Panel Two: Reinventing and Reinvigorating the News Environment
Moderator: Geoffrey Sands, Director of McKinsey & Co.’s Global Media Entertainment and Information Practice

Panelists:

Amanda Bennett, Executive Editor/Enterprise, Bloomberg News. Former Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer
Jim Kennedy, Vice President and Director of Strategic Planning, The Associated Press
Betsy Morgan, CEO, the Huffington Post, and former General Manager of CBSnews.com
John Stack, Vice President, Newsgathering, Fox News Channel, and former NBC News executive
Jim Willse, Editor, the Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey

Pat Mitchell called it a good sign that so many conversations were taking place in the corridors and stairways between sessions. “It means that many of the issues that have been put forward already this morning and in the breakout sessions from which you just returned have been exactly the questions that you came here hoping to discuss,” the Paley Center president said. “Not that anyone has answers at this point, but we know that an exciting, stimulating dialogue has begun.” While the opening panel concentrated on the challenges for journalism schools in a changing media landscape, “This panel will look at those same issues as they are occurring and creating challenges in a news environment,” she said. As the industry grapples with declining circulation and fragmented audiences, “The issues are still the same: trying to stay relevant as a business and as a resource for information. This is not, obviously, just an old media problem. These issues are facing all media companies across all sectors,” said Mitchell. “New media are hardly immune to the tumultuous changes in the marketplace.”

Geoffrey Sands, who led an earlier McKinsey & Co. pro bono study of the news industry for Carnegie Corporation, said the panel collectively represented more than a hundred years of newsroom experience. “If we don’t get these problems licked by lunchtime, maybe they are more profound than we thought,” he quipped. He began by asking the panelists what change in the newsroom environment had had the most profound impact on them.

	Amanda Bennett, Jim Kennedy, Betsy Morgan, John Stack, Jim Willse, Geoffrey Sands

Bennett said, “Obviously, for me personally, it was the sale and breakup of all the newspaper organizations and the recombination, which is why I’ve got the job I have now instead of editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The biggest insight I had from that moment was not what you would expect. It was going overnight from being the editor of a major newspaper in a major metropolitan city to a reader of that same newspaper. The way I approached that newspaper changed 180 degrees.” She amplified:

“What happened to me is I immediately became a consumer of the newspaper in a way that the news organizations that I’d worked for pretty much rejected. I went to consuming a newspaper in terms of, What can I do with this information? That was a way of approaching news that newspapers just rejected terribly as too pragmatic, too consumerist or whatever, yet every morning when I pick up the Philadelphia Inquirer from the day I left it, until this morning, I read the news as, ‘What can I do with this? What can I vote for? What can I buy? Who can I call? Who can I write a letter to? How am I going to use this? The utility factor is absolutely paramount.”

Bennett said this is the approach that guides Bloomberg News. “At Bloomberg, it’s one of the things we do. It makes everyone nuts, but every single day it’s, ‘How are the people who are buying our terminals going to use what you write?’ If they can’t use it, we are not going to write it,” she said.

AP’s Jim Kennedy said it was “not so much the change in the newsroom per se, but the change in the culture.” The industry, he noted, is dealing not only with the movement from print to online, but a generational shift as young people adopt the tools and habits of the digital age. “They are totally different tools of consumption than the audience had when those of us on the panel started in the profession,” said Kennedy. “We’ve got to respond to that. Otherwise, you’re sending your hard efforts out into the ether.” He added, “We have to recognize how people are consuming news in totally different ways and we’ve got to change what we do to adapt to that.” AP used to take the stories it put out on its wires for newspapers, and took the same text and distributed it to radio and television stations, he explained, saying, “That’s not good enough anymore. You’ve got to differentiate those news reports across platform and you’ve got to target the audiences.”

