Every reporter or editor should have the experience of dealing with the news media. We are a pushy lot who ask difficult questions, often just the questions you can’t answer.
I have spent much of the past week dealing with the news media. The easiest questions came from a television reporter for KWWL, wondering what’s going on here at Gazette Communications. The tough ones came from the reporters, photojournalists and editors on my own staff.
As I did with the staff, I will tell you right away that we don’t have all the answers yet. We’re trying to be as open as possible with the staff and public as we consider changes that will fundamentally transform how this organization operates and how our staff works.
I have worked for newspapers that were making big changes and the managers kept employees in the dark until all the details were worked out. You can answer all the questions at once that way, but you damage trust and make clear that management is deciding everything in a one-way process.
Either way, it’s a scary time for our staff and leadership. David Lee, a copy editor, spoke for many of his colleagues when he wrote in his Write On blog last week, “I’m worried about my career, I’m worried about the newspaper I work for, I’m worried about my profession.”
Management has to set the strategic direction and makes the final decisions. But employees deliver the success or failure of any organization, so this week we have been informing our staff of changes that are taking shape in our company, even as we continue making crucial decisions.
I have told the newsroom staff that all of our jobs are fundamentally changing. The jobs in our new organization, including mine, won’t be the jobs we currently hold. We posted some new jobs earlier this month and will post more this week. I have told my staff the general framework of some new jobs, but I’ve asked them to help me shape those jobs.
News spreads quickly by word of mouth, so you might already have heard some of this from your friends and neighbors who work for this company. News also spreads inaccurately sometimes by word of mouth, so you may have heard wrong (some of the rumors that made it back to me were certainly wrong).
The changes we are making are no surprise: Chuck Peters, our CEO, began discussing them with the staff about two years ago, long before I showed up last June. He began blogging last April about the need to change.
Still, when you’ve been operating much the same way for 126 years, as our company has, or for decades, as many of our loyal employees have, it takes a while for the changes to sink in. They’re still sinking in for me, and I’m supplying some of the ideas.
For all of those 126 years, our success has been tied to a packaged product, a newspaper. Even though our customers like that packaged product and many even love it, they aren’t buying it because of the package but because of the content: stories, photographs, columns, graphics, editorials, obituaries, calendars, box scores, lists of information, advertisements.
If the content of this newspaper was in a different language, or if it was dictionary entries, pornography, gibberish or children’s riddles, we would have had an entirely different set of customers, or none at all.
Of course, we can present content in different ways: We can package content digitally or we can focus the content on particular niches. We can publish content in different packages – magazines such as Edge or books such as the popular “Epic Surge.”
Products come and go. The first newspaper I carried as a boy in the 1960s, the Columbus Citizen-Journal in Ohio, went out of business in the 1980s. The first newspaper to give me a writing job in the 1970s, the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa, went out of business in the 1990s. I was present for the deaths of afternoon newspapers in Des Moines in 1982 and in Kansas City in 1990. But the newspaper industry has never seen – at least not in my career – as much upheaval as it has in the past year. A web site called Paper Cuts counts more than 15,000 newspaper jobs lost in 2008 and that has continued this year.
Tribune Company, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, filed for bankruptcy protection last month and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis did the same last week. The Detroit newspapers cut daily home delivery to three days a week.
Demand for the packaged newspaper product is falling at the same time that newsprint prices are rising and the economy that supports our advertisers is in turmoil. But demand for information content – news, photos, videos, answers to questions – is stronger than ever. The community always needs to connect and engage.
So the leaders and employees of Gazette Communications are working to reorganize into a company that can meet the information demands of the future and continue connecting and engaging the community effectively.
Products come and go in response to market conditions but information always remains essential to the community. So we are developing a new organization that separates content from products.
We will have a separate operation, which I will lead, to gather information content and publish it digitally in large quantities without regard to the limitations of packaged products. We will work out ways to tag the content and make it easily searchable, so you can quickly find what you’re looking for or browse by topics of interest, looking for nothing in particular.
Another operation will manage a portfolio of packaged products such as The Gazette, GazetteOnline, Hoopla, Edge, Penny Saver and IowaPrepSports.com. Those products will draw heavily on our information content as well as content from other sources. They will manage those products in response to changing market conditions.
Other parts of the company are organizing to provide production services or to focus on sales, distribution or customer care. No one is unaffected. We are committed to creating an entirely new media company, focused on and structured for the challenges and opportunities of the future.
Some of the newsroom staff will work in information content, others in product management, but all of our jobs are fundamentally changing.
Even as I sympathize with employees in turmoil who want quick answers to their questions, I am excited about our plans to transform this company and pleased with the willingness – and at times eagerness – of our staff to lead the way in developing a new organization that will serve our community long into the future.
