“understanding what’s important…”€¦ · 09/02/2017 · michelle nicolosi, editor for...

PANew York Press Association

NewsBeat PANYPublished by the New York Press Associationon behalf of New York’s Community Newspapers

February 2017

Friday and Saturday, April 7th & 8th, 2017Gideon Putnam Resort • Saratoga Springs, NY

2017 SPRING CONFERENCEA N D T R A D E S H O W

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“Understanding what’s important…”

2 NewsBeat February 2017

NewsBeatA NEWSLETTER FOR NEW YORK’S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERSPublished by the New York Press Association621 Columbia Street Ext., Suite 100, Cohoes, NY 12047518.464.6483 • 518.464.6489 fax • www.nynewspapers.comExecutive Editor — Michelle K. Rea Layout & Design — Rich Hotaling

C L I P & S A V EBy MICHELLE REA — Executive Director, NYPA

Register today for NYPA’s fabulous spring conference and trade show in Saratoga Springs! Registration fees are as low as $49 per person — a bargain at five times the price!

Sixty-four conference workshops will focus on fostering great news organizations (great journalism is at the core of our brand!), driving revenue and growing audience. Industry leaders from across the country will lead discussions on design, graphics, video, photography, advertising, events, social media, cyber security, writing, reporting, metrics, Freedom of Information Law, virtual reality, investigative reporting, enterprise packages, ethics, and family-owned businesses.

Here is a sneak-peak at part of the lineup:

NEWSROOM:

IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.) will present a day-long program on conducting quick-hit investigations, finding information (including key government documents) online, examining businesses and non-profits and obtaining public records, getting what you need from sources, ethical decision-making, ensuring accuracy, and finding a way to do great enterprise reporting.

Terry Parris, ProPublica’s community editor, will talk about audience engagement and why investing in a deep connection with your readers can pay big dividends.

Jacqui Banaszynski, Knight Chair in editing at the Missouri School of Journalism, will present sessions on interviewing and story discovery.

Michelle Nicolosi, editor for digital, social, photo and video at The Oregonian, will lead a session on how to put your readership metrics into action with a step-by-step guide to creating content that readers want.

Jean Hodges, senior director of content for Gatehouse Media, will show you how to take stock of your resources, shake up your structure, and generate more quality content.

Stephanie Davis, from Virtual Xperience, will show you how to use virtual reality as a story telling platform.

Will Bancroft, author at Newswhip, will talk about the state of content and social distribution.

Cindy Rodriguez, senior journalist-in-residence at Emerson College will present two sessions: Protecting yourself against doxxing, and social media for newbies.

Media consultant Val Hoeppner will lead one session on developing a video strategy, and a second session on developing a mobile first news strategy.

Jan Shaffer, executive director of the J-lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, will present, “Networked: Collaborative journalism partnerships to increase impact.”

Julie Manganis, an award-winning reporter for The Salem News and North of Boston Media, will discuss the ins and outs of covering courts.

Tom Gierasimczuk is a journalist and media leader who develops effective, multi-platform, editorially driven marketing strategies that engage audiences, and help turn their brands into engaging, nimble media companies.

NYPA 2017 Spring Conference and Trade Show

(Continued on Page 3)

PANY

Mark your calendar

Thursday, April 6, 2017NYPA/NYPS Boards of Directors MeetingsNYPA Foundation Board of Directors MeetingGideon Putnam Hotel, Saratoga Springs, NY

Friday & Saturday,April 7 & 8, 2017NYPA Spring Convention and TradeshowGideon Putnam Hotel, Saratoga Springs, NY

Friday, June 9, 2017NYPA/NYPS Board of Directors MeetingsNYC

Thursday, September 14, 2017NYPA/NYPS Boards of Directors MeetingsNYPA Foundation Board of Directors MeetingThe Westin Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

Friday & Saturday,September 15 & 16, 2017NYPA Fall ConferenceThe Westin Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

Friday, November 17, 2017NYPA/NYPS Board of Directors MeetingsNYC

April 7th and 8thGideon Putnam Hotel and Conference Center

Register for the conference and reserve your hotel room at www.nynewspapers.com

February 2017 NewsBeat 3

Penny Riordan, digital guru for Gatehouse Media, will show you how to integrate Snapchat and Instagram into your newsroom.

Jeremy McBain, executive editor of the News-Review, Petoskey, Michigan, will lead a session on the continuing power of community newspapers.

Jennifer Fizzi, from Videolicious, will show you how to empower your staff to make great videos in seconds.

Charles Apple, deputy design editor at the Houston Chronicle, will present “Graphics for Word People,” “Alternative Story Forms,” and “Great Visuals on a Shoe String Budget.”

Suzette Standring, syndicated columnist with Gatehouse Media, will talk about the art of column writing.

George Freeman from the Media Law Resource Center will present a seminar on Fair Trial/Free Press — and, will Trump change media law?

Robert Freeman, executive director of the NYS Committee on Open Government, will talk about New York’s Freedom of Information Law, open government issues, and what to do when public officials improperly close government meetings.

PUBLISHERS:

Ondrej Krehel, cybersecurity and digital forensics, LIFARS, will present, “Your Money or Your Data: The Era of Cyber Extortion.”

Heather Phillips, editorial product director, news projects, the New York Times will present a session on product management to manage multiple stakeholder needs and ensure the best possible user experience.

Rebecca Capparelli, executive director of promotions at Gatehouse Media will talk about increasing revenue, engagement and data with artful promotions.

Mary Walter Brown, publisher, Voice of San Diego, will lead a session on, “Revenue Diversity — The Importance of Building a Pipeline of Consumer Revenue.”

FAMILY-OWNED BUSINESSES:

David Cadden, professor emeritus of entrepreneurship and strategy at Quinnipiac University, and Patricia Angus of Columbia University’s Family Business Program will lead workshops on outside board governance, next generation leadership, family dynamics, and extended family communication.

ADVERTISING:

Shannon Kinney, founder of Dream Local, will lead a workshop on using the latest and greatest social platforms to drive revenue.

Ryan Dorhn, CEO of Brain Swell Media, will present sessions on digital sales strategies, 60 sales tips in 60 minutes, and increasing the total ad buy.

Kelly Wirges, CEO of Pro Max Training, will talk about addressing objections, prospecting that pays, developing a high-performance sales team, and assessing your own strengths and weaknesses as a sales leader and coach.

Stacey Sedbrook, vice president for strategy and business development, SalesFuel, will present, “A New Way to Prospect, Reinventing the Needs Analysis Through Smart Automation,” and “How to Focus, Motivate and Retain Your Sales Team.”

Steve Bookbinder, CEO of Digital Media Training, will teach you how to evolve your media offerings, and he’ll provide an overview of the digital media landscape and what’s trending.

NYNAME will present its innovative advertising project of the year.

Self-described integrity sales specialist Diane Ciottta will present four successive workshops focused on increasing sales, enhancing accountability, and accomplishing goals. Diane’s motto: “Activity drives productivity, and integrity sells.”

Digital handyman Russell Viers will present two days of his always-entertaining Adobe certified training sessions on publishing

workflow, pagination, Adobe Bridge, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and publishing trends.

David Fowler, CEO of Ads Up, will present workshops on creating high impact digital ads and powerful print ads.

Editorial photojournalist David Handschuh has been working his magic behind the lens for more than 30 years. Handschuh will lead workshops on Photography 101 for reporters and feature photos that focus on community.

Tracy Collins, design team leader at Gannett’s Phoenix Design Studio, will explain how digital has changed print design.

Adrian Norris, creative director, digital media at The Globe and Mail, Toronto, will present a workshop on page design.

In addition, you’ll be inspired by an awesome keynote address at lunch Friday, and by the presentation of more than 400 Better Newspaper Contest awards over the course of the weekend.

Enjoy fabulous (and we do mean fabulous) food and drink while dancing the night away and cavorting with your colleagues in Saratoga’s famous Museum of Dance Friday evening.

Take time to learn about cutting edge products and services from more than two dozen exhibitors including commercial web printers, app developers, graphics services, CRM software, CMS, mailing software, publishing systems, video platforms and more.

Last, but not least, take advantage of the networking opportunities and all the information and experience that your colleagues from across the state have to share. This year, for the first time, NYPA is partnering with NYNAME and FCPNY to bring together daily and weekly newspapers, Pennysavers and shoppers. The brain trust will be amazing.

Registration materials for the conference and for hotel rooms are available at www.nynewspapers.com . Don’t delay — hotel rooms sell out fast. Register today!

(Continued from previous page)


By JEFF SONDERMAN

Newsonomics: Rebuilding the news media will require doubling-down on its core values

ournalists and publishers need to breathe new life into the social contract with readers: The audience holds the media accountable, the media holds the powerful accountable.

“Alt-what?” I asked the audience of the leaders of America’s alternative press, in a talk last Friday, the day of the inauguration and the day before an estimated 100,000 people marched through downtown Portland, Oregon in Protest. “Alt-what in America’s growing news deserts” was the title of my talk, and it followed up on my most recent Nieman Lab Column. In that piece, I asked who — struggling dailies, emerging public radio initiatives, spirited startups, local TV stations — might seize the opportunity of the day and ramp up the kind of local news coverage that readers might support with subscription or membership.

Could alt-weeklies be part of the solution? More than 100 of them still populate the landscape, from the hometown Portland’s Pulitzer-winning Willamette Week to Cincinnati’s CityBeat to Vermont’s Seven Days to the L.A. Weekly (itself just now put for sale). The alternative press was born out of an earlier tumult, in the 1960s and ’70s, and I knew it well, having been part of it early in my career. Then, it was “alt” as in counter, as in counterculture — but that’s a blast from a fast-disappearing past. Now, these publications almost all build their audiences around things to do, guides, and calendars; the level of incisive local reporting varies widely.

