Ug…The blog hasn’t been as active this summer because as I previously noted, I’ve been busy with just a few things! Hope to gear it up again soon.

Newspapers are finally beginning to truly embrace change. They are creating structures and processes that allow them to break news online all day (here is one example of this at my hometown newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; many other papers have taken a similar approach) and encouraging more staffers to develop multimedia skills.

Interestingly, however, I think that newspapers are still caught up in seeing the Web more as a technological innovation rather than a community innovation. In newsrooms, the Internet is seen primarily as a tool that can do neat/pretty things or can provide the news to readers instantly and on demand. Seeing it as a truly social medium that involves building a new relationship with readers is something that seems to be coming along more slowly, and more in lip service than in practice. Comments go unresponded to, if they are allowed at all. Special communities of expertise or interest are untapped. Email databases of possible sources for future stories are unmade.

I can understand why. Our culture is full of metaphors that equate computers with geeks and gadgets, it’s easy to get carried away with the whiz bang coolness of new technology. Heck, even I, a relative Luddite, have an iPhone.

But, as some of my smartest friends who study media audiences are learning through research, it’s the community part that may matter more to a viable future. The technology will keep changing, but fundamental human needs change much less quickly. The most fundamental innovation the Internet has driven is making news more of a conversation.

Obviously, I’m far from the first to say this, and indeed the journalism blogosphere is full of what I might call smug exhortations to newspapers to get with the program on this one. But I think it’s worth emphasizing this point anyway. Newspapers in particular are really missing an opportunity to make the Web work more to their strengths, which at some fundamental level have always been knowing the community and cultivating strong relationships with sources. And research shows that organizations that develop upon existing strengths when trying to adapt to environmental change do better than those that try to build whole new capacities.

Busy dissertating, preparing to move to Memphis, getting ready to start a new job, and planning a wedding, I didn’t notice this article by Howell Raines until a journalist friend of mine sent it to me.

Apparently Raines thinks that Romeneko’s “gossip” site “inadvertently ushered in the era of fact-free journalism.”

Huh?

Does anybody else find it a little bit ironic how sensitive journalists can be to…gasp…airing their NEWS in PUBLIC?

While there can be legitimate reasons to keep some personnel matters under wraps, last time I checked, our core ethic as journalists is one of transparency, which applies to us just as much as it does to the government agencies whose internal memos and emails we can request under FOIA. Like the government agencies we watchdog, I believe it is important that we open ourselves up to public scrutiny because we operate in the public trust. If, as a newsroom leader or employee, you are doing something that would be incredibly painful to you and your organization if it were to be disclosed, my thought is - 99 percent of the time, you probably shouldn’t be doing it, or at the very least, you should be sure you’ve thought through your actions carefully and can defend them. I don’t disagree that Romenesko probably makes newspaper executives jobs harder, but that’s one reason they get paid the big bucks — and I’m also not convinced that Raines or anybody else can really attribute their job loss to being “Romenesko’d” as opposed to, well, bad management.

I think the profession as a whole benefits from a through airing of issues like the Blair debacle. I worked for the Committee of Concerned Journalists at the time that episode occurred, and we frequently had fruitful discussions in training sessions about not only verification, but internal communication and leadership. The climate of fear that was created in part due to Raines’ leadership at the Times was preventing important information from being shared. This is something that folks at many newspapers could relate to, and almost all said that they could certainly improve internal communication — which can be limited in a still-rigidly hierarchical system.

I’ve read Romenesko for years. I guess there is gossip on the site, although I don’t usually see anything particularly salacious. More often, however, there is what I would call “news.” Indeed, most of the site is composed of summaries and links to mainstream media articles, which undergo standard verification procedures. And exposing something like an internal memo that some would prefer to be kept secret may be a question of judgment, but it certainly isn’t “fact-free.” Yes, it’s depressing to read about layoffs and buyouts, but burying our heads in the sand and pretending they aren’t happening, or that knowing about how other paper’s have handled them isn’t helpful, doesn’t seem particularly useful to me.

I augment my media diet by reading my former colleagues at Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Daily Briefing and I’m increasingly adding more journalism blogs to my RSS feed to balance things out. But Romenesko seems to me a useful compendium of what is going on in the industry, and I guess the Raines argument just strikes me as ironic coming from somebody who makes a living exposing wrongdoing wherever else in society it may linger.

The following quote from a recent speech given by Media News Group CEO Dean Singleton (posted by Jon Fine of Business Week here) exemplifies the attitude many leaders are taking toward change, even though most would not express it quite this directly or harshly:

Too many whining editors, reporters and newspaper unions continue to bark at the dark, thinking their barks will make the night go away. They fondly remember the past as if it will suddenly re-appear and the staffing in newsrooms will suddenly begin to grow again.

