Gannett: The Seven Desks

Earlier today I published a story on WiredNews about Gannett's newsroom reorganization. As often happens in my reporting, I gather far more material than I can possibly use. This time, however, the story deals directly with the same issues covered by crowdsourcing.com. So rather than let all that material – which is often as interesting, and more revealing, than what winds up in print – gather dust, I'll be running it here. Over the next few days I'll be posting extended transcripts with some of my sources inside Gannett as well as several of the internal documents off the Gannett Web site that provide some insights on what CEO Craig Dubow calls "the newsroom of the future." (My apologies to those of you more interested in the stock photo, or video game side of things. We'll return to those subjects soon enough.)

The following is a break down of the seven divisions into which Gannett newsrooms will be reorganized. It's a pretty significant departure from how most newsrooms are currently structured, and, I think, gives a glimpse of how Gannett expects their outlets to work in the future.

The 7 Primary Job Areas

By May, the editorial side of each Gannett newspaper will be organized into the following seven primary job areas, which make up the Information Center:

Digital — selecting the best platform for news delivery;

Public Service — extending First Amendment coverage, in part by involving readers and asking for community input on investigative areas;

Community Conversation — expanding the concept of the editorial page; managing staff commentary, from editorials and blogs to columns; and encouraging community participation online;

Local — expanding local coverage and re-establishing sports, business and feature reporting into hyper-local areas;

Custom Content — connecting with identified target audiences and looking for efficiencies in repurposing content across all platforms;

Data — elevating the practice of managing and acquiring deep local information;

Multimedia — leading all visual presentation across every platform; photographers will be trained for any type of multimedia.

More to come. -- Jeff

Comments

[Shazz]

A sign of things to come.

Also of interest, in the same spirit: http://www.pollingplacephotoproject.org/

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America. [...] In the spirit of public access and broad dissemination, this is an open-source project. [...]

First seen on http://www.designobserver.com/index.html

[Jeff Howe]

Thanks Shazz ... This has come up a number of times in the last few days. It's a brilliant idea and I have high hopes for it.

[kdoctor]

It's astounding how hard it's been for newspaper companies to come to grips with calendar/community/entertainment databases. Undoubtedly, newspapers -- at great cost -- collect more of this event info than anyone else. In fact, when Knight Ridder moved forward with now-dead Zip 2 in the mid-'90s, it arguably had a lead. But that then-ahead-of-the-pack technology froze in time and never got updated. Tribune tried some new things with Metromix and the WashPost's CityGuide is now one of the best. I'm interested in the Star-Tribune's Vita.Mn as a step-forward into the 2.0 world. Biggest development though may be this month. Yahoo, as part of its bigger deal with 7 newspaper companies, will be providing "technology" -- in part, tools to harness that entertainment/community content. Yes, it will be better displayed on individual newspaper websites -- but also through Yahoo's vast desktop and mobile network.

This may the be second coming of interactive, community-generated community/calendar/entertainment sites, intelligently mixed and matched with professional content.

[Jeff Howe]

Ken, it is rather stunning, isn't it? All that time and money on a service that could have been augmented by user contributions as soon as the technology allowed. Reminiscent of the music industry in its insistence on maintaining the status quo against every indication that newer models were cheaper and more efficient. I didn't know about Zip 2.0 or MetroMix, though. Thanks for the backstory. Enjoyed your "Good for Gannett" post on ContentBridges, btw. Thanks for stopping by ... Jeff

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Gannett's oldest newspaper still in circulation is the Star-Gazette located in Elmira, New York. In 2001, the company moved to its current headquarters in Tysons Corner, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

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[Ken]

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