Please pass this along to anyone you think may have been planning to attend.

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San Jose CopyCamp

Saturday, April 19, 2008

San Jose Mercury Newsroom

750 Ridder Park Drive
San Jose, California 95190
The San Jose Mercury News invites you to the first ever Copycamp at their Newsroom on April 19th, 2008 at 9 a.m.

RSVP at our wiki: http://copycamp.pbwiki.com/San+Jose+Mercury+News

CopyCamp is a one day un-conference that brings community members into the newsroom to meet and discuss important issues with local journalists. After an initial meet and greet, reporters from the San Jose Mercury News and active members of the San Jose community will suggest topics they believe will benefit through an open dialogue in the hopes of improving the quality of journalism in the Bay Area and figuring out how the SJMN can better cover under represented communities.

These conversations can cover any topic pertaining to the South Bay, from education to homelessness or even propose collaborative future projects for the Mercury News. The hope is that by coming together to learn from each other the journalists will have a better understanding of community issues and local readers and citizen journalists can voice constructive criticism and even partner with journalists.

We won’t know what will be discussed until that day - because the agenda is set by those who show up. We do know this is an opportunity to improve the quality of journalism from the Mercury News, the relationship between journalist and reader and a way to work together to redefine the San Jose identity.

Come join us.

When: April 19th; 9 a.m.
Where: San Jose Mercury Newsroom
Why: Everyone will learn something

RSVP at our wiki: http://copycamp.pbwiki.com/San+Jose+Mercury+News

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 Keane writes:

“We’re calling it NewPaper, but we’ll focus on every facet of newsgathering, both in print and online. No examination of the news business in 2008 would be complete if it failed to look at the impact changing reader habits and new technologies were having on our ability to deliver the news. Content needs to be provided when people want it and in formats they find useful and convenient, and our newsrooms need to adjust to these challenging reader demands.”

“…I will ask you to challenge your assumptions on what readers expect of us and how to best use our time. You should consider the NewPaper Project a unique opportunity to re-examine everything, from what we find front-page worthy to how our news pages are designed and presented. Ask yourself how you would put together a locally focused news operation of our breadth and size if you were to start one from scratch.

For the sake of the NewPaper discussion, we must assume that the business model of newspapers has been permanently altered, and that we will never be able to support a fulltime news operation larger than what we have now.”

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Read our story here.

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Ryan Sholin, who is leaving the Bay Area for New York state, gives a recap of our recent history and offers his thoughts on our current issues:

“So change. Or die.”

Michael Bazeley, who worked at the Merc for 11 years, was most recently our multimedia guru before leaving last fall. He writes an obit for the Merc, which I hope is premature:

“It pains me to write this, pains me to know how this situation is affecting the lives of some really great journalists still at the Merc.”

Finally, on a somewhat related note, David Sasaki on the Idealab blog, gives a more hopeful take on the legacy of our former corporate parent, Knight Ridder. David looks at the fall of the company, and the ongoing work of the Knight Foundation as it tries to guide us into a new era:

He writes: “The Knight Foundation is single-handedly making citizen media both more serious and more respected by giving financial support to some of the field’s most innovative thinkers. But is this a sustainable model for the transformation of media?”

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You can read a profile of Matt here, written by a Merc alum, Jonathan Berlin. But let me highlight from that story a post mortem Matt gave on our process here: 

“As many people know, I’ve been working on a rethinking project here. Our aim was to use a great deal of observational research to reposition our product portfolio as massive change in media use has hit the newspaper industry hard.

That’s a fancy way of saying we needed to do something — and we needed to do it quick!

Look, I’ve been on the front lines of the online revolution. I live in Silicon Valley, after all. My faith in what we do is stronger than ever.

But because I have grown up loving digital media, I know the imperative for change demands a different look at how we do business as journalists. I hope the industry begins to confront that in meaningful ways.

I have immense interest in and passion for the news, information, entertainment, technology and social media spaces.

I also know that building new audience segments is more important than ever because it helps define the overall impact of our media reach. So that means we have got to create some niche products that will draw in people who might never look at the traditional paper.

Trust me, I know that newspapers are in a tough market position because so much of the existing revenue model depends on the part of the franchise that’s getting less audience reach than it used to. I don’t side, however, with all the traditional folks who think that, if we hope and pray long enough, the good old days might just return. They won’t.

Media use has fundamentally changed. Smart people see this, both in that macro sense when they look out at the world and in the micro sense when they check out their own habits. We need to make media products that we want to use, and that other people might want to use even if we don’t.

For all those reasons, doing nothing (often the advice I hear) seems like doing harm. We must do something. Anything.

My advice: Try as many things as your organization can afford. And give until it hurts.”

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The news tracks with a number of similar recent announcements throughout our industry, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the L.A. Times. It’s been a challenging year, once again.
 
Even before the announcement yesterday, we had hit the pause button on our Rethinking process. We had a number of management changes at the Mercury News since the start of the year. Now we’re waiting for things to settle out over the next few weeks before deciding what to do next.

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Here’s our promised (much overdue) update.

The last three weeks have been intense. The Rethink committee put together two sets of prototypes. We revised those. We met with several groups, both inside the Mercury News and around the community, to get feedback. We adjusted again.

While the details varied, a common refrain was heard: You’re not going far enough.

So we huddled again for several days, merged the two prototypes into one, and moved on to the next round. We’ve honestly lost track of which version this is, but, whatever it is, here is the latest overview of what is on the table.

(Disclaimer: These descriptions represent a glimpse of what remains a work in progress. Please be kind.)

Our driving goals in this process remain the same. We must re-imagine the print version of our paper in a way that serves our loyal readers and continues to reward the reading habit we know will be a part of many of our lives for years to come (no matter what the naysayers on “the death of print” say). At the same time, we must redeploy a good deal of our news staff to work online where our business and our readership is growing faster than we could have ever imagined, even in a place as wired as Silicon Valley.

PRINT

We’re still on track to create a three-section printed newspaper every day, with several extra weekly sections (more on that in a second).

Why this approach? In our interviews and conversations with the community, we’ve heard frustrations with changes in the paper in recent years. We want to stem that tide.

With the three-section daily paper, we would focus on doing greater depth on a smaller range of subjects, but those content choices would be things that the Mercury News reporting staff excels at doing, namely stories about working and living here in Silicon Valley.

We intend to plan a smart, thoughtful blend of news you need and news you can only get from the Mercury News, stories from the worlds of business, technology, politics, and sports, as well as arts and culture news that recognizes the South Bay’s vibrant scene. We want to be mindful of the call for depth and balance that with the need for a quick start to what’s still a morning ritual: reading the newspaper.

(more…)

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