Following our robust conversations on Tuesday, I am looking forward to another set of employee annual review meetings today, at 9 AM and 3 PM CDT.

You can follow the live blog on CoverItLive at the site below:

The slides are the same as Tuesdays, and can be found at:

We will be live blogging our employee review meetings at 10 AM and 2 PM on Tuesday, May 4.  This will be the first time that we have live blogged an annual review meeting, following our annual board and shareholder meetings, which were held last week.   You can follow live, and contribute comments and questions, at the CoverItLive site noted below.

The slides we will be reviewing include:

After three days with industry leaders, and sharp outside perspectives, I am more encouraged about our direction, and our ability to make progress quickly.

I started writing this blog two years ago after my first presentation at an NAA MediaXChange.

At that time, I was very concerned about our industry’s approach to the fundamental changes in the creation and distribution of local information.

Rishad Tobaccowala kicked the meetings of with a quietly delivered exhortation to fully embrace the new mindset and business models, while continuing to deliver on the old — kind of a planned schizophrenia.  A couple of quotes from his great presentation:

I believe the very idea of what is “news” needs to be rethought. Last night when following his talk on twitter I thought it was news. No journalists. No editors. No “content” company. It was news to me because it was what I believed was news in my context (today’s speech) and it was delivered to me just when I needed it and the form I wanted.

This is still an industry that is huge with over 40 billion of revenue. But it is one that is half the size of what it was three years ago. Yes, this year it will decline 4% versus last years 27%!But being less pathetic than last year is not exactly something to feel good about.

We are living in a time of STD and there is no contraceptive but only a vaccine. A time of Seminal, Transformative and Disruptive change. We must infect our own organizations and minds with seminal, transformative and disruptive thinking to thrive.

…forces us to rethink our own business and in doing so we have some collateral thoughts for yours.

Facilitation: First I would ask in an age where people are marketing to themselves and learning by themselves or other people they connect with how do we facilitate this behavior?

Voices and Users: Second, in a world where not just users of a product and service but also voices (advocates and detractors) are instrumental to decisions how do we combine, curate and make convenient all this information?

Re-aggregation: Third, as marketers, advertisers, retailers struggle with fragmentation how do we re-aggregate groups large enough to affordably market to or scaled enough to impact business? Google is an amazing re-aggregation engine in that via search and to a lesser extent Adsense it combines people who share intent one at a time into large groups.

I believe with the right mindset and right technology and right people your business can do very well in the future because of something that we see and what Eric Schmidt said.

Mobility.

All things analog are becoming digital (such as television)
All things digital are becoming mobile (i-phone, i-pad…)
Most things mobile are becoming deeply linked to analog (local and retail space).

I would redefine the future of your business not as “news” or “newspaper” or “content” but rather as a leader and key partner in facilitating and re-aggregating community information, history and voices for civic, retail and commercial purposes

Local is where it is at. Community will matter. Your legacy industry has some very strong assets such as sales folks, writers, and relationships with retailers as well as other voices in the community. You also have a trusted brand name that allows you to either be a leader or significant partner in what will be a huge future business.

People need a well-curated, combined and convenient resource as they meander their communities. Retailers need help in promoting and spreading the word about themselves. Marketers need to find folks in large numbers as “intent” based marketing is supplemented by “location” based marketing.

He then closes with 10 steps for improvement, so his entire notes are well worth the read.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep focus, built on Rishad’s opening keynote, by noting that our role is as conversation starter, and that we should be using the local networks of information, mostly social networks, to:

1. Get real time intelligence – discover what your communities care about now
2. Promote real time conversations – make it easy to share and comment on information
3. Focus on Location using mobile applications – this is going to explode as Facebook adds location based services
4. Redefine “ad” to “add value” – people pay much more attention to information referred by their friends

Ian’s blog is worth a view, and he has made his presentation available on Slideshare.

I tried to build on Rishad’s and Ian’s comments, by presenting what we are doing to change our company to play in this world, in a panel with Greg Veis of the New Repubic and Lincoln Millstein of Hearst. Greg got us off to a good start by showing what his company his doing to show related content and share content.  Lincoln then quietly showed a concept video of where Hearst is going with their content strategy.  The Hearst video so engaged the audience that I had to almost forceably bring them back to pay some attention to my presentation!  Words cannot do justice to the Hearst video, but I can say that Hearst is clearly trying to “start conversations” in their communities and make it easy for everyone to engage. I am hoping that both of them share their presentations.

