Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe celebrates one-year anniversary

Hard to believe, but it’s been one year since The Register Citizen launched a “Newsroom Cafe” and invited its audience to be involved at every step in the process of local journalism.

Boiling it down, we’ve learned that:

Managing Editor Emily M. Olson leads a workshop for local organizations and church groups on how to get information published by The Register Citizen.

- Transparency builds trust.

- Openness improves your journalism, leading to new and more diverse sources and improving accuracy and context.

- Partnerships make you stronger.

As Andy Carvin said recently, it’s not about “leveraging your audience.” It’s about listening and knowing how the audience is telling its own story, and in some ways acting as a facilitator as the community organizes itself around common interests or goals.

If you feel that you must own and control every piece of content and platform for delivery, you will wither and die in isolation from the networked world.

In terms of tactical lessons learned over the past year, we’ve found that:

- There will never be a good time to commit time to audience engagement, becoming more transparent, trying new things and training staff, especially in a newsroom as small as ours. You have to “just do it.”

- Effective community engagement won’t happen on your terms, it will happen on the audience’s terms. Their lives don’t revolve around your internal process or desire to get a story done. But the power of the crowd can be amazing when you’ve tapped into something that citizens care deeply about and are either already organizing around or have been waiting for a platform to organize around. Readers (for the most part) aren’t going to tune in to the live stream of your daily story meeting because they care about what you talk about every day. They’re going to tune in because they know you’ll be discussing a particular issue that affects their neighborhood, workplace or family. Or the ideal – they’ll tune in because they feel welcomed to bring up that issue to you because you HAVEN’T been discussing it and they think you should.

- The logistics of community engagement deserve a dedicated staff position (or positions), but it’s a principle that must be incorporated into everything we do and taken up by everyone in the newsroom.

- “Just do it” should be the mantra given the urgent need to transform our business model and how quickly things around us change. But we need to spend more time along the way communicating internally and making sure that every employee understands and buys in to the underlying principles of openness and engagement. You can be undermined pretty quickly by staff who are just going through the motions.

Significant articles that have been written about the Newsroom Cafe experiment and/or its role in the JRC turnaround over the past year:

GigaOm, “For Newspapers, the Future is Now and Digital Must Be First,” December 2, 2010

New York Times, “Walk in, Grab a Muffin, and Watch a Newspaper Reinvent Itself,” December 15, 2010

Poynter, “Register Citizen Takes Analog Approach to Reader Engagement: Open Doors,” December 16, 2010

Suburban Newspapers of America, “Opening Up Your Newsroom,” March 7, 2011

Editor & Publisher, “10 Newspapers That Do It Right,” March 15, 2011

Nieman Lab, “Journal Register’s Open Advisory Meeting: Bell, Jarvis and Rosen Put Those New Media Maxims to the Test,” March 25, 2011

Poynter, “At Washington Post and Register Citizen, ‘report-an-error’ forms make it easier to identify, respond to mistakes,” April 4, 2011

NewspaperTurnaround.Com blog, “Why Our Small Town Daily is Adding a Full-Time Curator,” April 20, 2011

JoyMayer.Com, “Inside the Engagement Experiments at The Register Citizen,” May 4, 2011

Columbia Journalism Review, “John Paton’s Big Bet,” July/August 2011

EditorsWeblog.Org, “JRC’s Jim Brady: Uniting Digital First With a Face-to-Face Approach,” September 5, 2011

Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe blog, “What the Newsroom Cafe Has Taught Us About Improving Local Journalism,” September 13, 2011

The Associated Press, Open Connecticut Newsroom Wins APME Innovation Award,” September 15, 2011

American Journalism Review, “Wooing Them With Coffee,” October/November 2011

Connecticut Newsroom blog, “Corrections, Fact Checking and Accountability: Our New Approach,” October 26, 2011

Annenberg Innovation Lab paper by Melanie Sill, “The Case for Open Journalism Now,” December 7, 2011

John Paton’s “Digital First” blog, “New Media’s New Role as Both Medium and Messenger in a World of Partnerships,” December 13, 2011

After 32 years in print, a newsroom veteran jumps to a digital-only job

As newspapers transition to “Digital First,” with the new skills and radically different job descriptions that can entail, what happens to a person whose entire career has been focused on the print edition?

No doubt, some will not make the transition. Catch up with the past year of layoffs, buyouts and early retirements across the industry for evidence of that.

