12 Steps to Opening up the Newspaper

By Eric Newton
Editor - in - residence
The Freedom Forum

Does your newspaper have a diversity committee, but no diversity?
Readership task forces, but no new readers?
Retention programs, but no retention?
Profit plan, but no profit?

Total Community Coverage means more than a new hire, a new beat or a new edition.
To diversify, to open up coverage, to grow, to move fast, newspapers are beginning to discover they need to make big changes. I call these broad moves toward new people, practices and products the creation of The Open Newspaper.

At an open newspaper, we agree that each of us sees only a piece of the whole picture. We build the skills of group decision-making. We take time to learn about things that separate people - like gender, age and race - as well as things that bring people together.

An Open Newspaper builds an institutional open mind - one designed to learn about the community it serves and the people it employs. Such a newspaper seeks to grow by attracting new readers fro its core community, instead of only by taking new territory.

Many of the problems faced by newspaper today - declining audiences, revenues and profits - have been created or made worse by institutional closed-mindedness.
It doesn't have to be that way. There are, in fact, as many ways to open newspapers as there are newspapers. Here are 12 of the most basic steps:

1. Make diverse hires. Take hiring as seriously as budgeting. Post all openings. Advertise in community and trade publications. Recruit at conferences and colleges. Keep a diverse database of candidates. Hire young and promote in-house. Base managerial bonuses on hiring performance.

2. Connect with your community. Form community advisory boards. Write and distribute media access guidebooks. Use computers to connect the newpaper to schools and neighbourhoods. Set up guest columns in all sections of the paper. Sponsor community events.

3. Open up reporting. Require reporters to find their own story ideas. Get them out of the office. Subsidize their reading lists. Build diverse source lists in databases. Link your library to others. Gain access to every government database in your region. Raise writing standards. An issue is behind every news event - find it. Answer, in every story, the question: So What?

4. Open up the editing process. Require reporters and editors to talk as story is edited. Open news meetings, on a rotating basis, to staff and community members. Hold planning meetings away from the office. Know your colleagues; use each other as cultural specialists. Set up style rules that respect all your readers. Talk like a coach, not like a dictator.

5. Expand the Page One mix. You now mix hard with soft, local with wire. Try mixing in stories important to the different people of your community. Look at the paper through the prism of gender, generations and race. Try making Page One decisions by consensus.

6. Rewrite the rules. Break the newsroom into smaller groups: pods, clusters, teams. Reorganize beats to fit the way readers live today. Try innovations like the Newsroom Without Walls, or Maestro. Rules make results: If a newspaper makes 70,000 beat calls to the cops every year, unnecessary police stories will make the paper.

7. Critique. Review what you are doing daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Survey readers and the community. Do ASNE content audits - annually. Seek out critics. Make your phone numbers available. Speak and meet in the community.

8. Train. Set up a comprehensive program of in-house training. Do weekly seminars. Arrange for experienced journalists to coach newcomers. Fill in gaps with traveling trainers. Make your newspaper a local training hub, working with high schools and colleges. Let the staff know what the research says about your newspaper, readers and community.

9. Think about standing features. Comics, columns, stock pages and the like take up most of your editorial space, yet get the least attention. Order research with sample sizes large enough so no group is "statistically insignificant." Look for alternatives to syndicates that have no demographic readership breakdowns.

10. Try new sections, new content. Grow your own standing features, columns and special sections by reaching out to the staff and community. Let readers write a special section. Have a contest for a new cartoonist.

11. Try new media. Audio text, fax newspapers, library databanks, reprints, magazines, books, electronic newspapers, multimedia - these are the special sections of the digital world. Try them. Train some of your journalist to do radio and television: Put them on your own programs to promote the newspaper.

12. Start today. Cable television had greater reach in America today than newspapers. We have fallen to half the household penetration that we had 50 years ago. To survive and thrive, newspapers need every reader. To get every reader, we need to cover every part of the community. We need a willingness to experiment. We may not have another 50 years.