Ten things I learned at the weeklies' conference

I have a particular affinity for weekly newspapers. Weeklies are where most of my experience lies, and I believe firmly that the strength of connection between a weekly newspaper and the community it serves can be a significant strategic advantage. So it was a pleasure for me to spend four days a couple of weeks ago moderating API's annual seminar for weekly executives, Management of the Weekly Newspaper. (The seminar is offered again in September 2008; please click here for details.)

We crafted the seminar with four basic objectives:

• To understand where we are now, both in the market through market intelligence and within our organizations through measurement and benchmarking;


• To find ways to maximize what we already do, through innovative ways to link content to revenue while at the same time preserving and strengthening our core journalistic mission;


• To see what a profitable future might look like, from the perspectives of content, revenue, vision and organizational structure, and what bridges we need to build to get us to it;


• To develop tools to pull together everything we learned into an executable plan for action.

We had a terrific group of weekly executives, ready to engage and challenge and synthesize at every step. Here are some of the things we talked about.

1. We need to know more about our markets and the many unmet "jobs to be done," but that doesn't have to be an expensive proposition. We learned low-cost, easy ways to start getting "jobs-to-be-done" information from key market segments on an ongoing basis.


2. Numbers are our friends. We have no idea how well we're doing if we're not willing to decide what metrics determine success, benchmark where we are now, and set goals going forward. Often it's an enormous effort for a small weekly organization to pull together a lot of these numbers, but they become a critical tool to guide resource allocation and improvement efforts so it's worth it.


3. It's not about us, it's about them. Content, that is. People want to see content that reflects their lives, and they also want to provide it. This wasn't really new news, but what was new were some of the easy, affordable, innovative ways we saw to engage audiences in small communities - things like photo galleries, wikis, and community conversations.


4. There's gold in them thar hills, but we need to learn to use a lot of new tools in order to go mine it. Bottom line: let's stop calling them ad departments and start calling them revenue departments, and let's make a commitment to our revenue staffs to offer appropriate training opportunities so they may learn more about things like paid local search, lead generation, targeted direct marketing, etc. They can't sell it if they don't understand it.


5. Revenue is everybody's job. Good content drives revenue, but that will only happen if the content people and the revenue people are both part of the planning process. To paraphrase Bill Watson from the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pa., journalists say they don't care about money but really they do, because more of it can actually expand journalistic possibilities.


6. The Web is everybody's job. (Credit to discussion leader Anne Eisenmenger from GateHouse Media New England for that thought.) Build it into job descriptions and performance management plans in all departments, or it will never be more than an afterthought.


7. It's still about the journalism. Everything we talked about came down to how we can expand our growth opportunities in order to support our core function of explaining our communities to their citizens, ferreting out scoundrels and enabling informed public opinion.


8. We need a new vision, way bigger than our current one. We need to start thinking in terms of our audiences' needs - "Help me know and do whatever it takes to live here" - and our business customers' needs - "Help connect me to every one of my customers." This provides so many more opportunities than if we stay focused just on news and advertising, but it also pushes us well out of our comfort zones.


9. You gotta have a plan. Weekly organizations sometimes have trouble looking past the next deadline, but a good broader-vision plan is affordable, executable and essential, and we shouldn't start the year without one.


10. Bring on the revolution. "Make no little plans," said the architect Daniel Burnham as he designed the entire city of Chicago. It will be the revolutionary thinkers among us who will carry the day in this disruptive environment, and as we saw from our conversation with Richard Anderson of VillageSoup, revolutionary thinking can work in all market sizes.

Other issues: Pioneers and comfort zones
We spent a good deal of time during the seminar well beyond our usual comfort zones, not always the most harmonious place to be. However, I think our industry has learned to its detriment that business as usual is not the road to a sustainable future, so our very survival depends on how fast we can adapt to these new spaces. It's hard to be the first ones into new territory, and revolutionary thinking is difficult to sustain, but pioneers have always had a special place in history that makes the hard road worth it. I hope that as seminar attendees make their way back into their day-to-day operations they stay confident in forging these new paths to the future, even when it's not particularly easy or comfortable, and I encourage all of us as a professional community to support the pioneers among us. Our future depends on it.

Closing thoughts: Isolation + community = opportunity
We closed the seminar by thinking about the state of communities today and what role community newspapers can play. On the one hand, the trends are disturbing: Disintegrating downtowns; the decampment of the people's business to ugly government buildings in highway locations outside of town, inaccessible except by car and surrounded by an impervious moat of parking; the ubiquity of privately run gated communities containing large-lot single-family houses with increasingly lavish interior comforts including delivery of just about everything, which means less and less need for citizens actually to venture out into their communities; the trend toward insulation of our children in supervised, mostly interior, environments or, when they must be transported, in more and more heavily armored vehicles - in short, an overall trend toward self-isolation and the idea that any "public good" is merely an agglomeration of individual private goods.

On the other hand, despite, or perhaps because of, the trend toward self-isolation, there appears to be an inexorable societal yearning for membership in some kind of larger organism. Witness the explosive proliferation of different kinds of communities online - both communities of specific interest and, for lack of a better term, communities of "general interest" both global and local. And, while on many things I am not a pessimist, I do believe that the inevitable coming shortage of two key resources - water and oil - will force many of us back toward a much more local sphere of daily operation and mutual support, for everything from food availability to elder care to travel and recreation.

The combination of these two phenomena provides an unprecedented opportunity for newspapers, and I believe that successful newspapers will be the ones who figure out ways to knit their local communities back together. Will it be with news? Partly. But it will also be with things like community conversations, idea exchanges, peer-to-peer advice, critical information resources, events of various kinds, and content that isn't necessarily news but is still "about" us. If the mission of newspapers really is to foster strong communities, technology has given us an increasingly powerful set of tools to help expand the ways in which we do that. What we need to do now is embrace them.