Today, it’s the Washington Post reporting that Gannett is undergoing some radical restructuring.
Gannett Co., the nation’s largest newspaper chain, is radically changing the way its papers gather and present news by incorporating elements of reader-created “citizen journalism,” mining online community discussions for stories and creating Internet databases of calendar listings and other non-news utilities.
I think it would take another newspaper to label Gannett’s recent announcements as ‘radical,’ but it’s interesting to see the publishing giant accepting the idea that theirs is not the only way to gather/present news. So, yay and rah for Gannett.
I still wonder what would have happened if Gannett and others (Knight Ridder / McClatchy, Tribune, etc.) would have focused their energy on news rather than on classified advertising from the start of their online efforts. These papers are home to [arguably] the deepest pool of editorial talent anywhere, and yet their online publishing techniques have always avoided innovation.
I’d love to see this be a turning point.
Article at washingtonpost.com.
2 Responses to “Gannett gets radical”
[...] Earlier this month Gannett, Tribune, and McClatchy (which recently absorbed Knight Ridder properties) made news for their investment into topix.net, an online news aggregator. Gannett also announced a community publishing initiative to leverage crowd sourcing. [...]
[...] Since nobody reads them any way, I won’t jump into another post about Gannett’s digital publishing efforts. I will say this, though, content isn’t shit if your distribution channel is broken. The entire newspaper industry needs to spike its collective web strategy before using the “content is king” phrase ever again. As an alternative, maybe it could test-drive the phrase “accessibility is king” for a while. Maybe even “craigslist is king.” Newspapers could learn a lot from a widely accessible site that develops none of it’s own content. [...]