OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Steve Buttry

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Homepage: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/

Mr. Buttry is information content conductor for Gazette Communications. This is a new position, overseeing the creation of a content organization that will be separate from the production and management of packaged products. He has spent 38 years in the news business. He was a reporter, editor and writing coach for the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald, Des Moines (Iowa) Register, Minot (N.D.) Daily News, Kansas City (Mo.) Star and Times and the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa. He spent three years working with the American Press Institute and its Newspaper Next project.

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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

How are you going to make money? By changing your relationship with your community

May 1, 2009
I get the same question again and again as I explain our innovation efforts at Gazette Communications: How are you going to make money doing that?

When I explained our plans to separate content from product, people could see that we were moving to an organization built for the future rather than the past. But they still asked: How do you monetize that? (Yes, even journalists have started using the M-word.)

I answer in my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, published this week on my blog: We need to move beyond advertising.

Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen, the foremost authority on disruptive innovation, says established businesses take two approaches when faced with disruptive technology: They ignore it or they try to cram their existing model into the new opportunity. The newspaper industry did both. When we realized we couldn't ignore the Internet any longer, we tried to cram our newspapers into our websites. More...

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News businesses must think about content, not just products, to ensure their survival

March 25, 2009
I work for a 126-year-old start-up company.

Since our founding in 1883, Gazette Communications has revolved around the newspaper that gave the company its name. As time went on, the company added a television station and various other products, but our focus was always on the products, especially that venerable core print product.

We developed a pretty good staff to provide content for the products, but their work always revolved around the products. Editors would meet daily in a conference room and talk about the stories that would be in the next day’s paper, writing slugs and story lengths on a whiteboard. The story lengths were not based on the amount of relevant content a reporter might develop. They were based on the interests and attention span of a mythical average newspaper reader and on the price of newsprint.

After two newspapers that were older than ours, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, folded within the past month, it’s clearer than ever that a proud past doesn’t ensure a prosperous future. We are feeling the same pressures as all newspaper companies. In fact, beyond the national economic problems and the industry turmoil, our community is reeling from a historic disaster. Our company is cutting its staff from about 600 before the flood to about 500. I had to tell 14 journalists last month that their jobs were eliminated. But whatever turmoil our products face, the demand for content is stronger than ever.

So Gazette Communications is unhitching our content generation from product management.

If you just thought, “Huh?” you’re not alone. Our staff and some of our leaders are still working on understanding this concept. Content and product are so closely entwined in newsroom organizations and in the minds and hearts of journalists that “untangling” would probably be a more accurate verb for the paragraph above than “unhitching.” More...

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