Another staff member, Angie Holmes, wrote in her Frumpfighter blog last week: “I see opportunity and forward-thinking in The Gazette’s plan. Will everybody who works there now make it through the restructuring? Probably not. I am guaranteed a job? No, nobody is. But I do have a sense of resilience that will keep me going no matter what happens.”
Mr. Buttry, After your company has eliminated the line between editorial and advertising — essentially all is just “content” — should your organization be allowed to continue the privileges of being a news-gathering organization? These include the right to shoot photos and use computers in a courtroom and “press” passes/access to events. What about ethics when the line is blurred? If employees are paid, in part, by the number of readers/hits, how will you ensure that the public is being served? What about the media’s role as watchdog of government, if that content doesn’t generate enough revenue/hits for you? It content is posted live by writers without editors, how will you ensure accuracy?
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Dee, Thanks for raising this misconception. We are not eliminating the line between editorial and advertising. In fact, we are developing a separate commercial content operation in addition to the information content operation I described and I should have mentioned it in my post (I will mention it in the version of this that will be published as my Sunday column). We are most certainly structuring to maintain our watchdog role. And I told the staff this week that ethics and integrity will remain paramount in this organization. But we cannot continue the watchdog role without building a better business model to support it and that is what we are doing. My former boss, Drew Davis, president of the American Press Institute, often said (quoting a former boss of his, as I recall) that the best guarantee of a free press is a profitable press. I echo that and expand it to the digital information marketplace as well.
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Hi Steve,
Congrats on embarking on this sea change. (Well, maybe it’s not “sea change” in Iowa.) I look forward to watching the evolution of this on your site. I hope you are thinking of layering in social networking and adding a news wiki and other collaborative features.
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I will miss the Gazette.
R.I.P.
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I am glad that the Gazette is not going out of business,but instead is looking to the future!
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Joe, I expect The Gazette to be around for many years. In our plans for developing separate operations focused on content and product, The Gazette will remain our flagship product for the foreseeable future, but we will be better positioned to provide content for multiple products in a swiftly changing media martketplace.
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[…] fast-forward to this weekend when I see that my editor, Steve Buttry, quoted from it in his blog posting and column about changes at The Gazette, which also appears in the Sunday Gazette (76,622 circulation!). How […]
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What’s happening is the Gazette is further watering down its content (across any and all platforms) rather than enriching it. Staff will be reduced and/or paid less, and you get further away from what matters: good reporting and writing of any meaningful depth. Anybody can blog and twitter, and the Gazette will struggle to stay relevant. Sad.
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[…] to concur with that statement…I’ve seen and heard enough to know it needs to be said. Steve Butty has just recently laid out an outstanding explanation of the changes taking place in his… It is a great read and of interest to employees, customers and others in the industry. Watch and […]
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Joe P, I will be interested to hear back from you after we’ve made the changes. I’m glad you mentioned “meaningful depth,” because for all of my 37-plus years in the newspaper business, depth of our reporting and writing has always been limited by space and by the cost of newsprint. I believe we will provide greater depth than ever in our new model for customers who are willing to look beyond the print edition. But I welcome your skepticism. We need to remember that we are serving a demanding community that expects the best. Thanks.
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What might be of some interest to the staff is that there are a number of us who belong to the major tax paying moderate to conservative folks.
We know the ” Obama group” has the outspoken political strangle hold. But there are consequences from long term in your face reporting (Editorializing as poorly diguised reporting).
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Mr. Buttry,
I realize that the Gazette is trying to cope with the changes in technology by offering more “on-line” products, such as the live blogs, etc., but how many readers/public have time during the day to log in and and read them. I’m willing to bet it’s a very small percentage of daily readers.
I’m a regular reader of the old-fashioned print edition and find it’s much easier to sit in my easy chair and scan through the pages than sitting at a computer and reading the paper on-line. Frankly, it’s more time-consuming and I can often miss an article that may have caught my attention in the paper.
Let’s not neglect the print version in favor of the e-mail edition.
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Very nicely put Steve. This has to be a very hard post for you to write and I think ti was done very well.
As odd as it feels to say this, it will be an exciting time to work at the Gazette. I think we are the first company to try this particular “move” and I’m guessing we have some serious eyes watching.
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No kidding. Thanks for your post. I’ve been pndering on this issue a lot the last few days and the thing that keeps coming to the surface is this: I think this challenge will take every skill and talent each of us has to give. And we will need to have high expectations of each other, yet understand that we WILL make mistakes. Minimizing them — and learning from them — is of utmost importance.