But for other newsroom veterans, it represents an exciting (and/or nerve-wracking) new chapter in their careers. Their transition is significant for our company because we can’t afford to lose the knowledge and experience these journalists and editors have.

Roseann Iacomacci

Yesterday, the New Haven Register announced a significant newsroom reorganization that, among other things, established a five-person Breaking News team focused 100 percent on speeding news and information to our websites and via social media, blogging and SMS alerts.

The effort will be led by Cara Baruzzi, whose previous role as business editor revolved around preparation of a daily print section. Three other members of the team will be moving over from the copy desk that prepares the Register’s print edition.

Roseann Iacomacci is making the transition to a digital-only job after 32 years in the business.

She started her career at the Bridgeport Post and worked there for more than two decades before joining the New Haven Register in 2002. She started writing wedding and engagement notices and has spent most of her career selecting and editing wire copy from around the country and world to sandwich into print edition pages, writing editorials and plowing through a blizzard of local reporter copy filed for a late-night print edition deadline.

On Nov. 18, Rose left her last late shift on the copy desk at 12:30 a.m.

On Nov. 21, she arrived at 6 a.m. for her new shift – more aligned with the reading habits of the Register’s digital audience.

“My first thought about the shift to ‘Digital First’ was that it was inevitable, but, frankly, perhaps a bit premature. I also thought it was one of those mysteries of business that only accountants and tax lawyers understand, because the print product is still making the bulk of our profits, if what I hear is true,” Iacomacci said.

The New Haven Register’s parent company has been a pioneer in accelerating rapidly to a focus on digital on both the news and advertising sides of the business as print advertising revenue has plummeted across the industry and print circulation has declined.

“I decided to apply for one of the digital jobs because it’s the direction of the future and I want to stay employed,” she said. “Over the years, I’ve had to adapt to many changes: hot lead to cold type, galley proofs to full page setups, paper layouts to computerized pagination and more.”

As she learns dozens of unfamiliar technologies and processes – from embedding a live chat on a web page to maximizing the effectiveness of her Twitter posts, Rose worries that she’s spending more time on the medium, the technology, than the content.

New Haven Register City Editor Helen Bennett Harvey worries what the content would be like if Rose and employees like her weren’t making the transition to digital.

“To me, Rose has always embodied the part of journalism that demands that we get things right,” she said. “She has been relentless in making sure we get our facts straight – as well as making sure we say it in a way that is clear to our readers.”

“By nature, I don’t like change. I’m always a little nervous about it, and sometimes I worry that the actual skills of writing and editing are taking a back seat to the technology,” Rose said. “I guess the exciting part is that we’re sort of pioneers of paperless newspapers. The routines and practices we work out now, and the mistakes we make, might inform the next generation of journalists.”

Bennett Harvey is more confident that we’re establishing the right ground rules with Rose on board.

“Rose, for instance, is the one we can turn to to make sure a headline – while SEO friendly – does not make us sound like grammar morons,” she said. “This talent also plays well into our goal of improving our journalism as we climb toward the digital first goal: There is no good journalism without good writing.”

“Rose has come a long way in terms of her skills and the evolution from the legacy print operation to our digital world,” Bennett Harvey said. “We all need to keep honing our digital skills, and to me, Rose has embraced this goal.”

UPDATE: Of course, in reading this blog post, Rose pointed out an antecedent problem. I inserted a quote from Helen Bennett Harvey before the “By nature, I don’t like change …” quote, which referred only to “she said,” making it seem as though Bennett Harvey said it, when it was actually Rose’s quote. More evidence of why we need her!

Investigative and in-depth reporting bolstered by ‘Digital First’

“What about the journalism?”

That’s the question media analyst Ken Doctor asked a few months ago about both the philosophy of a “digital first” approach to running newspapers and the newly formed company “Digital First” Media that now oversees both Journal Register Company (including the New Haven Register, Middletown Press and Register Citizen, among other publications, in Connecticut) and Media News Group (ranging from the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News to the Berkshire Eagle and Lowell Sun in Massachusetts).

Michelle Tuccitto Sullo

CEO John Paton has a plan that many see as the best hope for rescuing the newspaper industry (in case you missed it, see the recent New York Times story here, and a more extensive Times interview with Paton here).

Will Paton’s formula of cutting print edition-related costs and emphasizing Flip cameras, mobile phones and Twitter improve local journalism or leave a multi-platformed but shallow and empty reproduction in its place?