Further, the word “alt” has taken on the dark new reality of “alt-right,” the sanitized neo-Nazi umbrella for those who decry (“Lügenpresse!”) the press, not build it. And then there’s the la-la land of “alternative facts” that Kellyanne Conway unveiled to Chuck Todd. Throughout the past week, the pages of America’s news sites have been transformed into what seems an alternative universe itself, as the rat-a-tat-tat of Trump-promised change looks like the flipside of the past eight years.

That alt-what dilemma of the weeklies offers just a variation on the theme. For them and for America’s news media generally, the question grows more urgent by the day: Who are you now and what can you do for would-be paying readers?

“Hold the media accountable, and make your public officials hear you,” Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington march Saturday. Expect to hear a lot more of that sentiment. Within the demand comes both a threat and an opportunity to reclaim a paying readership for news that newly matters in subscribers’ lives.

Fundamentally, we’ve arrived — possibly again — at a place where people expect values-oriented media. Let’s talk about what that may mean, and then, more practically, I’d like to offer five ways news media can begin to breathe new life into the notion.

“Values” may seem a scary proposition for much of the legacy press and the digital startup press that has followed it. It can conjure up partisanship or “taking sides,” but it doesn’t need to.

Take that word: accountable. Journalists have talked about accountability journalism and practiced it well for decades. But in recent years, it has sometimes seemed like an add-on — maybe a foundation will fund it? — rather than the basic mission of a free press, national and local, in a free society. That’s how the framers saw it when they gave the press quite a shout-out. They didn’t do that so that fishmongers, tailors, and alehouse keepers would have a place to advertise. They did it to keep tabs on power.

As budgets and newsroom workforces throughout the country have been halved, stenography — limp, single-source stories — have become more the rule than the exception. Too few of the remaining local reporters, at the nation’s 1,370 or so local newspapers — we have only four national ones — have both the time and local knowledge to hold local and state politicians and business to account. So they largely — with very important and award-worthy exceptions — don’t do enough of that work. That’s the certainly a question of capacity, one that I raised last week, and it’s the gating issue here.

Increasingly, though, I’ve come to believe that we can’t rebuild local news capacity until we’re more clear about our 21st-century values. What might we include in those values?

It may not be bad to start with a few Robert Fulghum tips from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. They seem oddly modern and newly recited in this toxic political atmosphere:

• Share everything.• Play fair.• Don’t hit people.• Put things back where you found them.• Clean up your own mess.• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

They seem awfully relevant, don’t you think?

These seem to be human values and American values, and the press can remind all of us about them. Maybe a few additional ones can be borrowed from the Boy Scouts: being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, thrifty, and brave.

Those are just for starters, though. Try the four principles of the long-established and once universally accepted Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics.

• Seek truth and report it.• Minimize harm.• Act independently.• Be accountable and transparent.

Yes, it does seem quite basic to have to list these, but the times apparently demand remedial courses. Underlying all this, a single word: fairness. Even more than mere “accuracy,” it’s the word that has driven the best journalists from tiny towns to major metros. It’s still the best barometer.

Rather than assert some shaky new world or parse meanings of words most everyone understands — “fact” and “lie” now among them — the admonition of Washington Post editor Marty Baron, reaffirmed by others, says it simply: “Just do our job. Do it as it’s supposed to be done.”

Make no mistake, it’s not the adoption of a values-based mission that’s essential. It is acting on these values that must now define news media. If

J

By KEN DOCTOR

PHOTO BY JEREMY BROOKS USED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE.


publishers, editors, and general managers — at dailies, public radio stations, alternative weeklies, TV outlets and emerging digital startups — assert such values, what work will they point to, each week or each day, that fulfills that promise? Those news organizations — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Guardian — that have seen a boom in subscription sales have done just that. They’ve done the visible work, and readers have responded.

This is the outline of the new social contract I urged last week. A contract is, by its nature, transactional. Journalists, and those who pay them, must make a new bargain, a new offer to their readers and communities — and then make good on it.

I wonder how many of the 3 million or so people marching on Saturday — and of all those lighting up the lines of Congress this week — subscribe to a newspaper. I bet you many of them did once but no longer do.

They probably didn’t find those papers politically objectionable, but instead would more likely cite a worse fault for media: blandness and incompleteness. Readers do expect coverage of the day, and those that don’t provide it don’t deserve reader support. (Consider, for instance, the 22 percent of U.S. dailies that didn’t feel the mass protest of millions deserved play on their front pages.)

This is the new virtuous circle that must be spun, and quickly: Readers hold news media accountable for covering the news, and news media hold the power centers of their nation, states, and communities accountable for their actions. Spin the wheel faster, and more money will fall out, paying more and more journalists to do their jobs. Call it a pipe dream if you wish; I call it a necessity.

At this point, it seems clear that without reader revenue, we’re likely to see a robust local press continue to wither away toward extinction. 2017 witnesses a convergence of severe financial pressures and intense press demonization, led by the new president. In a nation in which the press and broadcasters represent a thin line between partisan propaganda and citizen-readers, the time for action — new action — is now.

Press critic Jay Rosen’s brutal realism — “Winter is coming: Prospects for the American press under Trump” — seems more prescient each day as working journalists are charged with felonies, multiple federal agencies are gagged, and the “alternative fact” war with the press looks to be an enduring affair.

Comparisons to press crackdowns from Turkey to Venezuela to Russia, seemingly unimaginable six months ago, demand reading.

What might this new asserted social contract look like? I hope to be building it throughout the year — and your submissions are highly valued — but let’s start with five points of the moment:

Project strength, not weakness.

When the bear appears in the wilderness, you don’t curl up in a ball; you make yourself seem as large as you can. The press needs to do that. In addition, subscribers are more willing to pay for strength — that day-after-day demonstration of news values — than to weak appeals for support. Assert the strength of the news product — and how your subscription can make it stronger.

Wishful thinking also won’t work. Earlier this week, some journalists noted how new White House spokesman Sean Spicer behaved on Monday as compared to Saturday, saying the shift might herald the long-awaited political pivot. Journalists who make too much of kinder words here and there and don’t stay focused on actions will be run over. Wesley Morris, The New York Times critic-at-large, deftly dissected a cousin of this wishful thinking (“Politics’ newest empty gesture, the disavowal”), appropriately decrying “political language used in such a bloodless, begrudging way that it’s borderline dangerous.”

Remedy news overload.

Even before the raft of Trump initiatives launched this week, the infinity of news has weighed heavily on readers’ minds, with the smartphone an accomplice. Now that overload can lead to a political overwhelming.

As Callum Borchers outlined in The Washington Post recently: “The news overload is enough to make you want to throw your hands up — or, perhaps, use them to reach for a cold beverage and a remote control, with which you can escape the transition tornado by tuning in to back-to-back NFL playoff doubleheaders on Saturday and Sunday. This is a near-perfect situation for Donald Trump.”

We know solutions for overtaxed readers, in an age of digital and social news bounty: editing. That’s why newsletters have proven so valuable as a new news marketing tool. But news companies of all kinds can go farther. How about organizing Trump’s tweets into tables, searchable by date and topic, with the fact check alongside it, rather than only writing one fact-checked story after another, which for readers tend to disappear into the ether? Various kinds of scorecards

— we’ve seen beginning indications of them here and there — can help readers make sense of the change-in-policy chaos and change-in-law confusion that is yet to come. Tame transience by creating permanent searchable records, new variations on the old Times Topics pages and their cousins of an earlier generation.

Show, don’t tell, impact.

The real-life implications for Americans, given the spate of policy/law changes, looks like it is going to be profound. Especially at the local level (where, let’s remember, everyone lives), health care, environmental, education, and criminal justice impacts should be quite reportable. This week, via NPR’s All Things Considered, I heard the kind of report we need. NPR, in partnership with Phoenix’s KJZZ and Kaiser Health News, produced “Arizona Children Could Lose Health Coverage Under Obamacare Repeal.” In less than four minutes, it made human impacts clear.

Create an Ignorance Index.

We’ve all seen them, those stories — now multiplied by the fake-news feeding frenzy — of how many Americans believe “facts” that simply aren’t true, like “vaccines have been shown to cause autism” or “President Obama was born in Kenya.” How about publishers — again, nationally and locally — creating with polling partners a series of Ignorance Indexes, tracking over time how much community/nation ignorance has increased or decreased?

We’d hope — one of our fundamental values, right? — that as a learning species and nation, we could all agree that facts are important. Does that sound elitist or partisan, you know, asserting that facts are important? Forget the noise. If factuality is one of those core values, double-down on it. And have some fun with it. Maybe show the comparative results of two groups: subscribers and non-subscribers.

Identify allies.

Given the events of the day, would-be allies of the press are popping out of the woodwork. Meryl Streep’s Golden Globe call-out for the Committee to Protect Journalists (now even more necessary, as six journalists have been charged with felonies related to Inauguration Day violence) boosted CPJ donations 140 times normal. John Oliver’s summer appeal to support journalism clearly spurred some rush of subscription sign-ups. Publishers — who must earn support they receive — must ask who are the social influencers, local or national, who will get people to open their wallets, given the new realization that paying for news makes a difference? The sprouts of a real reader revenue revolution must be nurtured.


I don’t understand the logic of moving local news coverage from the long-established and highly respected printed newspapers to the internet. Any egomaniac with

a home computer can create a local website or blog. But it takes a community newspaper — with credible reporters, editors and well-deserved reputation — to provide direction and consensus to the community.

“What if almost the entire newspaper industry got it wrong?” asked Jack Shafer recently on Politico.com. Printed papers, he says, have struggled the last two decades to reinvent themselves for the digital age. Few have seen any real revenue and there has been almost zero growth since 2007. Surveys show, he says, that most readers still prefer the print version of their newspaper to the web version. “Maybe newspapers should focus on what they’re good at,” he says, “instead of fighting a digital war they can’t possibly win.”

My son, Jeff Wagner, says nobody can save their way into business success. The industry cutback in newsroom staff, editorial hole, circulation promotion and community involvement has deflated the image and value of newspapers overall.

