Good for Gannett: 7 Steps to Modern Sobriety

You can greet Gannett's recent "Seven Desks" announcement with skepticism. After all, major pronouncements from the corporate suites of news companies often have an off-key sound to them. And Gannett's name over the years has been more associated with high-margin newspapers than prize-winning ones.

Still, the announcement tells us that someone at Gannett has a clue. Fundamental to the Gannett announcement is at least a tentative embrace of citizen-generated content, of engaging the group Jay Rosen well describes as "the group formerly known as the audience." Gannett talks about "crowdsourcing" in its 7-step plan, of engaging citizens both in newsgathering and story idea generation. The details are hazy, emerging from experiments at several of its papers. The early iterations are bound to be ungainly, but hopefully will be learning experiences.

The plank is formally known as "COMMUNITY CONVERSATION." 

It joins the six other planks, all intended to be rolled out across the 90+ Gannett U.S. operations by May:

---LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL: Gannett's gotten the message we all live in national/global news bubble, in which the news finds us. Local is the last and best bastion of community newspapers.
---PUBLIC SERVICE: Gannett talks about extending First Amendment coverage with more community involvement.
---CUSTOM CONTENT: Here, the company will try to get vertical, and presumably locally vertical.
---MULTIMEDIA: It will try to cross-train reporters and photographers alike, with the understanding that journalists should be able to tell stories in text -- and sound and moving pictures.
---DATA: Gannett says it wants to get serious about harnessing databases for local calendar information. Newspaper companies have squandered this opportunity for a decade; this looks like a new attempt. 
---DIGITAL: Easier said than done, the company will try to become medium-agnostic, delivering to print, desktop and mobile media. And it says, learning the presentation ins and outs of each medium.

Implicit in all this is the idea that these newsrooms are 24/7 operations. Flexibility is the key word here,

and one that explains the corporate mandate. Unfortunately, newsrooms have moved so glacially to re-create themselves for the digital age that mandates are likely required as we move into the second decade of Web publishing. How few newsrooms have harnessed the opportunities of news publishing, and become transforming themselves, instead of just bemoaning the layoffs and the loss of readers. Within that context, the mandate makes sense.

It reminds me of Gannett's forced diversity march of the '80s. It put forth what seemed to be silly mandates that the racial diversity (or lack of it) in newspaper photographs be tracked rigorously, and then that the community be represented numerically in those images. Those of us in Knight Ridder made fun of the mandates, and some of us did move to do some appropriate diversifying of our own. But the truth is that the Gannett corporate diversity mandate did get the ball rolling, did force changes. It would be great if journalists did the right thing, and did it in timely ways. When they don't, all that's left will be mandates.

Make no mistake that Gannett's "Seven Desks" plan is about community service. It's about business survival itself, and the company seems to realize that. Though the print circulation slide is concentrated at large metros, and Gannett is luckily made up of a few metros and many mid- and smaller-size markets, the slide is in evidence throughout the country. Gannett's own earnings show that. In October, GCI revenues dropped 2.9% year over year, with classifieds down 5%. Flat-lining is the generous way of describing Gannett's -- and the industry's -- revenue plight.

So Seven Desks is intended as one way to reverse those fortunes. As for its crowdsourcing notion, it's a simple matter of economics, at least: why pay staffers professional salaries for content when you can get community members to happily contribute it for free.

Comments

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As a UMass "Media Giraffe" and former, ten-year Gannett employee, I applaud my former company's attempt to modernize. However, given their policy against investigative journalism (fallout from the infamous Chiquita story by the Cincinnati Enquirer), I'm afraid this is just their latest attempt to save money and further shift traditional watchdog responsibility from their newspapers and TV stations to someone else. Gannett's idea of journalism has always been what sells, not what's important. Money has always been Al Neuharth's bottom line. Community welfare has never been a consideration. It won't be now.