Well, as a former journalist, I also wish for the past, but it’s not coming back. The printed space allocated to news and newsroom staffing levels will continue to decline, so it’s time to get over it and move to a print model that matches the reality of a changing business.

Folks, it is easy to place the blame on recalcitrant individuals clinging to the past. Doing so serves the (possibly unconscious) needs of news leaders by simultaneously reinforcing their own status as the ones who do “get it” while also conveniently shifting responsibility to others for the lack of success many have had thus far in adapting to the changing environment.

Yes, there are a few people out there “barking at the dark,” here and there, but every profession has its crazies. However, what researchers call “survival anxiety” — a critical ingredient for meaningful change because it breaks down the natural human resistance to change — is explosively high in newsrooms today. People may feel nostalgia for the past and even believe that it was a better way of doing things, but my experience suggests that virtually nobody is still under the illusion that they can continue to do things the way they are always done.

I feel like I see this tired argument — if only “they” would just get it already — all over the journalism trade press. One of my professors who studies organizations says that to an outsider, it certain seems like news organizations have a “macho” culture; while those aren’t the words that would have come to mind for me, I have to say it did give me pause. Maybe he is right. I certainly do hear a lot of complaints about “whining” from upper-level managers.

And it’s not only newsroom leaders — even some online media experts I really respect have a tendency toward the same arrogance (with the exception of Steve Yelvington, who wrote about the same issues here). What is often missing from these diatribes is a)a coherent strategy or vision for exactly what change means and how it will be managed b)any on-the-ground guidance for staffers who are struggling to figure out what Web-first really means in their day-to-day lives. It’s all well and good to say “we need to do more multimedia” and “we need to embrace immediacy,” but what kinds of advice are leaders giving middle managers and staffers about how to execute that? For example, how do you fit in time for reporting, the one skill that is as necessary now as it ever was, when you are producing a much higher volume of content? Online tools can enhance reporting by making research and contacting diverse sources quicker and easier, but any journalism pro worth his or her salt will tell you that there is no substitute for going out of the building and talking to people, face to face. We need to help reporters and photographers find practical ways to balance their workload in ways that produce the best journalism possible, rather than just bemoaning so-called Luddites.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that many of the reporters and photographers I’ve interviewed are, in fact, desperate to develop new skills for the online world. The self-starters and the risk-takers have already seized that bull by the horns on their own, but others with more structured learning styles or who need more coaching along the way are fearful they are being left behind. Instead of haranguing people, try listening to them — and going beyond your usual go-to people you know have already embraced the Web — you’d be surprised how many people have some really interesting ideas for how their jobs could change, if only someone in a leadership role could help them develop a plan for making it happen.

My friend Jonathan Groves, also a PhD student at Mizzou, former long-time reporter, editor, and Web geek, and instructor at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, had an interesting rebuttal/addendum to my previous post, and he even has an MBA.  I think it’s great to have conversations like this that help us to really understand what is going on so that we can make informed decisions about our future. He suggests that we have to be sure not to give the corporate folks a pass — which I couldn’t agree with more.  Here are his comments:

Two thoughts:

*I believe Rick Edmonds was talking about the operating margin of the newspaper division alone, so that I don’t think the 0.6 percent includes the Kaplan stuff at the WaPo.  [Me: That's what I meant, but good to clarify since that wasn't well-stated on my part.]

*Yes, the declines are massive, but those are year-to-year declines, so be careful about reading too much into that. I checked Gannett’s latest quarterly report (through April 2008), and here’s what the results were:

Revenue dropped 8.4 percent from $1.8 billion to $1.6 billion. Its net income dropped from $210.6 million to $191.8 million, an 8.9 percent drop. Yes, those are marked declines. But look at the margins: 11.5 percent in the 2007 quarter compared with 11.4 percent this year. If you look at the balance sheet, their assets actually declined in value, meaning they’re not investing in long-term assets such as plant, property or equipment. In the discussion of the financial results, the company notes: “The Company’s continued aggressive cost control efforts during the quarter mitigated to a significant degree the effects of lower revenue results.”

Yes, but what is the company doing to plan for the future? Where is the investment in new technology and training? How is it motivating its work force to take on the challenge of the future? There’s a hint of it in the press release: “The increase in equity losses in unconsolidated investees was due to weaker results from newspaper partnership earnings, the impact of new digital investments and lower operating results from certain digital partnerships due to the timing of certain promotion and other expenses.”