I then presented the following slides, which summarize much of what I have written here about our direction and our key tasks, with a focus on the content repository, as the session was on managing content:

On the plane to the next meeting, I drew out the flow of information as I envision it for us to achieve our C3 mission to be the Complete Community Connection:

We have created deep emotional ties to our products, both within our company and within our communities.  We need to begin to create emotional ties to an integrated local information ecosystem, and the multiple ways we can access that system.  That requires a definition of a brand promise and a new way to talk about the system, without regard to our existing products, which all have strong brands.

At the most basic level, this information system will be designed to provide an individualized two-way flow of information.  While we want to still be the trusted source of accurate information, we need to have a brand to describe the relationship desired with the entire system, not just the products.  And our employees creating the information, or helping local businesses connect with local communities, need a name and brand promise that is beyond the products.

While we are not settled on the exact name yet, we think we know the essential characteristics of the brand promise.

I could go on describing for some time, but for many,  a visualization helps to best see the relationship of the supporting brand concepts.  (Press the “full” button below the image to see the image large enough to read the text.)

When I started this blog, in April, 2008, all I knew was that we needed to explore new ways to fulfill our mission of being the “information provider of choice”.  After 21 months of exploration and experimentation we have a plan that needs to be executed.

There are many nuances to this plan, but the core of it revolves around a few concepts:

1. We need to use all the tools at our disposal today, and the many that will be coming, to enable anyone in the various communities we serve to engage in the issues important to them and to ease their commercial transactions.
2. Our products of today – newspaper, magazines, television, websites, shoppers – need to be recreated to fill a defined role in an integrated local information ecosystem.  These packaged products will all have roles, but will not be able to meet all the information needs of the people we serve.
3. To best define our products, we need to adopt the best practices of brand management as used in many consumer products companies today.
4. To satisfy the information needs of our users, we need to create information in the first instance in such a way that it can be easily flow into products, or be accessible to anyone with the properly tuned digital device.  The sources of that information should be transparent, and related information, and the context of that information should be easily obtained.
5. To ease commercial transactions, sellers need to be able to reach audiences, down to an audience of one.

In order to pursue these concepts, we have had to make some big changes, primarily in reorganizing our legacy print and broadcast companies, although commercial printing, packaging and distribution have seen significant changes as we took on the work of printing two newspapers, and distributing one of those and another newspaper.

Last year at this time we were organized by product, with each product having its own integrated company – print, broadcast and commercial printing.  Print and broadcast each developed digital products related to their core product.  We were creating content in the first instance for the applicable packaged product – newspaper article or broadcast video.  We did not have a digital strategy focused on the user experience. So, changes were necessary.

The biggest changes were separating content creation from product creation, setting up a separate digital products group, and creating one sales force designed to connect audiences with advertisers.  We have only been experimenting with those changes for the last 8 months, and know we need to make further changes.  Change management is critical.  The first step in that process is understanding why changes are necessary.

Let’s start with the separation of content creation and product creation.  We cannot pursue our 5 core concepts unless information is created in the first instance without regard to product or display. When I asked Becky Lutgen Gardner and Steve Lorenz to tackle that less than a year ago, many people in our company could not imagine such a split.  How would the work get done, on deadline?  Steve and Becky did a great job making that initial split, but our experience has shown that we did not get it completely right.  The daily tensions between the two groups are not creative tensions, leading to a better system, but are the result of flawed expectations and processes.  The products have not redefined their role in the local information system and content creation has not defined the core local information they will curate.  So, I have asked Steve and Becky and their staffs to go back to the drawing board and create a better system.

Products cannot create their focus without understanding the user experience and the user’s core information needs.  Our industry, and our company, do not have a history of strong brand management focused on the end user.  So, we are looking nationally for a new leader of brand management.  If we can find someone who will accelerate our development, that person will be responsible for all product management and marketing, and Steve Lorenz will focus on print product management.

Our print, digital and broadcast products each need technical production of their products.  Print and broadcast each have a dedicated production staff.  Digital production is currently housed within our Information Technology department.  We are searching for a new leader of digital production, to partner with Shannon Booth, our leader of digital products.