Betsy Morgan said the Huffington Post comes in after stories break elsewhere. “We pick it up once the story is written. We do some original reporting—not a tremendous amount—and we spend a lot of our time linking out to AP stories, Bloomberg stories, Star Ledger stories, even a few Fox News stories,” she said. “That’s where we really go into action. What the Huffington Post has done is build the community around the story. We rely on the notion that news is not a one-way medium of ‘here it is sitting on a television or in a newspaper or magazine,’ but it’s a conversation. News is a loop. A story gets developed. The blogosphere, the community that comes around a topic or story wants to talk about it, wants to help it evolve, wants to debate it, wants to discuss it. This is a big part of the business we are in and the business that we are building.” One good example, she said, is what happened after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. The Huffington Post linked to the major news sites covering that story and the violence that erupted across Pakistan. “We now have well over 4,000 comments on that event,” said Morgan. “That community and those comments and the conversations that are happening between different people, along with what bloggers are saying—making that into a real web community is what we are building.”

At Fox, John Stack said, “the biggest change and challenge is utilizing technology in the correct way. We still have to get down to basics and try to take available information and illustration and get it correct.” He said it was interesting that this summit was taking place on the day after the media got its predictions about how the New Hampshire primary would turn out completely wrong. What the media needs to do is focus on “proper utilization of what’s available and using it to make news deliver better as opposed to making it faster,” he said.

	Jim Willse

Jim Willse said, “The most profound change in my world is that the business model of newspapers that we all grew up with has blown up, it’s gone. It’s that simple. In one way or other, we’re all rassling with that and trying to figure out what that means for the future.” Willse, a former editor of the New York Daily News, said that in preparation for the summit he had gone back and read the Carnegie Corporation report on what publishers, editors and network executives were saying when this dialogue began several years ago. “The question then was what is the proper profit margin for big media companies, 15 or 20 percent?” he said. “It’s like a journey back in history.” Now, Willse suggested, with the implosion of their revenue from advertising and other streams, newspaper leaders must ask, “How do we preserve the values and verities we are all subscribing to here in a diminished newspaper economy?”

Sands, who serves on the board of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service and is a trustee of the Paley Center, said that he was struck by the wide range of answers to his question. In most industries, when leaders are asked to identify profound changes, they pinpoint only one or two things. “It illustrates the complexity of this environment when you get five related but distinct answers and how profound the problems are, ranging from very fundamental things like what is the value that you’re providing to your audience, what’s the business model that supports it and what are the technology changes that are taking place that are changing the nature of what you do every day?” He asked Morgan what impact participatory media and citizen journalists have on what the Huffington Post decides to cover and how it covers events. “Does it make it easier or harder, getting all this feedback from readers?” he asked.

“In a lot of ways it makes it harder,” said Morgan. Faced with 4,000 comments, “you think as a reader, ‘How would I possibly dive into that?’” she said. The Huffington Post’s strengths lie in strong editorship and technology that allows it to “parse” the responses into different “buckets” that make it easier for readers to follow and respond to different threads of the conversation.

Stack said, “Even technology needs an editor. I think, journalistically, we need to at some point be traffic cops and vet the information as well as get it out in the appropriate way.” In the last five years,
he said, some people have misused their ability to comment on the news and, “by being maybe half a step ahead of the technology, have been able to project their views and their agenda on the public.”

Willse welcomed having “a more participatory relationship” with readers. “Models like the Huffington Post remind us it’s not a bad time to get rid of this sort of priestly function that newspapers have taken onto themselves over the centuries where we’ll tell you what you should think and you can maybe write us a letter and we’ll maybe read it and we might even print it, to opening the windows and making it much more of a two-way equation. That’s got to be healthy and in the long run make it a more viable product.” Willse said the Star-Ledger, the nation’s 15th largest daily (circulation of 372,000 on weekdays and 570,000 on Sundays) has borrowed a page from the Huffington Post and the British Guardian newspaper’s web site for reader responses called Comment Is Free. “We call it NJvoices.com. The idea is that it’s a living op-ed page. The readers and a stable of regular bloggers are invited to say whatever they like about the issues of the day,” said Willse. “It’s changed for the better how we think about the paper.” Now in their story conferences about what to put on page one, instead of just asking “What are we going to put on the front page that’s important?” Willse said that the Star-Ledger editors also discuss, “What can we put on the front page that people might want to talk about?” This is “not quite the same thing as citizen journalism,” but it is one way that “digital technology is proving to be our friend.”

At Bloomberg, Bennett said, editors “can see in real time who’s clicking on our stories. The 16-hit story, everybody knows about right away.” She called this “both an incredible blessing and a curse.”