Some local newspapers attempt to get by printing mostly news releases that are nothing but self-serving, poorly written, boring collections of “who cares” facts. Worst, most of those releases also available in every other newspaper in your area. If press releases are used at all they should be rewritten and expand with fresh information and a local spin.

I used to think readers wanted their stories USA Today style, short and to the point. But while in San Francisco recently I found myself devouring exciting, enticing, full-page newsworthy features in The Examiner.

But being short or being long does not make story or feature article worthy of printing. Each article needs a “hometown” connection.

Here are some recent innovative stories published in my The N’West Iowa REVIEW:

“WHERE’S SUPERMAN SUPPOSED TO CHANGE?” (See attached illustrations) told our readers that most Northwest Iowa telephone booths have disappeared. You’ll find them in backyards, basement rec rooms and providing character to locally owned businesses.

“SEVEN FOR 7” featured seven articles in our OKOBOJI Magazine highlighting seven of the best places, interesting faces, restaurants, boat dealers, recreational trails and events around our nearby seven-lake Okoboji resort area.

“FULL-TIME PIG FARMER AND PART-TIME PASTOR” shared the journey of a man called to the ministry from his hog lot. Today, with much training, he both farms and preaches.

And finally, “TAKING A FLING AT MATH” explained how a Sheldon Middle School sixth-grade teacher was using the trebuchet, an ancient weapon of war, to teach math to his students.

There are endless worthwhile stories breaking around every community every day. The resourceful reporter will discover them while at church, listening in on the conversations at the city council meeting or simply by visiting with a local community leader. They are the stories readers remember. They just require an inquiring mind and an interest in the community.

Let’s not write print’s obituary yet. The printed newspaper is going to be around for a long time. All it needs is the love and care of an enterprising publisher and powerful, exceptional writing.

Peter W. Wagner is founder and publisher of the award-winning N’West Iowa REVIEW. He is a regular presenter

at State Press Association Conventions and Group Seminars. You may contact him with questions regarding

your newspaper at [email protected] or (cell) 712-348-3550.

Am I the only one By PETER W. WAGNER — Founder, The N’West Iowa REVIEW

who believes the traditional print version of our community newspaper still provides the best economic future?


By KEN PAULSON

F ake news is becoming a real problem, according to successive presidents of the United States. Barack Obama described it as a threat to democracy,

while President Trump decried it as a threat to his administration.

So it must be a big deal. Surely this nation’s inventive spirit can give us something to counter “alternative facts” and bogus stories to give Americans the accurate information they need. Just consider this potential Kickstarter campaign:

We’re pleased to offer you the opportunity to invest in the Fake News Eradicator, a content delivery system that will keep you informed in a timely and reliable manner, engage and entertain you and shore up democracy in the process. Among its features:

• The option of digital or retro packaging• Custom-built for your geographic location without

the need for GPS• Fully portable• Built-in fact-checking• Creates local jobs; the product is manufactured in

the USA by your neighbors.• Redesigned daily to meet your changing

information needs• Family friendly; absolutely porn-free• The retro model is delivered to your doorstep and requires

no batteries. It’s also guaranteed to be virus-free and has no annoying pop-up ads.

Yes, the best way to combat this spawn of new technology is with old technology, circa 1690, the year the first newspaper was published in America.

The most effective weapon against fake news is real journalism. The notion of caring professionals living in your community and writing about your town and government is admittedly very old school, but it has served us well for more than three centuries. We’ve had fake news at the checkout counter since the ‘70s, but there was also the real thing delivered to our doorstep each morning.

Perhaps print newspapers will one day disappear, but the touchstones of local journalism don’t have to. Keeping an eye on local government, celebrating achievements and telling the stories that shape the fabric of a community have never been more important.

For those rolling their eyes because they’re convinced that the local newspaper is “biased” along with the rest of the media, I’d invite you to reconsider. By and large, local newspapers strive for balance for both ethical and business reasons. With newspapers struggling economically, they can’t afford to alienate anyone. That’s why many newspapers have abandoned endorsements. They can’t take the risk of losing a chunk of their readership.

Many factors fuel the proliferation of bogus news. In a polarized society, there are certainly cynical partisans who manipulate social media to their own ends. But we also can’t let the American people off the hook.

“Fake news thrives because there is a lazy, incurious, self-satisfied public that wants it to thrive; because large swaths of that public don’t want news in any traditional sense, so much as they want vindication of their preconceptions and prejudices,” author and Norman Lear Center fellow Neal Gabler wrote recently. “Above all else, fake news is a lazy person’s news. It provides passive entertainment, demanding nothing of us.”

Why are so many Americans unwilling or unable to recognize partisan fairy tales? Who’s to blame when millions of Americans seem incapable of

distinguishing the truth from nonsense? Have America’s schools failed to foster critical thinking?

The biggest driver of fake news has been the reluctance of the public to pay for information and the subsequent decline of traditional news media.

Faced with declining circulation, newspapers have priced their content at astonishingly low levels. In recent months, a number of daily newspapers have marked down their annual digital subscription to $4.99 a year. Yes, you read that right. For the price of a cup of coffee or a Big Mac, you get 365 days of information about your community, your neighbors and your government. Unless you don’t care.

And that could be the real problem. The click culture has revealed a lot about who we are as a nation and what our priorities are. We’ll spend hundreds of dollars on cable TV or $14 on a movie ticket, but we refuse to pay for news and information. In the end, you do get what you pay for.

No disrespect to America’s television and radio stations, but those newspapers and websites drive broadcast reporting. Facebook posts on current events come from real news sites that need revenue to stay alive.

Unless we invest in journalism — at the national or local level, in print or online — fake news is all we’ll have. Democracy can’t survive on memes alone.

There are powerful politicians and their followers who say you can’t believe anything you read in the press. “Trust us,” they say. They want you to believe that America’s news organizations are all just like that strident and sensational cable channel you hate.

They suggest that the nation’s 1,300 daily newspapers, more than 7,500 weekly and alternative papers, 1,700 TV stations, 14,000 radio stations, thousands of magazines and thousands of online news sites can all be condensed into the singular “media,” united by a shared political agenda and a disdain for the American people. And that’s the most dangerous fake news of all.

Ken Paulson, president of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center and dean of the College of Media and Entertainment at Middle Tennessee State University, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

— Reprinted from USA Today

Fight fake news with the real thing: Ken PaulsonWith retro styling, portable, local, updated news needs no batteries and has no pop-ups! Subscribe Now!

(Photo: John Moore, Getty Images)


By GRETCHEN A. PECK

Today’s advertising sales teams are not taking “no” for an answer

hat is it going to take for newspaper organizations to retain — if not grow — their advertising support, particularly in a competitive field

with so many others vying for brands’ ad spends? What does it take to reignite the allure of ad campaigns that creatively build upon the publishers’ platforms — campaigns that leverage the strength of mobile, desktop, web and print?

To better prepare for the New Year and the new relationships newspapers will have with advertisers, the industry requires a point of reference about what’s challenging advertising revenues now. E&P asked advertising professionals (from ad reps to senior executives) about the greatest obstacles their ad teams are currently facing, the objections or reasons for reluctance from advertisers — across all the products and publications — and how they’re winning back the hearts of advertisers and changing their minds.

Conveying the Power of Print

Logan Osterman

According to Logan Osterman, advertising director for the Idaho Statesman in Boise, he and his team are accustomed to hearing plenty of objections from advertisers, mostly in relation to print advertising.

W “They may say, ‘We don’t do print’ or ‘Print doesn’t work for us anymore,’ or ‘Our audience doesn’t read print.’ If you look at objections, percentage wise, I’d say that’s far and away the biggest challenge. As soon as you get a foot in the door, you’re branded or labeled as ‘the newspaper,’” Osterman said.

His team isn’t in the habit of “pushing” advertisers to buy into any program for which they’re not comfortable, but the objection to print is often overcome by noting its reach and effectiveness.

“If we think there’s an opportunity for the advertiser to benefit from print, we usually go in with some market research. If there’s an objection to a print campaign, we inform them that the audience is actually more than 130,000 people who read the newspaper every day — many, every single morning,” Osterman said. “We may ask if that’s surprising or if it’s what they expected to hear.

“Increasingly, our reps are leading with digital solutions, instead,” he continued. “We’re rebranding ourselves and showing that we can help our advertisers with a lot more than just print advertising.”

Natalia Wiita

Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star advertising director Natalia Wiita thinks the reluctance expressed to her ad team probably mimics what other ad professionals around the industry hear as recurring themes.

“I’d say the most common, usually, boil down to advertisers stating that people aren’t reading the newspaper like they used to, that we are too expensive, or that they may not have the budget available,” she said.

Fortunately, Wiita said, the team has been able to dispel those worries. “When we hear, ‘People aren’t reading the newspaper like they used to,’ I think it’s important to address that, yes, our readers are now reading our content on a variety of platforms, which is only resulting in a larger audience for us and our advertisers.”

When advertisers challenge the publisher on rates, Wiita and the team are equipped to talk specifically about compelling numbers for cost per piece or cost per household, for example.

Objections do vary depending on platform, Wiita noted. In the case of print, the reasons are often related to audience or cost, though Wiita said that “objections” may be too strong a word to describe these perfectly typical conversations.

“With web or mobile buys, we may hear that ROI is too difficult to measure, or that the business doesn’t have a website or landing page to drive readers to,” she said.

Lance Lewis

Lance Lewis hears similar statements daily. He’s an advertising sales executive with the Gettysburg Times in Pennsylvania. In his estimation, the most common concerns from advertisers are: “Newspaper circulation is decreasing; it’s not a viable method of reaching the


PHOTO OF AN OLD DATSUN AD BY JOHN LLOYD USED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE.public. Newspaper advertising is too expensive on a per capita basis. Print is not a creative way to convey a message in the digital age.”

The good news is that the ad team at the paper is well-prepared to acknowledge the concerns and calm them.

