-provided content.

• Serves as principal contact for any legal and ethical considerations that may arise regarding news operations.

• Looks for partnership opportunities to enhance news coverage.

• Coordinates staff training efforts and provides coaching for staff members; promotes staff development and monitors possible opportunities for advancement within GateHouse.

• Works with news operation managers and human-resources staff to resolve any disciplinary problems, and ensures compliance with all HR policies and procedures.

• Consistently meets deadline and budget requirements.

• Posts daily (either social media or website) with the expectation to meet minimum goals set.

• Identifies digital goals, working with the regional editor, to achieve audience growth on team and/or individual levels.

REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES: • Must have good communication skills to deal effectively with internal and external customers • Excellent knowledge of grammar, spelling and AP style • Ability to react quickly to new developments and exercise judgement.

• Ability to juggle multiple stories and deadlines REQUIRED EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE: • BA degree in journalism or equivalent experience • Minimum of 5 years experience in supervision/management role • Other combinations of education and experience may be considered Please send resumes to: tleifeste@gatehousemedia.com

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Help Wanted

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Help Wanted

SENIOR EDITOR: Quanta Magazine seeks an experienced, all-purpose senior editor to assign and edit science and math articles and assist in managing our small, growing newsroom. In addition to news and feature editing, the senior editor will oversee the work of freelance writers, copy editors and fact checkers, and write and review display copy as well as language for associated infographics.

The ideal candidate will have substantial science news and feature editing as well as copy editing experience and be an accomplished wordsmith and master stylist with impeccable news judgment. We are looking for a deft, detail-oriented manager and a diehard advocate for the highest standards in journalistic ethics and scientific accuracy.

This full-time position reports to the editor-in-chief and is based at the Simons Foundation offices in New York City.

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• Must be comfortable editing feature-length articles under web deadlines and be fluent in the best print editing standards and online conventions.

• Must have copy editing and display copy writing experience, be detail-oriented and organized, and demonstrate mastery of the highest standards of written English.

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shoptalk /commentary Facebook’s ‘Fake News’ Problem Won’t Be Solved by Banning Trolls

By Brooke Binkowski

I

f Facebook wants to show us they’re opposed to hate speech, banning individual trolls is about as effective as a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound— painful, messy, and worse than useless.

In 2016, when I was managing editor at fact-checking site Snopes.com, we agreed to partner with Facebook to stop a major problem that was rapidly approaching crisis mode. This back when disinformation was still called “fake news,” and no one yet had any idea of the scope or the power of what they were seeing on social media.

I had some trepidation, but I thought it might be a good-faith effort to stop stories that were using fearmongering and lies to corrode not just policy but the most intimate social relationships. I thought we had a chance of changing the system from within.

Instead, I discovered Facebook’s role in a genocide in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine—which, at the time, the company appeared to downplay. I saw this not just as a massive human rights violation on its own, but also a terrible warning for what was in store for the rest of the world.

The model for what happened in Myanmar was simple: Facebook set up a deal with local mobile phone companies to exclude use of its platforms from data restrictions. Many people in the country then got their news stories directly from Facebook, making it fertile ground for algorithmic experimentation on individual and crowd behavior. “Burma is experiencing an ugly renaissance of genocidal propaganda,” Matthew Smith, co-founder of human rights organization Fortify Rights, said in 2017.

“And it spreads like wildfire on Facebook.”

False stories about Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims played on a decades-long pattern of discrimination against the ethnic group in the region. Rumors spread that they were rapists and thieves, and posts urged they be

shot or exterminated.

The results have been devastating. These stories, many of which were pushed on Facebook by government officials, were used to justify driving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya out of their homes and sparking a massive refugee crisis. Since then, Facebook has taken some steps to control the vitriol on its platform, but the efforts so far cannot undo the damage.

Facebook and other social media’s true problem is a hellish combination of disinformation, an ever-weakening journalism industry, algorithmic clustering, and sophisticated dark advertising using psychographic research to bombard already-identified users with false or frightening imagery—all in the service of “engagement” revenue.

Which brings me to the most recent ban

by Facebook of high-profile individuals that it says spread anti-Semitic content. While I applaud moderation of all corrosive content and other consequences for spreading hateful speech, banning a few people would not have been a solution even if the network had implemented it years ago.

You can already see that those same individuals are able to parlay this ban into charges of personal censorship that are ludicrous, reactionary—and incredibly effective in certain quarters.

What is particularly insidious is how this all relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of free speech. When someone speaks in a way that intimidates another individual or group into silence, then that speech ceases to be free. Social media hasn’t learned that yet.

That Facebook has taken any action speaks volumes about how far we have come. But if we don’t keep pushing, it will end here and we’ll all be stuck in a toxic soup of hoaxes and fake stories in a dystopian alternate universe created by algorithms. This will permanently destroy democracies

around the world.

In the meantime, if Facebook (and Twitter, and YouTube, and others) truly wish to change for the better, here is what they must do.

Hire more moderators, ethicists and historians. Train them to be ruthless about pruning back disinformation and propaganda. Supporting corrosive disinformation that silences others is not supporting free speech. Make users opt-in to social media algorithms and show us exactly why we see the stories and posts that we see, and give us the power to adjust them.

Facebook must atone for its sins toward journalism. Even before its “pivot to video” metrics fraud—hugely destructive, whether it was intentional or not—Facebook devastated small news organizations that rely on ad revenue and goodwill to survive.

My suggestion: Stop paying fact-checkers directly, which has helped effectively politicize fact-checking. Instead, put money into an independent and transparent foundation to be distributed to newsrooms as annual grants. While $100,000 a year might not mean much to Facebook, that could be everything to a small-town newspaper.

This will require soul-searching and a large cultural shift in Silicon Valley. But humans aren’t faceless meat-sacks who exist solely as moneymakers for Big Tech. Every human deserves a basic modicum of human dignity, not rank exploitation.  Brooke Binkowski is a longtime awardwinning journalist and managing editor of TruthOrFiction.com. Before Truth or Fiction, she ran Snopes.com and spent more than a decade covering immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. This edited piece was originally published at USA Today.

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