At the end of the day, Doctor asked, “Are the readers, the citizens of its communities, better served?”

Without question, Journal Register Company news organizations are serving their communities better in breaking news situations thanks to the philosophy of “Digital First.” Hurricane Irene was a great example. When it comes to speed and use of platforms beyond print – from SMS alerts, to social media, blogging, video – we are light years ahead of where we used to be, and our audience has benefited.

But what about depth, context, investigative reporting?

It has taken longer to bear fruit, but as Digital First shifts emphasis away from the print production process, it is freeing up resources to invest in better journalism. And “slow news” – journalism that delves deeply into a story, that invests staff time in investigative work – has a prominent place alongside the breakneck pace of breaking news alerts.

This morning, we announced a newsroom reorganization in Connecticut that will establish a full-time investigations editor position at the New Haven Register for the first time in more than 20 years. A second full-time position will be devoted to the “explainer” format of in-depth reporting on local and state issues and “fact checking” statements made by politicians, public officials, activists and business leaders.

Mary O'Leary

Michelle Tuccitto Sullo, who joined the Register in 1992 and has covered courts and served as Naugatuck Valley bureau chief, will be charged not only with pursuing investigative stories on her own, but in creating a culture of investigative reporting in the newsrooms of the New Haven Register and its sister JRC papers in Connecticut. She’ll team up with staff reporters to pursue stories that the daily grind of a beat don’t allow them to pursue. Michelle draws upon strong knowledge of court and Freedom of Information Act process and award-winning investigative experience in writing about cold case murder and missing persons cases.

New Haven Register Topics Editor Mary O’Leary, who has 31 years of experience covering state government and a variety of other beats at the paper, will be freed from chasing the press conference of the day to focus on in-depth reporting. She will split her time between “explainers” and “fact checking” – both aimed at cutting through the “he said, she said” blizzard of political spin and process to help our readers get to the truth.

We are creating these positions and replacing Michelle and Mary in their old beats, for a big net increase in our “feet on the street” reporting. And we’re doing that by consolidating positions that were focused either entirely or primarily on the process of putting out the print edition of the newspaper.

Big news for our company and the newspaper industry

When John Paton took over as CEO of Journal Register Companyin early 2010 and laid out a vision for our struggling, old-school newspaper company that called for a rapid “Digital First, Print Last” transformation, one got the sense that it was one of the first tremors in a possible upheaval and revolution for the entire newspaper industry.

John Paton

Well, if Paton’s changes at JRC (owner of the New Haven Register, Middletown Press, Register Citizen, Connecticut Magazine and a number of weekly publications in Connecticut) were tremors, this morning was the earthquake.

This morning’s announcement of the formation of Digital First Media and Paton’s appointment as CEO of both Media News Group and Journal Register Company means that Paton’s vision and strategy will be spread to a huge footprint of the U.S. newspaper industry.

For those who care about quality journalism and the communities that these newspapers and websites serve, it’s wonderful news. Not just because Paton is pursuing a new business model for newspapers that show a path toward survival and sustainability, but because he’s passionate about journalism itself.

Hurricane coverage in the new news ecology

“Just as CNN created the 24-hours news cycle for television, Twitter has accelerated that news cycle to the point where news breaks every minute of every hour, and a tweet is almost as good as a page-one scoop,” Mathew Ingram wrote earlier this week in “The Twitter Effect: We Are All Members of the Media Now,” a post for GigaOm.Com. “Not only that, but anyone can do it.”

Twitter and other social media, blogging, widespread access to mobile smart phone technology and other factors have created what our company has been fond of calling the “new news ecology.”

Assistant Sports Editor Kevin Roberts and Community Engagement Editor Kaitlyn Yeager work in The Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe Saturday.

What our news coverage looks like in this new world is a work in progress. But thanks to an historic hurricane threat, the past few days have provided a glimpse into the kind of Digital First operation we are becoming.

For examples:

* We’re mobile first. Neighborhood evacuations, parking bans, power outages, warnings from the governor first go out to our readers via SMS text message alerts. Hurricane Irene helped triple The Register Citizen’s base of SMS breaking news subscribers as we advertised the service as vital this weekend for those who may lose electricity and not have access to TV, radio or the Internet on a desktop computer or laptop.