In response to the first objection about readership, Lewis said, “It is true that in metro areas circulation is shrinking; however, we have found that in smaller markets that circulation has remained either level or is actually growing. I always cite Berkshire Hathaway’s investment in small market papers to support this.”

Regarding return on investment, he said, “Per capita advertising cost depends solely on if you are reaching your target audience. If you are attempting to reach millennials in print, your ROI will be higher than if you are attempting to reach Boomers.”

Finally, to counter the assumption that print is somehow underwhelming as a creative platform, Lewis pointed out, “Creativeness in print can be overcome by utilizing print as a referral method to digital advertising, which I have seen to be very successful.”

Using Data and Targeted Marketing

Data seems to drive so much of the publishing organization today, especially in the digital space. Today, data can glean so much more insight for advertisers, which they need to effectively target their ads, even if they don’t yet know it.

“Readership numbers have gotten less and less important over the years,”

Osterman said. “It seems that advertisers aren’t quite as interested in them, even when they’re presented with media audit information that dispels their own notions; so, we’re frequently talking more about digital data than we are about readership or traditional metrics like that.

“A lot of the time, the advertiser doesn’t actually express that they want data. It’s more about trying to entice them to want it,” he added.

Osterman offered data from Borrell Associates as an example.

“We might suggest to the advertiser, ‘You might not want to see the readership figures for the paper, but if I can help you understand what other businesses in your category are spending on various kinds of media, in this market, would that be interesting

to you?’ And it is,” he said. “That is an extra value for the advertiser and insight that they would otherwise have to pay a lot of money for.”

The New Ad Sales ProThe conversations that advertising reps

are having with ad buyers these days are far more sophisticated and consultative in nature than they were when print was the sole product to sell. The conception and creation of the advertising program is also far more creative and collaborative than before.

“The more information and feedback that we receive from both current advertisers and those that aren’t doing business with us, the better,” Wiita said. “I’m a big fan of feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, as it allows us to adapt and change to suit the needs of the market. I would say that most of the feedback we’ve received as to where clients who aren’t spending with us are spending their budgets generally comes down to a lack of knowledge of the services we can provide.

“More often than not, new clients are not familiar with the fact that we are not only a newspaper, but that we offer a full suite of digital solutions, produce a wide variety of niche publications, have an events department that produces large-scale and custom events, and operate an in-house ad agency. There is no better feeling than sitting down with a new client and walking them through the wide variety of ways that we can help them grow.”

At the Idaho Statesman, Osterman’s team has adapted to a more consultative approach.

“We follow a multi-step sales process, which is very much based on doing research and essentially interviewing the

(Continued on following page)



client. Then, we offer solutions that fit, which is opposed to the ‘old way’ of selling audience and pushing product,” he said.

To be effective, the salesperson must be rebranded, too—from ad sales to media consultant. The new role of ad reps includes having conversations about where reluctant advertisers and their marketing agents are investing their ad spends, and why they are perceived as a better buy.

Osterman said, “We try to crack open that conversation about why they’re spending elsewhere, especially in the digital space. Is it that the others are actually doing a better job than our digital team can do, or is just because the site is new and has a trendy look? We find that there are a ton of fly-by-night operations that we can far out-perform when it comes to creating multi-faceted digital campaigns.

Plus, in the end, those publications are not the newspaper.

Osterman cited a favorite quotation by businessman and author Stephen M.R. Covey, who said, “Trust is equal parts character and competence.”

“A lot of times, businesses don’t trust us to handle their digital (messaging). In their eyes, we may not be ‘competent,’ though we have the character,” he explained. “They know us. They know who we are, so we have the character, but we haven’t done enough work to show them that we’re competent in the digital space and that we’ve trained up as well.”

The implication is that, while newspapers are known to have digital complements now — the web, web mobile and mobile apps — they’re not perceived as being leaders or particularly innovative for those efforts, at least not yet.

“The winning scenario is we build on the character that we’ve already established and prove that we’re a digital force,” Osterman said. “In some cases, they may be turning to a digital advertising alternative that’s merely using an off-the-shelf technology for something as important as search engine optimization. Meanwhile, we have a fully staffed team of extremely talented marketing professionals at their disposal. They may not know we have that expertise.”

Wiita said at the Lincoln Journal Star, they’re accustomed to hearing that ad budgets have been sliced, leaving less of the pie to portion out.

“The budget objection is obviously a very common objection in sales, and while in some cases it may be valid, most of the time, if a consultant gets this objection, they haven’t sold the agency or the advertiser on the value of the program,” she said. “We do a lot of training and role playing with our staff on getting the value proposition right.”

Prove Your WorthCertainly one of the greatest challenges

that advertising sales teams have faced in recent years is reinforcing the advertising value proposition of the news organization. When asked if advertisers generally still understand and buy into that value proposition, Osterman said definitively, “No.”

“I think newspapers, in general, are behind the times of self-promotion, especially compared to broadcast and radio,” he said. That needs to change, and he suggested that educating advertisers—and the public—about what the newspaper does for its readers and advertisers must start at the highest levels of the organization, at the publisher level and certainly among marketing teams.

Beyond evangelizing the value of the news organization, sales teams need to be prepared to come to the table with real solutions based on the expressed needs of the advertiser. But the work doesn’t stop there. Then, they must be able to prove ad effectiveness, and do that with every single program, with every single digital or print display and insert advertiser.

And about the “character” part of the trust equation that Osterman suggested?

Lewis concurred and pointed out that character, integrity and a record of getting the stories right have a tremendous impact on value proposition messaging. “When I discuss newspapers as a viable and reliable source of news, I point to issues such as the Dan Rather story regarding former President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard, the recent election and how it totally caught the broadcast media off guard, and now this ‘fake news’ on the web regarding a Hillary Clinton sex ring in D.C. The print media is still, in my humble opinion, the only truly investigative news source available.”

“I do think that advertisers believe in our value proposition,” Wiita said. “However, it’s important that we continue telling our story as an industry. While our industry is changing, it’s not a bad thing. People read our content now more than ever, and our audiences are larger than ever before…I think it’s important that we acknowledge that change is good and that all industries have been forced to adapt to a digital world.”

Gretchen A. Peck is an independent journalist who has reported on publishing and printing for more than

two decades. She has contributed to Editor and Publisher since 2010 and can be reached at

[email protected]

Today’s advertising sales teams are not taking “no” for an answer


Print Still Refuses to Surrender

rint is the past and online is the future, as all can attest. But a new study by Neil Thurman indicates that print isn’t quite prepared to

surrender to online. According to Thurman’s research, a whopping 88.5 percent of the total time U.K. readers devote to 11 national newspaper brands —Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Mail, Mirror,et al. — is spent on the print edition. Only 7.49 percent of reader time goes to mobile and a mere 4 percent to PCs.

Guardian readers spend 43 minutes a day on the print version and only 0.68 minutes on the online version. Readers of The Mail spend 39 minutes on print versus 2 minutes to the online edition. And so on down the list. “U.K. national newspaper brands engage each of their online visitors for an average of less than 30 seconds a day, but their print readers for an average of 40 minutes,” Thurman writes.

Are the Brits just slow readers? Nope, says Thurman, who drew on a year’s worth of data: “Time spent reading print newspapers doesn’t vary much country-to-country, and neither do online dwell times.”

Thurman’s work follows the research of University of Texas scholar H. Iris Chyi, who criticized the newspaper industry for splurging on online editions when real profits remain in the fading print product. In correspondence, Thurman points to a Deloitte study that found that 88 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenues comes from print, making time spent reading and money collected a near percentage match.

P Like Chyi, Thurman thinks newspapers need to rethink resources they’ve allocated to online editions. He believes his research should raise questions about the wisdom of the online expansion of U.K. newspapers to nondomestic markets: Both the Guardian and the Mail have taken their product to the United States and elsewhere. The Guardian, which has invested deeply in its online editions, reported declines last summer in its digital revenues. In the fall, it announced that it would cut 30 percent of its U.S. staff.

The study butters the toasty feelings for print that I expressed last year. As convenient as a smartphone may be when you want to sneak a nibble of news or gather a few sports scores and the weather report on the fly, for a genuine reading experience, nothing yet beats ink on paper. It’s telling that Thurman found smartphones outperforming PCs for reader time, indicating perhaps that if people are going to sit and read they’d rather do it on something other than a monitor.

If readers find newspapers so absorbing, why do media types burn endless talk on the tens of millions who visit their online sites? “Our website has 15 million uniques a month!” they say. “Oh, yeah? Our website draws 22 million!” What they’re thrilled about is “reach,” which Thurman defines as a “measure of whether someone has been exposed to a media brand but [that] tells us nothing about how much attention they paid to the content.” Yes, gillions of unique browsers make touch-and-go landings and on lots of websites, but most of them move on before absorbing any of the content or partaking of the advertising messages.

By JACK SHAFER

Thurman’s findings help reframe the rise of online and the decline of print as a debate between the number of “readers” and the actual time spent reading. The reach vs. time spent debate, says Thurman, “matters in an era of multi-platform media brands and consumption when reaching someone online often means a fleeting engagement against the deeper encounter permitted by print.” When it comes to newspaper news, the print product is walloping the online version in terms of reader engagement.

Everybody accepts that newspapers have been bleeding circulation for the past decade, but the continued devotion of the readers to print even though they charge high prices compared to free or at least cheap websites remains an under-told story. Writes Thurman, “[T]he metric of time spent reveals an inconvenient truth about newspapers’ online experiment.” Given all the developer money spent on developing news for smartphone users, it’s a bit of a shock to discover how little time that large audience invests in the format.

Online still outperforms newsprint in many vital areas. It’s superb at breaking news and boutique news, and it remains the cheapest and easiest way to publish. But Thurman’s paper, along with Chyi’s findings, provides fresh ammo to the debate about print’s future that’s been raging since 1993, when novelist Michael Crichton famously predicted in Wired that not only newspapers but mass media would be dead in 10 years. Newspapers, it seems, are always dying. But thanks to their loyal readers, who hold them tight and long, they refuse to die.