But why not take some of that added profit and invest it in other projects? What is it doing to be innovative?

I know it’s folly to compare unlike industries, but Apple spent $273 million in research and development during its first quarter of 2008, a 49 percent increase in the R&D budget year over year. That investment came with a cost: Its profit margin was 14.6 percent in 1Q 2007, and the increased R&D budget dropped the margins 3 percentage points to 11 percent for 1Q 2008.

If Gannett had agreed to accept a similar drop (say, a 9 percent profit margin), that would have meant about $48 million it could have invested in technology and training. But did it? No. It was trying to appease shareholders and Wall Street expectations.

At the risk of being depressing, I feel that I have to write about something that has been bugging me for awhile now.  Please correct me if you think I’m wrong as I’m not trying to pretend to be an economist — maybe there is something I’m missing.

We all know that the newspaper industry is in a state of crisis. ‘Nuff said.  But I’m constantly surprised by what seems to me to be a lack of knowledge among journalists and academics about what really going on financially.

I still hear the following over and over from people from all different lines of journalistic work: If only newspaper companies would stop being so greedy and simply accept less exorbitant profit margins, we would be fine!

Folks, that ship has sailed.  You know I hate to say it.  But I think it is true.

It once had some truth to it, especially in the late 90s and even just a few years ago (although it is an essential market reality, whether we like it or not,  that all publicly traded companies have to keep increasing their margins in order to remain attractive to investors — which places a substantial burden on all large companies that have to make a whole lot of money if they are to keep growing).  Newspapers have historically reaped huge profit margins in the 20-or-more percent range. Contrast that with grocery stores and many other enterprises that make only 1 or 2 percent profits, and you’ve got yourself a cash cow.  Even as margins have gone down in the newspaper industry, many people say, they are still pretty impressive, especially when you consider that you are talking about more than just a widget, but rather a vital organ of democracy.  So we should really content ourselves with less and all is well.

What is happening now, though, is a revenue slide that is so precipitous that we can’t keep making that argument, folks.  In other words, even somebody as bad at math as I am can tell that if something keeps going down, and down, and down, eventually you are going to hit bottom — and even worse, the cuts you make to compensate for the downward slide in turn erode the quality of your product, which may accelerate the whole cycle.

According to a Biz Blog entry by Poynter’s Rick Edmonds, The Washington Post newspaper division had a first quarter operating margin of 0.6 percent. That’s basically breaking even (they are lucky to own Kaplan and other properties that help keep them in the black.)  He also observed:

“Among more profitable public companies, operating margins and cash flow margin are not all that they used to be but are still robust. The hitch is that those percentage measures of profitability conceal how quickly actual profits are declining. Gannett, for instance, reports results for its community newspapers, USA Today and a group of British papers as a single publishing division. For the first quarter, operating margin was around 19 percent, little changed from the year before. But publishing revenues were down 8.6 percent, operating income down 16.2 percent and cash flow down 14.5 percent.”

That is, in two words, not good.  Here is another number that freaks me out:  Journal Communications Inc., parent of the Journal Sentinel, reported a 60 percent (yes, that is a six and a zero) drop in net income in the last quarter of 2007.  Although this drop reflected some one-time charges, it is still a staggering figure.

I also hear many people bemoaning, understandably, the papers recently taken bought up by the likes of Sam Zell and Brian Tierney, and indeed, Zell’s recently announced productivity and 50/50 news advertising mix (linked here from Romenesko) is plenty outrageous.   But as Steve Yelvington points out, these guys aren’t just fooling around for giggles — they are  floundering with massive debt.  For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer,  purchased by Tierney, is currently in default on its loan terms, which Yelvington compares to the situation that is roiling the real estate market.  Yes, they are technically still making money (although the margins are declining rapidly), but crushing loan payments are dragging them down anyway.   As he observes, even news organizations that know they have to spend money to invest in the future can’t do that if they don’t have and can’t get any capital to work with.

At a meeting I attended a few months ago of some executive editors and publishers, a publisher drew a bunch of numbers up for all of us to see and explained why he is getting night sweats.  I can’t remember the exact numbers, but suffice it to say, within a few years, they went from black to red.   An editor confessed to walking around the block after financial meetings to defuse some of his fears and emotions before returning to face his staff, to whom he wants to project a more optimistic outlook.

It might be over soon for newspapers, but I don’t think it’s over for journalism.  I am actually feeling pretty bullish lately as to the ultimate job prospects of many of the journalists whose work I respect so much, which I will elaborate on later.  But just saying “the problem is that we won’t accept lower profit margins” is wishful thinking of the kind that can cloud our up with better strategic plans for the future.  And I think that in the long run, democracy is much better served if we all have a grasp on what the picture really looks like so that we know how to confront it.