* We use new tools. The reporter’s notebook and pay phone has been replaced with smart phones, Flip cameras and Netbook computers with wireless access from anywhere with a cell phone tower signal. Our reporters are live tweeting and live blogging events in the field, as they happen, and filing photos and video in real time. Instead of just interviewing a fascinating subject at an opportune time and recounting it in print, they invite the audience in via live-streamed video and live chats. Or invite them to watch the hurricane itself as it approaches.

* We use the power of the cloud. Our hurricane coverage included use of Google Docs to compile lists of flood-prone areas, emergency shelters and evacuation routes from multiple reporters and editors from multiple offices around the state. We used Google Maps to visualize those locations for readers, in a format that could be embedded on our site or anywhere on the web. And we used Google Docs for numerous other functions of our news operation, from sharing and updating statewide story budgets to maintaining emergency contact lists.

* We use the power of our audience. As stores ran out of batteries and bottled water and long lines of cars formed at local gas stations, we crowdsourced the remaining availability of supplies in our coverage area. Readers submitted photos of storm preparation and damage. And we partnered with “new news ecology entrepreneurs” such as See Click Fix to help readers report and learn about storm-related problems.

* We aggregate and curate. The Register Citizen tweeted more than 100 times over the course of 12 hours on Saturday as Connecticut prepared for Hurricane Irene. Its Twitter feed included storm-related news, pictures, observations and links from its own staff, but it also was a diverse mix of retweeting of reports from local residents, answers to questions posed by readers, and retweets of state and national media reports, as well as information being tweeted directly from public officials and local businesspeople. Similarly, our websites included far more than just our original reporting. They included a robust mix of links to and embeds of reporting, graphics and videos from other news organizations, including blogs. And we use tools such as Storify to compile and present news and information from the Twitter accounts of our readers.

* We invite the audience in. In Torrington, our daily newspaper operates out of an open-to-the-public newsroom, The Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe. All day Saturday, residents were there utilizing the newsroom cafe’s free public wifi to go online and check on relatives in the path of the hurricane further south of us, to watch the Weather Channel on our big-screen TVs, and to see if they can find out the latest from reporters and editors who are following the storm up-to-the-minute. For our staff, this kind of interaction offers an endless supply of news tips about how the community is preparing for and reacting to the storm, and helps us zero in on the biggest issues they want to see addressed.

Curating an earthquake

You couldn’t draw up a better example of a breaking news story that called for audience engagement to be at the center of news reporting.

Gateway students text friends and family after being evacuated from the building because of earthquake tremors Tuesday. Melanie Stengel/New Haven Register

That’s in part because Tuesday’s earthquake – centered in Virginia but felt as far away as New Hampshire and Vermont – was experienced by close to 100 percent of our audience in Connecticut.

So after the desks stopped shaking at the New Haven Register, Middletown Press, The Register Citizen in Torrington and Litchfield County Times in New Milford, editors and reporters turned first to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, to gauge the extent of how the quake was felt locally and across the region, how it was disrupting workplaces, public safety operations and airline and rail travel, and the extent of damage, if any.

Editors’ first step was to send out SMS text message alerts to readers’ mobile phones, confirming that what they just felt was, indeed, an earthquake – 5.8 on the Richter scale. A breaking news email alert followed.

Simultaneously, Twitter was used to report the news, both with original information and a retweeting of reports from throughout the coverage area of readers’ reactions the quakes and institutions’ reports of evacuating buildings or halting events. Readers started chiming in via Facebook and story comments on our websites, and the most interesting and relevant information provided by the audience was incorporated into our main story.

Editors set up a real-time feed of Twitter reactions with the hashtag “#earthquake.” It was an interesting thing to watch, as more than 40,000 Tweets were sent out about the earthquake within a minute of the first tremor. Then they used the curation tool Storify to collect local Twitter reactions and present them in story format. An editor at a sister publication in Pennsylvania even created an “earthquake humor” Storify of the best jokes to hit Twitter about the situation.

Flip camera-wielding beat reporters on assignment in downtown New Haven and reporters and photographers covering the New Haven Open pro women’s tennis tournament were submitting video within minutes of the quake. Sports writer Dan Nowak’s Flip camera video of the evacuation of the tennis stadium at Yale was picked up and used on the national NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams Tuesday evening.

Early in the process, our sites linked to an “explainer” on why earthquakes happen in New England and how they’re different from West Coast quakes.

