Let's Start Over...

By now everyone knows the state of newspapers. It's beyond doom-and-gloom. It's ugly and nothing will ever be the same again. Time to get over it...

Obviously, I have not posted since fall. My book wasn't going anywhere, my work at PTA kept me incredibly busy and, frankly, I succumbed to the gloom and followed the downward slide of the newspaper industry.

Then one day, I took out a sheet of notebook paper and wrote this sentence: "LET'S START OVER." I wanted to ignore where we were and concentrate on where we are. Instead of focusing on a decline (from which newspapers were never going to rebound), I thought of establishing new benchmarks. Of course the numbers are bad...compared to where we were.

But what about where we are now? We have audience. Media proliferation and generational preferences created audience fragmentation. But that audience is still there to be captured--through print (yes, print), websites, e-newsletters, podcasts and a medium that hasn't been invented yet...a suite of products that, as one unit, delivers an audience of news consumers.

What we're talking about is multiple platform delivery...sounds labor-intensive. But is it? Change the thinking: A story is not just a story; it is many. Let's use my work at PTA as an example. We start with an authoritative, in-depth magazine article. If we owned a newspaper, we could optimize this piece for publication in one or more editions, possibly framing it with expert commentary or local opinion columns. We could optimize differently for web reading, condensing it and adding links to more information or supporting documents. We condense it further for delivery to our e-newsletter audience with links back to the website. We condense it further to tweet out to our followers on Twitter, post on our Facebook fan page or start as a discussion on our upcoming Ning page. Further, we could create a podcast on the soon-to-relaunch PTA Radio that references all of these media.

Yes, it takes some time to optimize for the various formats, but it's editing time not writing or reporting time. Content editing takes far less time than content creation.

With that, let's start over, shall we?