— Reprinted from Politico

The readers have spoken: You can pry their newspapers from their cold, dead hands.


Steve Dempsey: Good news for publishers as research finds time not up for print

What does that equate to in terms of minutes and seconds? Print newspapers are read for an average of 40 minutes per day. And online visitors spend an average of just 30 seconds a

day on the websites and apps of the same newspapers.

“Time-spent data has been collected by many print readership surveys for some time as well as for internet users, but it hasn’t become a standard metric for newspapers for a couple of reasons,” said Neil Thurman, a Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, and the author of the research. “Firstly, because of a natural tendency to stick with the status quo - publishers and advertisers are used to circulation, page impressions and so on. Secondly, because time spent reveals an inconvenient truth about online audiences: they spent far less time with newspapers’ online editions than with their print versions.”

S Thurman’s research relates only to UK newspaper brands, and is based on data from the UK National Readership Survey, the Audit Bureau of Circulations and Comscore. Interestingly, there seems to be a close correlation between audience attention and revenue. The News Media Association recently found that UK newspaper publishers made 88pc of their ad revenue from print and 12pc from online. That’s surprisingly close to Thurman’s 89:11 split for time spent consuming news.

Thurman believes many legacy publishers have forgotten their core product in favor of a shiny new digital bauble. “Legacy publishers understand the value of their print products very well,” he says. “They are still responsible for a large majority of their advertising revenue. However, while chasing their digital dreams they have, perhaps, neglected print -

their golden goose. They are starting to understand that there is not a bright digital dawn just over the horizon, and that it might be time to reinvent in print.” Similarly, Thurman feels digital products can learn a lot from ink on paper.

“I do think that online newspapers should try to emulate some of the characteristics that make print so engaging,” he says. “Its design, the sense of completion it gives, the focus it inspires. We’re starting to see this now in the best mobile apps and e-paper editions.”

But is this really possible? There is a vast difference between news as a printed product and news on a screen. Print is tangible and readers who buy a paper are making a commitment to spend time with it. This is nothing like the habits of a drive-by digital reader. It’s also worth bearing in mind that digital readers face a lot more competition for their attention. They are, after all, consuming news on something that can butt in with emails, social messages, not to mention the odd phone call. Computers, tablets and phones offer a host of distractions. Newspapers never start ringing in your hand.

It’s also worth remembering that there are more than just legacy publishers sharing information on the internet. Thurman’s research only relates to data from 11 national newspaper brands in the UK. There are no digital pure-plays factored in. There’s no accounting for broadcasters’ online activities. And there’s no mention of the elephants in the online room - the Googles, Amazons, Facebooks and Apples. “If you’re a content company and you’re not Facebook, Google or Snapchat, you’re in the niche ads business,” quipped Meredith Kopit Levien, Chief Revenue Officer of the New York Times at a recent AdExchanger event.

While print news needs to be celebrated for what it is, so too digital news products need to be seen for what they are. Thurman notes that online editions have doubled or tripled the number of readers that UK news brands now reach. And It’s this reach and always-on availability that news publishers need to harness online, while increasing the attention gobbling potential of print.

If time on site as a measurement provides us with anything it’s the understanding that news as a product is different depending on how its users access and consume it. The same articles that newspaper brands create need to be commercialized, distributed and measured differently on each channel.

— Reprinted from The Independent

By STEVE DEMPSEY

While print news needs to be celebrated for what it is, so too digital news products need to be seen for what they are

According to research released this week, print readers pore over the news in detail while news is no more than a dalliance for digital readers. The snappily-titled ‘Newspaper consumption in the mobile age: re-assessing multi-platform performance and market share using “time-spent”‘ found that 89pc of the time audiences spend consuming news was in print, and 11pc was online.


ver hear the phrase “print is dead”? Well if you check with almost 170 million Americans, they’d tell you that nothing could be farther from

the truth. In fact, a recent Nielsen Scarborough study found that more than 169 million adults in the U.S. read a newspaper in a month — whether it be in print, on a website or via mobile app. In total, newspapers reach 69% of the U.S. population in a given month. Newspapers remain largely a print medium, but the dramatic growth in digital media in recent years has compelled newspaper publishers to re-think their distribution models and become multi-platform content providers. According to the recent study, 81% of monthly newspaper readers engage with the print product, with 51% reading print exclusively. The remaining 49% reads a newspaper on at least one digital platform, with 30% reading both digital and print.

Traditionally, newspaper audiences have been more educated, affluent and

older than non-newspaper readers. As digital media have gained in prominence, newspapers have attracted younger readers. Newspaper readers are still educated and affluent, but their ages are more reflective of the general population than they have been in the past. For example, 13% of the U.S. population is 70 or older, and this age group now accounts for 15% of the total monthly newspaper audience.

Compared to previous decades, younger readers now account for a greater percentage of newspaper readers. Notably, Millennials 21-34 make up 25% of the U.S. population and now represent 24% of the total monthly newspaper readership. Based on the shift in age of the newspaper reader, it’s clear that the newspaper industry’s adoption of digital distribution has allowed it to reach adults of all ages.

Despite their growing appeal among younger readers through digital channels, newspapers still maintain an educated and

affluent audience. Readers, whether print or digital, are still more likely to be college graduates and have annual household incomes over $100,000 than non-readers. And by broadening their distribution to digital channels, many newspapers have attracted digital readers, who represent an even more affluent and educated segment of readers. In fact, digital newspaper paper readers are 49% more likely than the general adult population to be a college graduate and 43% more likely to have household incomes over $100,000.

There’s no doubt that the newspaper industry has seen its fair share of change and evolution over the past decade or so, some of which has resulted in a loss of confidence from agencies, marketers and even researchers. But based on the recent Nielsen Scarborough survey, it’s clear that newspapers remain a thriving and viable medium, and they continue to engage a larger portion of younger, affluent readers.

ENewspapers deliver across the ages


How resource-strapped newsrooms still produce high-quality journalism

t’s an article of faith in the local media business: High-quality content is our trump card in the high-stakes business of attracting and monetizing digital audiences.

But how much of that high-quality content do we really produce? And how much of it really has the huge audience pulling-power we need?

It’s the same answer for both questions: not nearly enough.

Every small newspaper can find a story inside the local courtroom.

Day in and day out, little “Big-J” journalism is created in most newsrooms. The large majority of what we like to call “quality content” tends to be fairly routine coverage of fairly routine community events, government meetings, and crime.

This is nothing new. Newsrooms have always tended to focus on the standard fare of community life as the most dependable means of generating enough content for a day’s news budget.

It’s getting worseBut the amount of in-depth reporting is

shrinking still further as our revenues — and, therefore, our staffs — shrink.

Investigative reporting takes time.

And when we do take the time to do investigative reporting, we need to choose our subjects carefully. We need topics that touch or interest broad swathes of the population, or our investments of time may not pay off in big audiences.

What do I mean by Big-J journalism? I mean the kind of reporting that smokes out wrongdoing; holds people accountable; breaks open misfeasance; malfeasance, and non-feasance in government; reveals patterns of abuse; and so on.

A project for every communityHowever, my purpose here isn’t to go

banging on about the need for this stuff. Rather, it’s to share a “you-can-do-it” example of Big-J journalism even very small

staffs can take on. This comes from my days as editor at my family’s newspaper in Monroe, Michigan. And it goes way back, before the Internet, social media, and e-mail.

That doesn’t matter. This idea is as good now as it was then.

I hit on the idea one day as I was thinking about our local judges. As in most communities, once judges got elected in Monroe, they would be re-elected over and over again for as long as they chose to run.

I asked myself why. Well, because each judge’s daily work was mostly invisible to voters. We did routine court coverage and covered major trials, but none of this revealed much about the quality of the judges’ work. They reigned supreme in their individual courtrooms, where few voters ever went.

There was no mechanism of accountability.

I wondered what we could do about that. If only we could watch them work, day in and day out, we could inform voters on how they did their jobs. But that was flat-out impossible with our little staff of five reporters.

Getting the job doneBut then it occurred to me

there were people who were in those courtrooms every day, and whose training in law made them qualified observers: the local lawyers.

They handled cases every day, and they knew the judges’ strengths and weaknesses from personal observation and experience. How could we tap into their knowledge?

I huddled with our excellent county government reporter, Charlie Slat, and we came

I

By STEVE GRAY


up with the idea of drafting a questionnaire we would send to the members of our local bar association.

As I remember, we had about 10 judges at the time, and the bar association had about 90 members. We looked up the bar’s membership list and went to work to develop a questionnaire.

I wish I still had the original questionnaire and could provide it here. And I wish I could lay my hands on the stories we produced. But this was in the days before digital archives, so I can’t.

What are the parameters?As I remember, Charlie and I came up

with five or six main parameters of judicial performance that seemed most important. As I recall, these were the main ones:

• Impartiality, including gender, race, age, ethnicity, and defense versus prosecution.

• Punctuality, efficiency, and orderly oversight of the courtroom.

• Fairness and balance in sentencing, determining bond, and settling procedural disputes.

• Courteous and professional treatment of plaintiffs, defendants, attorneys, juries, and people in the courtroom.

• Knowledge and appropriate application of the law.

Each performance parameter was briefly described in a sentence or two, and participants were asked to rate the judges on a scale of one to five, from very poor to excellent. We also provided space for written comments on each parameter.

The survey included a ratings sheet for each of the 10 judges. At the end of the survey, we provided space — labeled optional and confidential — for the survey participant to provide his or her name.

In my cover letter, I asked attorneys to answer honestly and candidly. I asked them to recuse themselves from completing the survey if they did not frequently handle cases in court. And I asked attorneys to refrain from rating any judges in whose courtrooms they did not have direct experience.

I also pledged the newspaper would not reveal the survey respondents’ identities to the public or judges.

High participationAs I recall, at least 70 bar association

members returned the survey, completed either in full or for one or more of the judges. Only two provided their names — a mark of singular courage and honesty, in my opinion.