For the last 127 years, our information has been designed for our products, and our products have defined our relationship with our communities.  We have created deep emotional ties to our products, both within our company and within our communities.  We need to begin to create emotional ties to an integrated local information ecosystem, and the multiple ways we can access that system.  That requires a definition of a brand promise and a new way to talk about the system, without regard to our existing products, which all have strong brands.

I will write more on the branding process later, as well as our content creation efforts and audience focused efforts.

What do you think so far?  What does not make sense?

The first event will be Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 3 PM CDT and it will be live, and recorded, here:

The second will be Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 9 AM CDT, and it will be live, and then recorded, here:

We have our quarterly board and employee meetings this week.  We are an ESOP company, owned by our original founding families (over 126 years in business), and the Employee Stock Ownership Trust.  So everyone is interested.

The last time I made a formal report, we were having difficulty forecasting our sales, and we did not know if we would be able to cut sufficient expenses to offset our accelerating revenue declines.  We were in danger of not meeting our bank covenants.

Today, I am very appreciative that we have stabilized, thanks to the wonderful support of our customers and the hard work and dedication of our over 500 employees.  We are profitable, have positive cash flow, have met the bank covenants and have been able to maintain our cash position after paying millions of dollars to ESOP participants who have left the company.

So, we are stable, but not out of the woods.  How deep are those woods? How dark?  David Olive challenges us to be “essential” and reviews how we got here — by being bland and boring, then buying other media at unsustainable prices.  Now, he says:

We have to surprise and entertain.  We have to be willing to offend, in causes we know to be right.  It’s really quite simple.  We need to be essential.

But it is clear that David likes newspapers.  He is not focused on the fundamental changes in economics and social behavior that others see, and occupy much of my time.  Neil Perkin does a wonderful job in his most recent slides of capturing these new dynamics, and graciously gave me permission to use a few from his June 2008 slides at the Newspaper Association of America convention this March.  For a more comprehensive view of these fundamental changes, and potential future states, download and read the new study The Big Thaw from The Media Consortium (with a helpful list of efforts to explore in Appendix E).  Doug Fisher includes many of these new points of view in his review of the literature, including our friend Dan Conover. As regular readers know, I have been exploring new organizing thoughts, culture, technology and organization for some time.  Some people say I make this too complicated.  So let’s try simple.  Most of these slides have been used before, including a few of Neil Perkin’s from the March NAA presentation, but what do they mean, in practical terms?

Shannon Booth, our Director of Digital Products, would like to offer easily accessible, relevant information to any one person in our community, on whatever device they possess, where they are, simply.  In order to do that, we need to change how we create the information in the first instance, make sure it is properly tagged (linked to descriptions of the information that travel with the information) and can be published anywhere.  That means that the content creators in information content and commercial content much change the way they work, and the systems with which they work.  It means that IT has to develop and support robust systems of content creation and management.  It means that our product managers must develop presentation systems that allow both “packaged products” such as newspapers, broadcasts and websites as well as flexible and free flowing user requested information.  It means our sales department must be able to consult with our advertisers to advise them on how best to reach their desired audience, not just sell them products.  Our financial metrics, and billing procedures, need to support this free flowing information. Lots of change.  But clearly doable, if we want to.  If anyone does not want to, then my advice would be to find something you do want to do.

National Public Radio is well down this path.  Their Create Once, Publish Anywhere system is a joy to use.  Try their iphone/itouch application.

Think of Shannon Booth, and her attempts to connect to the communities we serve, at the top of this pyramid, artfully created by Mike Coleman .  We all need to support her.

As our friend, and consultant, Abe Abreu, Sr. notes, this will not be easy, and we need people who want to play.

Well, I trust your three Directors – Content, Commercial, IT – on my team understand the purpose [of Content Engineering], and that the Content Director has the authority to execute on the organizational mission. I believe we have a solid plan to help build a bridge across the content creation and packaging chasms that now exist and everyone is struggling with.
I also feel that we have a solid platform on the way on which we will build new tag-at-first-instance workflows in the DAM [Digital Asset Management system]. And it doesn’t hurt that Dan [Conover] is a rock star.
But frankly, and as you’ve often blogged, the biggest challenge, as it turns out, is going to be the [people within the] organization itself. Is the desire and the willingness to change there yet? Will TV and Broadcast play nice? Will print and online willingly merge around a new digital-repository-first methodology? Those are issues that the leadership at large must address.