Stephanie Heck
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[…] I was so glad, and nervous, to hear of the bold moves we have made over the last week or so. (The process has been going on for over a year – so I was very glad to see the outward push.) The Gazette has made the decision that it is time to change – or, hopefully, transform. A part of this transformation is explained in our editor’s (Steve Buttry) post from Saturday: […]
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You will want to read Tom Gorman this morning , he has seen the need for expansive change and surrendered to total Gazette line of bashing the moderate to conservative folks .
He has now cemented his place in Gazette mediocracy.
I would hazzard to guess that he has tipped us off to his ” U of I” upbringing.
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Glad of the upcoming changes. I read the Gazette on-line every day but still have a weekend doorstep delivery. That said, when the print is eliminated, alot of trees will be saved especially the “10 pounds” of Sunday advertising inserts. I know inserts pay the bills, but who beside shut-ins and retirees have time to read every insert, clip cupons and run to store(s) just to save a few pennies?
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I’m glad to see the GZ taking the necessary steps to stay relevant in the information game but in a market where your main competition is no longer the Press Citizen but national sources, the Diggs and Twitters, and a blogosphere emerging from adolescence? I argue that now the quality of content needs to be matched by the quality of the user/reader experience. With out dynamic and rich content coupled with a superior user experience I fear that local information companies will lose relevancy in the minds of the next generation of information consumers
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[…] might have come at just the right time as many media organization, including the one where I work, continue to […]
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[…] a GREAT job that I’m excited about and with a company with exciting products and is undergoing exciting changes. And I’m here! I’m going to part of it! I count my lucky […]
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So sorry Steve:(!! You so-called journalists have cut your own throats. The problem is not advertising, it is TRUST!! Nobody trusts reporters anymore because they can’t even hide their biases. Why should I trust anything written by individuals with their own ax to grind. You don’t report news, you report opinion disguised as news. If I want factual information, I don’t turn to a newspaper, I get it from reputable web sites. Take a look around the country. Predominately liberal newspapers are dropping like flies. Journalism is dead. You’ve become nothing but cheerleaders for the Left. The GZ is good for one thing…local sports. Maybe you should take a look at the WSJ. Libs apparently don’t read newspapers in great enough numbers. Maybe Obama will decide to bail out his slobbering, tingle down my leg press. If not, enjoy your next career Steve.
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What a bunch of malarkey.
I feel for the employees who are getting jobbed by a bunch of penny-pinching weasels. Twenty years of service for some and they are forced to re-apply for their job, take a massive (10 percent) pay cut, and do three times as much work while they’re at it.
Congratulations on further watering down what was once a fine product. It’s looking more and more like the Register every day – and that most certainly is not a compliment.
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[…] spent a lot of time talking about how newspapers and media must move forward – and then, it started. So now what do I do – that boat left the harbor…or is at least […]
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[…] Puttin’ on the Gaz Steve Buttry, editor of The Gazette and GazetteOnline « Gazette working on transformation […]
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[…] Gazette Working on Transformation […]
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I initially did not approve the comment above from Jorge Vino, because I do not approve comments with factual errors and his comments about what is happening at The Gazette are not true. Since I dealt with the rumors in this weekend’s blog post (https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/uncertainty-fuels-rumors-and-questions/), I have approved the comment. I welcome criticism of me or The Gazette on this blog, but I will not publish factual errors without correcting them.
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[…] I have reported before in this blog, Gazette Communications is splitting content creation from the making of products. […]
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[…] into the Twittersphere; journalism ethics in social networks; liveblogging as stories unfold and reorganizing to separate content generation from product management. I’ll pull together links to various materials for people to read before or after the […]
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[…] Gazette working on transformation (stevebuttry.wordpress.com) […]
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[…] an effort to apply for a newer job, officially retire from refereeing hockey and just the normal noise of life, I have not spent […]
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[…] Gazette working on transformation (stevebuttry.wordpress.com) […]
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[…] and I wrote frequently about the changes we were making and considering. We cut the staff and reorganized the newsroom. My title changed twice, starting the year as editor and ending as C3 innovation […]
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[…] transformation did not go as planned. When Chuck Peters, the CEO of Gazette Communications decided to reorganize the company, splitting the content-gathering team from colleagues who assembled print and digital […]
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[…] monthly media column that I will write with John Goodlove. In this installment, we wrote about the recent announcement that The Gazette is restructuring its newsroom, and the following staff […]
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[…] It also involved some newsroom job cuts (I opposed them but carried them out) and some structural changes that were not my idea but that I was carrying […]
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[…] planning the cuts. When we had to cut staff in Cedar Rapids in 2009, we had been transparent in discussing with staff for a few months the reorganization we were planning. I discussed aspects of the plan in […]
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[…] in Cedar Rapids and then as we changed directions. But in my weekly editor’s column, in conversations with the newsroom, in public appearances and private discussions in the community, and in this blog, which launched […]
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