As the results poured in, we read them with amazement.

One felony-court judge was revealed in repeated comments to be extremely tough on defendants. Several attorneys labeled him “the hanging judge,” and one called him “an avenging angel for his conservative Catholic morality.”

Another was revealed in multiple comments as uniformly lenient, and a sucker for sob stories and psychologist witnesses for the defense. His sentences were said to be often too soft for the crimes committed.

And several respondents reported a dubious gambit used by some defendants to avoid the “hanging judge.” They would hire an attorney who rented office space in a building owned by that judge, and the judge would disqualify himself on their cases because of his business connection with the attorney. Then the case would often go to the lenient judge.

Another judge was criticized as indecisive and unsure of the law. And, some said, drunk on the bench.

Immediate resultsAnother judge was repeatedly criticized for

working only a precise 10-to-3 schedule every day, regardless of the backlog of cases.

After the survey went out and the legal community started talking about it, that judge called our publisher. He asked if the publisher would agree to delete him from the results if he resigned before the stories were printed.

The publisher said no. The judge resigned anyway.

Several judges got uniformly high ratings, several got middling ratings, and a few got plenty of criticism.

We published the results with responses and comments from the judges. A couple of them complained — mostly not for publication — that it wasn’t fair to ask lawyers to rate them anonymously.

In my opinion, that was the only way to do the survey. Given the tremendous power judges hold over attorneys in the courtroom, requiring identification would have silenced most of the truth that needed to come out.

Even before we published the results, the legal and governmental community was buzzing, and the lazy judge quit. Then our stories reverberated across the community, triggering discussion everywhere and more than a little indignation.

A few years later, after I had left the community, the newspaper repeated the survey process and again published the results. It appeared the original project had left a lasting mark; the results showed a generally higher level of performance among the judges.

Who holds the judges in your community accountable? You can — and it doesn’t take a large staff or months of work to do it.

Steve Gray is vice president of strategy and innovation at Morris Communications, based in Augusta, Georgia, USA. He previously led the American Press Institute (API) Newspaper Next program.

— Reprinted from INMA


R eaders have finally understood that their payments for the news will actually make a difference in what they and their community

know. That model needs to be extended down to states and cities.

One of the most challenging periods in American press history began at noon Eastern, Friday, January20th. The cries of “Lügenpresse” (defended by the outlet until recently run by new chief strategist to the president) echo almost as much as the stiff-arm salutes in the nation’s capital in late October. The Russian propaganda service Russia Today (now nicely rebranded as RT America) somehow taking over the airwaves of C-SPAN for 10 minutes is just icing on the cake. Who knows what language cable news’ crawls will be in soon?

As we feel the ever-louder banging on the doors of a free press, we should also hear, weirdly, another knocking. That’s the knocking of opportunity.

It’s not just the “journalistic spring” that Jack Shafer predicts as the conflicts and controversies of the Trump administration prove fertile ground for investigation. It’s the opportunity to rewrite the tattered social contract between journalists and readers, a chance to rebuild a relationship that’s been weakening by the year for a decade now.

That’s not just some wishful sentiment expressed in the face of the reality of Trump. We’ve seen it proven out over the past several months, and we must grasp this chance to reset an American press that has been withering away.

In both the immediate run-up to the election, and more so in its dramatic aftermath, we’ve witnessed one greatly ironic unintended benefit of Trumpism. More than 200,000 new subscribers signed up for New York Times subscriptions, many of them not even directly solicited — they just figured out it was the right thing to do. The Washington Post saw its own double-digit percentage increase in new subscriptions, and Jeff Bezos — sensing opportunity — has just taken the dramatic step adding more than five dozen journalists to the

Post newsroom.

Readers opened their wallets more widely, as The Atlantic, ProPublica, The Guardian, NPR, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, and the Los Angeles Times have all reported increased public support.

What’s the lesson here?

Beyond “support,” readers clearly recognize value. They reward reporting, factual reporting, secure in the knowledge that certain news brands are more immune from the fakeries, forgeries, and foolishness than others. They see their own questions being answered with dutiful reporting and thoughtful analysis. The Times, in its 2020 report, long in the works, renewed the new social contract, as it designated $5 million for deeper and wider national government coverage, given the Trump ascendance.

Readers see courage and they support it. The Times and the Post led courageously in 2016, even as the din of press attacks got louder. (And, here, let us recognize the uneven but growing courage of CNN, its reporters and its hosts, for more insistently piercing the bellows of nonsense they encounter. At the same, time, let’s recognize the potential of CNN-taming implicit in Trump’s meeting last week with AT&T chief Randall Stephenson, the would-be buyer of CNN through the acquisition of its corporate parent, Time Warner.)

And, yet, all of that outpouring of post-election support still amounts to a meager down payment on what the American press needs. The national news media lives on the thread of profit. It is not “failing,” as in the Trumpian taunt, but it’s just hanging on, having absorbed financial blow after blow of digital disruption. At the local level — where all but four of the nation’s 1,375 or so dailies operate — the unraveling is far worse.

Those dailies approached the election emaciated, their weakness exacerbated by 10 years of disinvestment. Make no mistake: Most of the U.S. daily press still returns profits. They just don’t return as much news, or reporting, or knowledge, as they used to.

Further, it’s in that local press that Americans long got their basic news, the basic facts that informed their voting habits. We can draw a straight line between the decline of the American local press and a populace whose ignorance has been further distorted by the polarization of democratic discourse. We may struggle to point out a few direct illustrations of that straight line, but the impact — civic and electoral — is only logical. We can’t cut the number of journalists in the American daily workforce in half — replacing the most locally knowledgeable with less experienced, lower-paid recruits — and expect no loss.

Looking forward, though, it’s that local press that we must look to cover the day-by-day repercussions of health, environmental, education, and racial justice policies and laws turned upside down. We’ll see mad spin coming out of Washington, and the national media will cover that. That national media, stretched as thin as it is, has little prayer to cover what seems likely to happen in the 50 states to the formerly insured, the women facing clinic closures, the aggrieved looking to federal legal insistence on fairness and justice, and the families seeking clean drinking water. Those are stories that must be unearthed, and told, across the country.

It’s a question that comes down to a single word: capacity.

Long-time media watcher Merrill Brown pointed recently to the drained ability of American news companies to adequately report on the administration that takes power today.

“There are not enough institutions in the American journalism community that are healthy enough to deal with what the Trump administration is likely to do in its early years,” he said on Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources on CNN a week ago. Speaking of both national and regional insufficiency, “We need more

Newsonomics: Trump may be the news industry’s greatest opportunity to build a sustainable model

By KEN DOCTOR


ProPublicas. We need more Jeff Bezos’s. Philanthropists and investors need to be focused on how important media is, right now, during a dramatic change in government. We need more people to step up to the changes in journalism.”

Is it a news emergency? We can make a good case for that, but even if we want to classify it merely as a deepening crisis, let’s remember the advice of Rahm Emanuel as Barack Obama took over a country on the edge of depression in 2009. “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

I’ve had many conversations with those in and around the industry since the election, and there’s clearly a greater realization of this existential moment in American journalistic life, yet no singular sense of what to do.

Let me suggest we act on what we’ve learned.

First, that means recognizing the new power of the reader/journalist relationship, one underutilized by-product of the digital age. Though the national/global newspaper-based media (The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, which is finally finding its feet, bringing its business acumen to tougher Trump conflict of interest reporting) still struggle with the digital transition, they’ve each crossed over. More than 50 percent of their revenue comes directly from readers; that’s up from the industry average of 20 to 25 percent just a decade ago.

That not only provides them a more stable source of ongoing revenue, as digital ad markets prove increasingly troublesome — it also makes the point of journalists’ work crystal-clear. Journalists report and write to satisfy readers.

Finally, in the recent cases of Times and Post subscription spurts, paying readers have finally understood that deeper connection: My payment for the news will actually make a difference in what I know and what my community and country know.

So, on a national level, that message needs to be reinforced at every opportunity, just as John Oliver and Meryl Streep, among others, have begun to do. Another half million to a million digital subscriptions could well certify the successful digital transformation of national news outlets proving themselves

indispensable to the democracy. That number now appears in reach, as we assess the progress noted in Monday’s New York Times 2020 report.

It is in local markets that the reader revenue lesson is going largely untested. Yes, most dailies have put up paywalls, but only a relative handful — mostly outside the major chains — have funded still-robust, if diminished, newsrooms. The common arithmetic I’ve described: Halve the product, double the price. Rather than invest in that reader/journalist relationship, too many companies simply milk the life of the disappearing print paper.

My simple proposition: More Americans will pay more for a growing, smarter, and in-touch local news source if they are presented with one. As the local newspaper industry has shriveled, most readers have never been presented with that choice. Rather they’ve had to witness smaller and smaller papers, and then less and lower-quality digital news offerings.

It’s not simply an “It’s the content, stupid” moment. Too many news publishers have failed to create products, especially smartphone ones, that display well even what these local companies today produce. That, though, is a topic for another day.)

Out of the welter of possibility in 2017, we need to see multiple tests of ramping up local quality, volume, and product. We need new scale brought back to local news reporting, which can now exploit the wonders of multimedia presentation, and do it far more cheaply than print could ever offer.

Will any of the local chain owners invest in a Bezosian long-term strategy? Already, I’ve heard discussion at the high levels of a couple of chains about the new public expectation of “watchdog journalism” and how to meet it — and benefit from it.

Will the trying-to-be-feisty independents — perhaps led by The Boston Globe with its own small bump to 70,000 paying digital subscribers and a broad reinvention plan taking shape — see Times- or Post-like rewards for their efforts? Will any of the larger public radio stations tie growing news capabilities to a kind of “news membership,” moving to fill the vacuum of news in their cities? How many local TV stations will test out the idea of becoming broader TV/digital news providers, and doing enough to get reader payment? What kind of stronger, regional roles might the likes of Kaiser Health News

(health), The Marshall Project (criminal justice), and Chalkbeat (education) play? Can any of the most ambitious of LION’s 110 local member news sites step up their coverage to benefit significantly from the new reader/journalist virtuous circle?

