SALT LAKE CITY — Newspapers must innovate and experiment to survive, a group of news executives told the first general session of APSE’s convention Thursday.
Whether the experiment involves website pay walls, sharing content, adding video features, increasing commentary and analysis, or inviting fans to meet a writer at a sports bar, the industry needs to try new things, the panel said during the “State of the Union” discussion.
“We need a new vision of who we are,” said David Shribman, editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “The word I’m using is utility – to have utility and be a utility.”
Newspapers, he said, need to envision themselves as essential as an electric utility and figure out ways to provide information that will make them necessary to their communities.
In a wide-ranging discussion that swung from the industry’s financial struggles to the lingering quality of its standards, the panelists kept returning to the theme of reinvention.
Marty Kaiser, editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, described how one savvy social-networking beat writer arranged a meeting with his readers at a bar. Sixty to 100 fans showed up.
“We’ve got to figure out what we can do best, then rely on our expertise,” he said, a strategy that will protect newspapers from ESPN and other upstarts. “We’ve got to engage with our fans. Everybody in the newsroom has got to take responsibility for the future.”
Ted Power, president and publisher of the Reno Gazette-Journal, asked his staff to take that kind of responsibility during a relaunch of the Sunday paper.
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“I asked every employee in the building, ‘What are you going to do about Sunday?’ What are you going to do to make Sunday better and better and better?”
Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, said small newspapers may have the most advantageous competitive position because they don’t face the same breadth of competition that large papers do.
He sees overall newspaper revenues heading up at the end of this year after years of decline.
Tim Franklin of the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University served as the moderator of the session.