For now, we are creating a 10-person prototype/team to deploy the tool, test my content-waterfall theories and new work flows, use those to prime the DAM with content, seat 2-3 content originators, flow content out to an alpha site, and fix the inevitable bugs.

In the meantime, company leadership needs to be equipping the rest of the organization with, metaphorically speaking, rough-terrain gear and leading them to the other side of the chasm across the narrow donkey bridge we will build. If that doesn’t happen, no tool or methodology in the world is going to save the business!!

We’re building the tools, we are working together to build the process to connect the people with the tools, but somebody has got to lead the people across the bridge – and that’s a function of talent, competence, passion and commitment. Clearly, the hardest work of all!!

People-Process-Tools! It takes a village

[Edited by Chuck Peters 10/25/09 at 8 PM CDT to correct typos noted by Abe in his comment]

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I have been back from the Media and Technology Summit (#mts on Twitter) for 10 days.  The reentry back into work and an early Winter in Iowa has been harder than usual.  Some of that is due to the pace of play in October, coupled with some strong personal challenges for very close friends.  But much of that is due to the deep tensions coming out of three days in Mountain View which were very well organized by Alan Mutter (@newsosaur)

John Temple (@jtemplermn) started us out with sobering reflections on the last decades of the Rocky Mountain News.  We shifted immediately into the latest semantic tools.  Several of the slide shows can be found at this “event” on Slideshare.

The immediate, and lasting, impression is that there are three levels of complex revolutions taking place.  The first revolution is in user interfaces, and users’ changing behaviors with those interfaces.  Even those presenters whose jobs focus on the use of those new interfaces were struggling to keep up, and had more questions than answers.

The second revolution is the numerous nuanced business models that can be successful in the networked economy.  Owners need to think about more than a simple “freemium” model.  Marshall Van Alstyne wowed and perplexed us with the concepts of proprietary complementarity.

The third revolution is the fundamental changes in underlying technology.  Atomic, tagged, semantic, free flowing.

Each of these areas is changing so fast that we can barely comprehend the changes, yet alone have robust and detailed discussions about them.

Yet, our basic human needs don’t change, our communities need tools for coherence and development and even Yahoo’s research shows that we really want relevance and simplicity.

Tara Hunt (@missrogue) tried to get us to focus on those essentials, to mixed results.  Starting with the quote

“Stop being important and start being interesting.” – Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic Monthly

if you can succeed in making your readers feel smarter, more in control, sexier, excited and more interesting themselves, you will win

Search is dead, web pages are dead, but print has a long future.

public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and a contributor to democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. We strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty.

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Dean Neil Henry, Adjunct Professor Alan Mutter (@newsosaur on Twitter) and the faculty and staff of the University of California at Berkeley have arranged a very interesting group of presenters and participants which are meeting at the Google headquarters in Mountain View California starting at 8:30 AM PDT September 30th and continuing on October 1.

I was asked to arrange Cover It Live events of the sessions. It is a full day and a half as you can see from the schedule.

For the benefit of the participants and any observers or commentators, the Cover It Live event for October 1 is below.

Click Here

The replay of the first day, Sept 30 is below.

Click Here

As business models change, those who pursued the old model are often portrayed as stupid or evil.  Creating a new model is very hard work.

Our C3 work is all about exploring, and creating, new models.   Many in our industry seem to be stuck on erecting walls around the old model. As I noted recently,

the emotional connections we maintain to products and companies often blind us to the relevant tasks of creating a product agnostic local ecosystem of information

We need to focus on creating the new ecosystem for local information, and the appropriate economic exchange for using that system.

While warning us of the dead ends of the old models and attempts to preserve them, recent lengthy posts by Bill Wyman ended with:

And, of course, they are too wedded to past practices.

If I were running a chain of papers, here’s what I’d do:

1)    Go hyper local; devote all resources, from reporting to front-page space, to local news. No one cares what the Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch has to say about Iraq.

2)    Redesign the websites to present users with a single coherent stream of news stories and blog entries. Create simple filters to allow them to tailor the site to their preferences.

