by Doug Fisher, University of South Carolina
Small, family-owned news organizations may have the best opportunity to take advantage of the digital pathway to reach their communities, but they also may be the most endangered by it and find it the most challenging.
I’ve come to that conclusion after working last summer in the newsroom of an 18,000-circulation community daily newspaper and after years of working with other editors and publishers at individual papers or small family-owned chains.
The health of these newsrooms is important to their communities. In many instances, as case studies at the Newspapers and Community-Building symposia have shown, they are among the few institutions willing and able to stand up to the power structure. Also, as has been widely noted, they generally are suffering less economically than their big-city counterparts.
Studies, some presented at Community Journalism Interest Group (COMJIG) research sessions, have shown that a significant number have a limited or no online presence. Rather than scoff at that, we should consider that it also has allowed them to bypass many of the online mistakes made by their big-city brethren.
But there also is a stark reality: Those are not newspapers hanging from the belts and in the purses of their readers. They are cell phones that are rapidly turning into complete mobile communication platforms. And they promise to forever change the communication landscape, even in the smallest of communities.
This is a fertile area for research that we hope to see more of at COMJIG: How are mobile devices being used and are they changing communication patterns in small communities as much as they appear to be in larger ones?
So why do I suggest that smaller newsrooms, especially those with local ownership, may have the best opportunity to take advantage of the emerging mobile space? First, it’s exactly because many don’t have the extensive online investment – and concurrent baggage – that many larger organizations do. Second, it comes from the short nature of the command structure that lends flexibility to most such operations. However, the flip side is that management traditions, especially informal ones, may be so ingrained that adjusting to the new discipline digital requires could be difficult.
I’d like to focus on that second point. My observation, and another area for further research we would welcome at COMJIG, is that much of the communication in smaller newsrooms is informal and sometimes even unspoken. People who work so closely together, and who often have done so for a long time, understand each other’s roles so well that they can function without much of the more formal structure needed for larger groups. They probably perform multiple functions or have had to fill in on one or more of those other roles at some time.
In the digital world, which values multitasking, that short management chain and fungibility can be a strength. The digital world also puts a premium on building community, not just pushing eyeballs, and these smaller newsrooms often have community loyalty that larger publishers can only dream of.
However, while the people in smaller organizations may be physically fungible, I have observed that they may be more susceptible to a form of groupthink and can become more set in their ways. This is another avenue for more research, but if my observation is correct, this “we don’t do it that way” orientation makes it harder to function in the digital space.
(One might observe that there often is a form of corporate groupthink at larger organizations. Granted, but the very nature of those organizations, with more people interacting and doing specialized jobs, seems to at least increase the chance of some different ideas surfacing.)
It may seem counterintuitive, but the wide-open digital realm also requires more disciplined thinking. Something as simple as blogging, for instance, raises procedural and management questions. Among them: What is the goal? Who will monitor postings and traffic to determine whether the goal is being met? How will you handle comments, and who will have the responsibility?
It’s as though someone moved a printing press into the newsroom and you had to adopt the kind of formal structure needed to keep “big iron” running smoothly. In fact, for many small news organizations, digital is the new printing press, moving that function into the newsroom just as pagination moved many of the backshop functions into the newsroom two decades ago. In that light, it may be time to reprise some of the research done on pagination reframed for the digital age.
Mobile ups the ante. Unlike the Web, where news organizations have often been able to just shovel content from print to digital, mobile is a different space requiring a far different approach. It values speed, interactivity and utility, and community news organizations that do not meet those values run the risk of losing an increasingly mobile-centric audience.
But mobile also poses very real resource challenges. It is not unusual for larger organizations to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on an iPhone “app.” How does a small newsroom effectively compete in that space? This is yet another fertile area for research that we hope to see more of at COMJIG sessions.
Fisher is a veteran journalist who most recently spent nine years as a news editor for The Associated Press. His interests are in reporting, precision writing, ethics, media economics, and new ways to manage the increasing flow of information so that reporters and editors, as well as consumers, do not suffer “information burnout.” In 2007, he became executive editor of The Convergence Newsletter, and he is co-author of Principles of Convergent Journalism (Oxford, 2008).