In business — and news is a business — consumers expect the improved product to be offered first, and then to be asked to pay (or pay more) for it. That’s why we need to see the kind of investment — from investors to philanthropists, as Merrill Brown suggests.

It’s been astounding to me that so few people of wealth have come forward to rebuild the American press in digital form. Why will an Elon Musk, an early investor in newspaper entertainment product Zip2, pour hundreds of millions into space, cars, and batteries, but nothing into his local Silicon Valley news sources? For the most part, even the most sympathetic haven’t seen a sustainable model that they thought worthy of their time and money.

Now, though, that model cries out before us: Majority reader revenue, built on a nationally proven next-generation content-and-product strategy. That’s the carrot. The big stick: Unless a new model is worked out soon, know-nothingism will find fewer challenges across the expanse of America’s new deserts.

Majority-reader-revenue models won’t work overnight, and, there, the bridging aid of a small fleet of foundations that have so far failed to fund a new sustainability will be key. I believe they will renew their own spirits — if and when they see building success.

Finally, let’s consider the intangible of civic pride in this strangest of political times. John Oliver made subscribing to the Times and Post and supporting ProPublica hip. Clearly, he tapped an open reservoir of goodwill. As high hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets this weekend, apprehensive of the future, and looking for accountability, the appetite for aggressive news media — national and local — may never have been as high.

Who will step forward and rise to the occasion?


By MAX WILLENS

How publishers squeeze new traffic out of their old content

couple years ago, publishers decided they had to start wringing more money out of their old content. Today, some of them are practically selling the photos that hang on their office walls, but the fruits of these labors

are sprouting: The Atlantic, which uses archival material on both the print and digital sides of its business, now generates more than a quarter of its traffic every month from older content. At publications like Business Insider, the figure is even higher, and for lifestyle-focused publications like Refinery29 it’s higher still: 35 percent, and growing, the company said.

“We’re not looking to build our business on single pieces of celebrity news,” said Neha Gandhi, Refinery29’s svp of content strategy and innovation. “Betting exclusively on the news cycle is far too volatile a game to play, if you’re looking to drive sustained growth and loyalty.”

Older, evergreen content has always been a source of traffic for publishers; for some, it’s core to their business models. But recently, publishers big

Aof a new site section. Over the summer, the grey lady launched a column called Smarter Living, with raw material coming mostly from archived posts that were years old. In mid-December, Smarter Living was given a standalone editor, and it now sources original material from numerous desks across the Times. Plans for a newsletter, events and original multimedia content are in the pipes as well.

“When we started, it was almost exclusively archives,” said Smarter Living editor Tim Herrera. “The balance between archival and news has shifted a bit to the point where now desks are pitching us.”

Figuring out what to focus on isn’t hard. Herrera’s able to draw on everything from internal site searches to reader emails to past content performance. Where necessary, stories are retagged, and in some cases updated with the help of the reporter.

That same intel will be used to create more resource-intensive content, like video and live chats, a strategy not dissimilar from the one BuzzFeed used to adapt successful content from one medium to another. “It just seems like such an obvious thing to do.”

and small have embraced a wide array of tactics to get more value out of their stories: republishing the same stories with different headlines; targeting likely subscribers with promoted posts on Facebook; syndicating old content with advertisers hungry for high-quality stories; and many more.

Focusing heavily on updating older content has driven big gains. “If we have a list of the Best Burgers in San Francisco, for instance, if we’re not updating that at least yearly and probably more often, we’re doing a terrible job,” said Ben Robinson, Thrillist’s chief creative director. “It’s an area we’ve attacked really aggressively.”

That aggressiveness has paid off. Two years ago, Thrillist got just 10 percent of its traffic from search. By the end of 2016, that number was closer to 40 percent.

But updating content isn’t the only move publishers are making. The New York Times, for example, which started thinking about archives in earnest after its much-discussed 2014 Innovation Report, used archival material to test out the viability

Public notice ads available from News Media Alliance

https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/email-gate/?submit=/research_tools/public-notice-ad/?gatval

hroughout our nation’s history, government agencies have been required to alert citizens of certain government activities that may impact

a local community, providing citizens with an opportunity to stay informed and take action when necessary.

Newspapers have long partnered with government agencies by publishing public

Tof a government agency’s action; reaching citizens that are passive information seekers that would not be aware of the fact that notices impacting the community are on a government agency’s website.

Publishing public notices through the local newspaper also serves an important audit role as the newspaper acts as an independent third party able to legally verify that the government agency has given the public notice.

notices, enabling the government to be fully transparent and accountable to citizen taxpayers.

In recent years, state legislatures — most recently in New Jersey — have proposed to move public notices out of printed newspapers and onto government-run websites.

Publishing public notices in newspapers informs a wide audience in a local community

Public notice ads from News Media Alliance, formerly NNA, are now available for use by newspapers — members and non-members. These ads, which highlight the importance of keeping public notices in newspapers, can be customized so that a newspaper can add its own logo. Any newspaper can access the ads by putting in an e-mail address that would recognize the newspaper’s URL.


(Continued on next page)

By BENJAMIN MULLIN

Reader support is more important than ever;Here are 22 ways to connect with your community

ne of the most promising moneymaking frontiers seems to be reader-supported journalism.

The New York Times, with its massive global reach, is betting big on subscribers; Dean Baquet, the Times’ editor, recently said a10 million subscriber goal was in the realm of possibility. The Washington Post, which is on a quest to convert drive-by traffic into paid subscribers, is now a profitable enterprise. Other subscriber-driven outlets — The Information and Timmerman Report, for example — have found success by putting readers at the center of their businesses.

This focus on audiences raises an important question: How should news organizations that aim to make most of their money from readers, viewers and listeners behave?

I put the question on social media and asked the Twitterverse for suggestions. Here’s what they came up with. (If you know some I’m forgetting, please feel free to leave them in the comments below!)

Newsletters: One of the most valuable pieces of real estate in our daily lives is the email inbox. News organizations have adopted daily briefings en masse as they seek to build a direct connection to their readers that isn’t mediated by social media.

iPhone/Android applications: If getting into your reader’s inbox is good, having a designated spot on their iPhone screen is better. The best applications are habit-forming and keep your most loyal readers coming back on a regular basis.

OLetters (real and electronic):Reporters and editors gathered around my desk excitedly during my internship at The Sacramento Bee when I got my first letter from Folsom State Prison. It was apparently something of a newsroom tradition — having a prison 30 minutes away meant that we often got mail from convicts who insisted they were wrongly convicted and wanted us to look into their case.

This letter was mildly upsetting, but I still read it back-to-front — as did several other people in the newsroom. The lesson? Snail mail takes up physical space in our lives and is harder to ignore. When a reader takes the time to write something longhand and put a stamp on it, it’s probably worthwhile to give it a hard look. That certainly paid off for The New York Times when Donald Trump’s tax returns showed up in the mailroom one day.

And don’t forget to set up electronic mailboxes, too. SecureDrop is a great way to receive anonymous tips from readers.

Membership: If readers love your brand, or individual personalities in your newsroom, membership can be a great way to bring your audience closer to the newsroom. Live chats, Slack channels and gifts are all excellent ways to bring people into your orbit.

Crowdsourcing: Here’s how the typical story is written. A reporter has an idea about what deserves attention. Then, they call the usual suspects — city officials and local citizens with a public profile. Then, the news and quotes go into a story that few people will read and even fewer will care about.

From NewsU: Lessons from 10 years in audience engagement

Social media: Judicious use of social media applications Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat can keep your news organization in conversation with the people who follow it. Reader-supported organizations — any organization, really — can’t afford to neglect social media.

Telephone: When I call local newsrooms, there’s an actual person at the other end of the phone who tries to answer my questions. The importance of a real human connection can’t be overstated in the age of digital and automated communication.”

Voicemail: My college-town newspaper once had an answering machine feature that the editor compared to a train wreck: upsetting but impossible to look away from. Readers would call in and leave a message; their (often tasteless) remarks would be transcribed and printed on the second page of newspaper. Although the feature was eventually killed (too few contributors; too much whining) there’s a lesson in its popularity: The power of a confessional is extremely popular, and anonymity leads to honesty, for good or ill.

Other news organizations, including BuzzFeed, WNYC and CNN have allused voicemail to help their audience open up about sensitive subjects.


One solution: Use social media (or tools like Hearken) to determine what people in your community care about. Then focus your efforts on those people and their questions.

Direct public offering: Want to give your audience a piece of the action? Ask them to invest — literally. At least one news organization, the Bay Area’s Berkeleyside, has asked its readers to buy chunks of the company to keep it afloat. This model was pioneered by the Green Bay Packers — one of the most successful NFL franchises, and gives readers a financial stake in the news organization’s success.

Subscription: Kind of like a direct public offering, without the equity. Subscribers may feel more invested in your journalism — and more likely to share it — if they’re helping pay for it.

Chatbots: Don’t have time to have a back-and-forth with every reader? You don’t have to! The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning is empowering news organizations around the world to create chatbots that can dialog with readers and help them find the news they want. The record for these bots has been spotty thus far, but expect this tool to improve with time.

Tours: No matter how convincing virtual reality gets, there’s no substitute for seeing a place with your own eyes and meeting people firsthand. Newsroom tours can deepen your connection with the community and foster spontaneous ways for the public to engage.

Internships: Honolulu Civil Beat used its internship program tobring a community member into the newsroom to learn more about the business and craft of journalism. What’s a better way to build the public’s trust in journalism than having them produce it for you?

Partner with the community:The community internship program is similar to an approach undertaken by City Bureau, a Chicago-based nonprofit that connects professional journalists with community members to tell their stories. More facetime with the public means more news literacy and, perhaps, additional support.