3)    Tell the union you won’t be touching salaries, but that all work rules are being suspended, including seniority rights. Tell all reporters that they’re expected to post news if word of it reaches them in what used to be thought of as “after hours.”

4)    Get out of the mindset of “nice” coverage. Tell the reporters to find the “talker” stories in town—development battles, corrupt pols, anything with a consumer bent. Monitor web traffic to find out what people are interested in. If a particular issue jumps, flood the zone. Make each paper the center of every local debate, no matter how trivial, and make finding and creating those debates the operation’s prime job.

5)    Create chain-wide coverage of all areas where it can be done. It’s sad, but it means laying off a lot more film critics and dozens of other duplicated positions. For such positions, do this. Hire two people to cover the beat for the chain. Make them into sparring partners, arguing about each new TV show, movie, CD, traveling Broadway show, concert tour etc. Get out of the business of being promotional. Give your readers sharply argued opinions, something fun to read they can’t get anywhere else.

6)    Create local listings second to none. Create them from the users’ point of view. Don’t use abbreviations. Overwhelm users with insider information that only locals know; where to park, where to sit, when to go, etc. Get rid of all the site navigation levels no one cares about. Put the information people want front and center.

7)    Devote as much manpower as possible to creating must-read local news blogs. Tell the bloggers to work the phones and IMs, finding out about every personnel change, every office move, any tidbit. Support and cite local bloggers in the same areas. Yell at staff members if they are consistently being scooped by (unpaid) competitors.

8)    Create and maintain a wiki designed ultimately to function as an encyclopedia for the town, from neighborhoods and politicians to every retail establishment. Let it become the ultimate guide to the area. Like Wikipedia, it will inevitably contain information that is controversial. Cover the controversies with alacrity.

9)    Serve the community. Don’t publish crap. Tell folks stuff they might not want to hear. Grow a pair.

In our C3 work, the first big decision we had to make was separating content creation from product creation.  I still cannot see any way to get to a new local ecosystem of information without making that split.  But that just gets us to a place to stand to do the real work.

We need to create content in the first instance with a new mindset, both those content creators we employ full time, and contracted or freelance community content creators.  All content creators need to have a primary emotional bond with their content and audience, not a product or company.

This content creation needs to take place in a new infrastructure which allows atomization and tagging at the simplest elemental level.  Today we are stuck with locked-down story and advertising publishing systems, and a bewildering array of blogs, tweets and social space entries.

Then, as mentioned by Wyman, we need to consciously create a wiki of local knowledge and wisdom, that can be edited by many trustworthy contributors.  Most wikis today are just too complicated for that type of community effort, and don’t easily link to the atomized content.

So, let’s focus on the essential tasks of new content creation, atomic content, local wikis and the structure of the new local ecosystem of information, not berating the past models, or arguing about walling off the old models.

As Chris O’Brien recently put it:

But on a fundamental level, it’s still the “blogs or mainstream news” construction that bothers me. … On any given week, I produce more words for blogs than the newspaper. So what am I?

Answer: It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I’m constantly trying to see how all those different pieces fit together and complement each other. I see blogs not as competition, but vital parts that help expand the conversation around news and information. I worry less about who is winning the battle of breaking news first, whether it’s mainstream sources, blogs, or Twitter.

Seeing these other pieces as competition leads down the poisonous road where people complain about bloggers stealing content. Or, it takes you down the equally poisonous path where people argue that blogs (or now Twitter) have rendered the mainstream newsroom obsolete.  I don’t want to choose option A or B. I want “All of the Above.” That is the mindset we must choose to fully realize the enormous potential of this digital era of journalism.

And, as Chris ended his well regarded post on August 13 -

Journalism is doing fine.Instead, newsrooms need to ask:

> How do we reinvent local community on the web?

> And how do we reinvent the local marketplace online?

By no means are these puzzles solved. I don’t believe that Craigslist represents the last, best way people in a community will buy and sell things. Yelp, while growing in traffic, continues to have reputation issues with local merchants.

The discussion over paid content and tweaking the advertising model is too limited. Solve those two bigger challenges of community and the local marketplace, and you’ll create a business that will support smart, multi-platform newsrooms. These newsrooms won’t be dominant, as they were in the past. They’ll exist as part of local news ecosystem.

But create community, help people succeed in business, and you’ll find a way back to re-igniting the passion for a local news organization.