Newspapers have more tools than ever before to do the business of journalism, said Jennifer Carroll, director of news development for the Gannett Co. in McLean, Va.
“We have better tools, and we have a responsibility to use them,” Carroll told attendees at NAA’s Annual Convention Monday afternoon at a session on journalism in transition.
Those tools include mapping software that shows users how a major road project will look when it’s finished, databases users can search, raw materials that allow users to do their own sourcing and forums where they can discuss what they have learned.
“We have incredibly smart people in our communities, but we’ve done a very poor job of inviting them in,” Carroll said.
Recently, Gannett’s Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester teased an investigative Sunday feature, about Rochester police officers bolstering their paychecks with overtime time pay, by publishing on its Web site a database that showed salaries and overtime pay for police officers. The database was published the Thursday before the feature ran, and users were invited to begin searching it immediately.
That Sunday the paper saw its highest single-copy sales, Carroll said.
Newspapers should harness the power of the community to help fill its pages rather than running wire copy that is available everywhere else, said Lincoln Millstein, senor vice president of digital media at Hearst Corp.
“Half of newspaper’s service-oriented content can be done by users and done in an engaging way that can enrich audience,” he said. Such a model, he said, would free up “precious resources to do the craft of journalism” and create content that sets the newspaper apart from other media.
He suggested, for instance, inviting the local church choir director to review a concert at the local high school and inviting parents to provide photographs of the event.
“We rope ourselves into what we consider content we can publish or not,” he said.
Millstein ended the session by warning major metro newspapers that they are an endangered species.
“You don’t need professional journalists to put out a travel or food section,” he said, adding that when he worked for a print newspaper he had 100 journalists reporting to him. “I don’t believe that model works or needs to work. Users are better served by having user-generated content. Use the journalists to do highly differentiated journalism.”
-- Lisa Rabasca