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MediaNews’ BANG-East Bay launches NewPaper Project

March 13, 2008 | Author: cobrien | Filed under: Milestones

Kevin Keane of the Bay Area News Group - East Bay, sent a memo to his staff announcing the start of the NewPaper Project. It’s a comprehensive look at everything those papers do in terms of news gathering, storytelling, and the business:

 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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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 and is filed under Milestones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

xygoxen

1 person has left a comment

Can we first talk about how the NewBuggyWhip project is going?

I don’t think there are any good answers to the dilemma faced by the newspaper industry. Why _would_ anyone want to put together a locally focused news operation of your breadth and size if he was starting from scratch?

One quick idea: Run guest editorials, particularly those that disagree with yours or from newspapers that are topically relevant. I suppose I could go find all the newspapers in New York state, register for their sites as needed, and skim the editorials to find the best editorial analysis of the Spitzer debacle, but that’s more effort than I want to apply. Or you could do that for your readers.

The fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion is coming up on March 19. I imagine nearly every newspaper in the country is going to have an editorial on the subject. Why not run a cross section of opinion on the matter? Some editorial in Kansas City, Cleveland, Miami, or who knows where will best sum up one viewpoint or another.

I don’t have time to read 100 editorials a day to find the two or three that best illuminate an issue: why don’t you find them for me and print them in the newspaper?

David Marshall wrote on March 13, 2008 - 3:47 pm | Visit Link

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