Events: Events are a great moneymaking idea for a few reasons. They elevate your outlet’s profile in the community. They give your audience a chance to see and interact with your journalists. And they make the process of journalism more transparent — people can see how conduct interviews, for example, and they can observe reporter-source relationships firsthand.

Give away your journalism: Many nonprofit news organizations, including ProPublica, The Marshall Project and the Center for Public Integrity, spend months tackling investigations in the public interest and give them away to partner organizations. Should public-spirited for-profit news organizations do the same? In recent months, news organizations in San Francisco and Philadephia have teamed up to examineissues such as homelessness and prisoner re-entry.

Sell (or give away) your data:ProPublica has launched a data store that has pulled in more than $200,000 to date. Many news organizations collect government data as a matter of course, so why not follow the ProPublica model and sell it (or offer it to the public for free).

Notifications, notifications, notifications: Mobile alerts, email alerts and web alerts are all fodder for instant engagement. Get users to opt-into alerts on Chrome, mobile apps and newsletters so you’re directly in front of them when big news breaks.

Comments: Many news organizations have gotten rid them, but online comments still have major champions in the news industry. Comment advocates contend that the spaces below (or alongside) stories are crucial spaces for reader engagement.

Slack channels: The Washington Post, Gimlet Media, Poynter and Nieman Lab have all established Slack channels to instant message with die-hard fans. Although it’s tough to build vibrant communities on Slack, chat rooms enable instant feedback and lively exchanges.

Live video: You can’t get facetime with everyone, so Facebook Live will have to do. Apps like Periscope, Facebook Live and Meerkat (remember that?) allow you to broadcast the inner workings of your newsroom without devoting time to things like editing and post-production effects.

Talk to them: There’s no technological tool or marketing scheme that can take the place of a face-to-face conversation. If you really want to know what people in the community think about your newsroom, knock on some doors, shake some hands and find out for yourself.


Reader support is more important than ever…


“Why can’t we all just get along?” might not be the best way to encourage innovation and growth

C ollaboration is crumpling under the weight of our expectations. What should be a messy back-and-forth process far too often falls victim to our desire to keep

things harmonious and efficient. Collaboration’s promise of greater innovation and better risk mitigation can go unfulfilled because of cultural norms that say everyone should be in agreement, be supportive, and smile all the time. The common version of collaboration is desperately in need of a little more conflict.

You’ve probably been taught to see collaboration and conflict as opposites. In some cultures the language and imagery of teamwork is ridiculously idyllic: rowers in perfect sync, or planes flying in tight formation. As a team, you’re “all in the same boat.” To be a good team player, you must “row in the same direction.” These idealized versions of teamwork and collaboration are making many teams impotent.

There’s no point in collaboration without tension, disagreement, or conflict. What we need is collaboration where tension, disagreement, and conflict improve the value of the ideas, expose the risks inherent in the plan, and lead to enhanced trust among the participants.

It’s time to change your mind set about conflict. Let go of the idea that all conflict is destructive, and embrace the idea that productive conflict creates value. If you think beyond the trite clichés, it’s obvious: Collaborating is unnecessary if you agree on everything. Building on one another’s ideas only gets you incremental thinking. If you avoid disagreeing, you leave faulty assumptions unexposed. As Walter Lippmann said, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” To maximize the benefit of collaborating, you need to diverge before you converge.

Unfortunately, our distaste for conflict is so entrenched that encouraging even modest disagreement takes significant effort. I find that three specific techniques help people embrace productive conflict. Carve out some team development time to do these exercises before your next contentious discussion.

First, discuss the different roles in the team and highlight what each role brings to the conversation. Highlight how the roles are there to drive different agendas. As an example, if you are in a cross-functional meeting with sales and production, the production person might be advocating for more standardization, control, and efficiency. The sales person advocates for the exact opposite: more flexibility, customization, and agility. When they are doing their jobs well, the sales and production leads should conflict with one another on the path to an optimized solution. One is fighting to be as responsive as possible to unique customer needs; the other fights for the consistency that breeds quality control and cost effectiveness.

As you work through each role in the team and their different motives, you’ll see the light bulbs going on as people realize, “You mean I’m supposed to fight with that person!” Yes! “And when he’s disagreeing with me, it’s not because he’s a jerk or trying to annoy me?” Right! If the team has the right composition, each member will be fighting for something unique. They are doing their jobs (and being good team players) by advocating in different directions, not by acquiescing. By taking the time to normalize the tensions that collaborators already feel, you liberate them to disagree, push, pull, and fight hard for the best answer.

Second, use a personality or style assessment tool to highlight differences in what people are paying attention to. In addition to differences stemming from their roles, team members will have different perspectives on an issue based on their personalities. As you explore the findings for your team, look for any tensions that might stem from personality-based diversity. Pay particular attention if you have one or two styles that are in the minority on your team. Team members with minority perspectives should be given the responsibility to speak up if the team’s thinking becomes lopsided.

For example, in my work with dozens of executive teams, I’ve found a dearth of executives who fully appreciate the process-related issues involved in strategy and execution. I call out those who have this lens and set the expectation that they are going to challenge the team when big ideas are insufficiently thought out or when alignment is only superficial. By describing the unique value of different perspectives, you encourage those in the minority to raise their voices.

A third approach to normalizing and encouraging productive conflict is to set ground rules around dissension. Ask your team to define the behaviors that contribute to productive conflict (i.e., conflict that improves decision making while contributing to increased trust) and those that detract from it. Cover as much territory as possible to give people a clear picture of what is, and is not, acceptable behavior on your team.

In addition to clarifying appropriate conflict behaviors, you might want to define processes or roles that will help you to have more-frequent or more-effective conflict. Some teams have success with DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats, which has team members use a specified perspective (e.g., white hat is logical and fact-based; black hat is cautious and conservative; green hat is creative and provocative) to shed new light on the issue at hand. Others assign the responsibility for eliciting diverging views to a rotating chairperson or the owner of the agenda item. The key is to clearly define the process you’re using and the associated expectations.

One case that would benefit from clearer expectations is the use of the devil’s advocate role, which few use correctly. Most people invoke the term only to say something unpopular or distasteful. The true role of the devil’s advocate (originally, the person appointed by the Pope to counter evidence of sainthood in the Roman Catholic beatification process) is to question the veracity of evidence and to propose alternate explanations for what has happened. By defining a clear devil’s advocate role, you legitimize challenges to the quality and relevance of the evidence you’re using to make a decision. A true devil’s advocate does a great service.

Even after using these three techniques to change people’s mindset about conflict, you have to go further. Giving people permission to challenge, disagree, and argue isn’t enough. After all, giving someone permission to do something they don’t want to do is no guarantee that they’ll do it. If you want to create productive conflict on your team and use it to generate better ideas, you need to move beyond permission to making productive conflict an obligation. Using these three techniques will be a good start.

Liane Davey is the cofounder of 3COze Inc. She is the author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and a coauthor of Leadership Solutions: The Pathway to Bridge the Leadership Gap. Follow her on Twitter at @LianeDavey.


To perform at your best, focus on Goals not Tasks

By PAUL ADAMS — Medium

am a big believer in setting goals. Throughout my career I’ve learned that when I set myself goals and stick to them, my performance really improves. I’ve also seen this in others that I’ve

worked with, time after time. I think there are two main reasons:

1. Goals force me to focus. Modern life is full of distractions, which kill productivity and impact, and goals are my way of avoiding distraction. When I inevitably get dragged into email or Slack, or start working on things reactively as they come up, having my goals in front of me brings me back to a place of focus and ruthless priority. It empowers me to say no to the many random things that come up. This hugely increases my impact because it means I’m working on the most important things.

2. It forces competition — me against myself. I’m a very competitive person, and without someone to compete against within my own job, and when my version of winning is played out over months and years, goals over a shorter timeframe allow me to compete against myself.

The level of impact you can have with hitting your goals is obviously dependent on setting good goals. I have a process with my Directors where we each set weekly goals, and we also have a process across all my org where each individual contributor

sets weekly goals. A common mistake we all make is that we slip into writing tasks instead of goals. This is bad.

So what’s the difference? For me, there is one main thing: Goals are strategic and aspirational, whereas tasks are tactical and will likely happen anyway. Goals are progress oriented, not event oriented. Because of this, goals tend to have much higher impact over time for people. I have more tasks than I know what to do with, but addressing all these tasks would simply result in me being very busy, but having very low impact.

Here are three examples of bad weekly goals, and alternatives:

Goal: Present the new approval process at the All Hands. The All Hands is happening, and presenting at it might lead to little value to attendees. This is a task. A good goal gets at the longer term benefit of presenting. A better version might be: ‘Ensure everyone in the team understands the new approval process by the end of the week’. This is aspirational and extends beyond the task of presenting at the all hands.

Goal: Work with Julie on next steps for new onboarding design. What does it look like to hit this goal? Have a meeting, goal hit. This goal isn’t

progress oriented. It doesn’t push everyone involved to focus on progress. A much better version would be something like: ‘Next steps for new onboarding design approved by both Design and PM Directors’. The approval is aspirational. It’s going to require focus to make that happen.

Goal: Interview Paul for the open PM position. Running an interview is a task. It’s in your calendar. Someone is showing up. It’s going to happen. A better goal might be ‘Fill the PM position by end of the week or have a concrete plan for how we’ll source more leads’. Now we’re aspirational. We’re more long term. We’ll need to get creative to come up with ways to hit the goal.

Obsess about understanding the distinction between goals and tasks. Once you do, the critical thing to know is that goals won’t get hit unless you set aside dedicated, focused time to work on them. Without dedicated time, you’ll fill your day doing task after task. You won’t make fast progress. You simply won’t be a high impact individual at your company.

This is why, despite having a large team to manage and more meeting requests than you can imagine, I block out every morning of every day — almost half my available time — to work on my goals. I win — and Intercom wins — if I set goals not tasks, and hit them week after week after week.

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“understanding what’s important…”€¦ · 09/02/2017 · michelle nicolosi, editor for...

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