And of course, reporters made all of the old-style beat calls to local fire departments, city hall, the public utilities and other “official sources.”

But for Journal Register Company newsrooms in Connecticut on Tuesday, crowdsourcing and a digital first toolbox of equipment, technology and mindset spread news of the earthquake as fast and as effectively as any breaking news story, ever, in the history of our newspapers.

That speed paid immediate dividends in audience growth. Because the weekly Litchfield County Times posted within seconds of confirmation of the earthquake, monthly unique visitors went from an average of about 100 an hour to nearly 1,000 after the news broke.  A high percentage of that traffic came from Yahoo and Google searches. Traffic on the daily sites tripled for the same reason, and the constant addition to and enrichment of earthquake content kept readers on the site throughout the afternoon.

And the testament to how far we’ve come in embracing a “digital first” mindset is that this happened almost completely on its own … It was second nature for New Haven Register Managing Editor Mark Brackenbury, City Editor Helen Bennett Harvey and reporters and editors throughout the newsroom in New Haven, Torrington, New Milford, Middletown, both in news and sports. I certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. And no corporate deep thinker had to pick up the phone and suggest it. Our reporters and editors know how to use these tools now and when to use them. They are eager to get the audience involved. It’s part of the culture now. And Tuesday’s earthquake experience gives us the confidence to further embrace it as the new normal. It’s an exciting proposition.

Digital First means Journalism First

After three and a half years in a publisher role with Journal Register Company, I returned to the newsroom full-time yesterday, and I’m excited about the good we can do with a large network of journalists and potential journalism partners in Connecticut.
My agenda as the company’s “group editor” for Connecticut is a rapid acceleration of our transition to truly “Digital First, Print Last” newsrooms in Connecticut. It will be the most significant change we have faced in our careers. But to me, it’s a return to why we got into this business in the first place. To pursue good journalism and make the world a better place.
With few exceptions, we’ve embraced the concept of “Digital First” as a strategy for our company and the industry.
But the “Print Last” part is a more difficult transition to make. It means the work day is radically different for some of us. It means different schedules in some cases. It requires a much different cost structure. And it means that jobs with a 100% or near-100% focus on print might no longer exist. It means new types of jobs and roles must emerge.
Unless we become “Print Last” in mindset and structure, we’ll never really be “Digital First.”
I’ve been fond of saying that “Digital First” really means “Reader First,” “Community First” and “Journalism First.”
That’s why we’ve pursued so many “community engagement” initiatives in Torrington, including opening a newsroom cafe, live-streaming story meetings and inviting the public to attend, launching the Fact Check box, etc.
The Web has put the reader in the driver’s seat. Their own ability to search and find news according to their interests, including via referrals from their friends and co-workers via social media, and slicing across millions of news sources, has replaced sole reliance on “the local paper” and “the nightly news.”
And the Web and mobile devices have enabled readers to be sources of news themselves.
We can’t and won’t be relevant or survive without partnering with our audience at every step of the process of local journalism.
“Digital First” means telling readers what we know, when we know it, instead of when our preferred platform (i.e., print) is scheduled to be delivered.
“Digital First” means linking to other sources of information (even traditional competitors) within articles, to benefit the reader.
“Digital First” means enriching traditional text articles with multimedia including video, audio, source documents, timelines, graphs and databases.
“Digital First” sometimes means that the best way to report the news is not with a traditional article format at all.
“Digital First” means that we are transparent and open about how we go about reporting the news and dealing with sources, errors and corrections.
“Digital First” mean that we all have a lot of learning and training to do on the use of tools that will better help us serve readers and engage with them.
“Digital First” means that we don’t waste an ounce of inefficiency clinging to silos that are built around the title of one brand platform, whether that’s the Shoreline Times, the New Haven Register or Connecticut Magazine. It means that we all work together to cover the hell out of the communities that we serve, and worry later (or let someone else worry) about under which mastheads or niche content sites that work is delivered.
How many examples can you cite where our three daily newspapers and numerous weeklies in this state, along with Connecticut Magazine, pooled their resources to do some kick-ass journalism that made the world a better place and gave readers confidence that we are fulfilling our role as watchdogs on their behalf?
We’ve got a state with many problems. We’ve got an audience craving answers that can only be found through in-depth and hard-hitting journalism. And it’s an exciting time because we are becoming more free than ever to focus on that core mission of journalism, and have so many new tools and partnerships available to use in serving that mission.