Sorry for the brief blog hiatus! Er. Well, that’s assuming that anybody actually misses my pontifications, which is probably unlikely. Anyway. The past couple of weeks have been pretty crazy. Last week I headed down to Memphis, where I will be an assistant professor of journalism starting this fall, to find a place to live; ending up finding a great house to rent just a couple of miles from the University of Memphis with a nice fenced yard for my chocolate lab, Sam. I was pretty surprised to see my name is already up on the wall, and I have an office, helping me to realize that wow, this is for real.  Here I am in the new digs:

And then, I got engaged! Pretty exciting. My fiance is also a journalist. He specializes in computer assisted reporting and knows a good bit about GIS mapping and creating searchable online databases.  Here we are in St. Croix this January (cheapest tropical adventure ever as one of my best friends lives there!):

Finally, I moved. We are temporarily living in my hometown of Milwaukee, where he has a summer gig working at the Journal Sentinel, and we will head to Memphis in August. Hopefully I can convince him to do some guest blog posts soon, as he knows a good bit about those Internets.

So, there’s some personal stuff, which feels narcissistic and goes against my Midwestern sensibilities. However, it seems to me that the most successful blogs are those that manage to combine some expertise on a subject with some personal insight, so I’m giving it a whirl.

More on journalism soon.

Research on organizational change shows that its critically important for leaders to reflect on exactly what they reward and what they punish. Employees are closely attuned not only to what you SAY about change, about the future of news and what needs to be done in your newsroom, but also more explicitly what you do and how you do it. Indeed, researchers who study organizations are trained to look closely at leaders’ rewards and punishments as important indicators of what the “real” priorities in an organization are, regardless of what might be formally espoused.

By rewards I don’t necessarily mean raises or promotions or formal awards, although of course those count too. A important reward is also praise and even just attention, and people notice and become demoralized when these are lacking. For example, if someone on your staff puts together a video for your Website, can you respond yes when they stop you in the hallway to ask if you have seen it? They know you’ve read that front page. Do you spend most of YOUR time focused on the print paper, even as you give speeches about the importance of thinking Web first? What kinds of things deserve a newsroom-wide email of praise - the exceptional effort of your team in its election coverage (important, but pretty standard) or the creation of a new interactive component of the Website that lets readers contribute ideas? How do you run your news meetings — when do you talk about what you’ve got for the Website (if at all?) Who gets the floor at those meetings and what gets the most energy and discussion? (The news meeting, I would argue, remains largely perceived as the place where “the most important stuff” gets talked about.) What makes you stop by someone’s desk? Who on your staff haven’t you spoken to personally in awhile? What messages are you sending with your body language? Who do you exchange jokes with?

My research seems to indicate that many newsroom leaders are basically sitting back and waiting for the individuals that work for them to step up and take on the host of new challenges that await them. Knowing that risk-taking is important in times like these, leaders are actually often quite tolerant, as they should be, of mistakes made — the important metric is simply the willingness to jump right in without much prompting. This works out just fine for the self-confident and the self-starters. They will not only adjust but quickly figure out how writing for the Web helps their work in print, too. Those who are willing but require more guidance or structure to adapt to new responsibilities (and many people do) are often viewed as weak, and, while perhaps not overtly punished, essentially ignored or worked around.

In many ways, this makes sense when you think about a typical newsroom’s culture, where learning by DOING is more important than degrees attained, hand-holding is disdained, and rising through the ranks based primarily on experience and action. I still remember my first boss’ response when I went out to cover my first bank robbery (really my first true breaking news story of any kind) and briefly asked if he had any advice on my way out the door. “NO, JUST GO!” he yelled. The key to pleasing him was always to stop asking questions and just jump in and get dirty.

Indeed, leaders seem to be relatively unwilling or at least slow to spell out their expectations in the multimedia environment and, critically, to launch process changes that would make it easier and more clear to everyone what direction to paddle. As I’ve said before, its the weight of the still largely unchanged processes for putting out a newspaper that stifle people’s ability to do more online far more than a recalcitrant attitude. Most leaders say that this is because it is an uncertain time and they aren’t quite sure what their expectations should be. Fair enough. But if you want your newsroom to be more Web first, start thinking more specifically about how you can make that happen rather than just hoping it does.

Also — yes, it’s important to empower those below you rather than issuing specific edicts from on high. That’s just good management, and I applaud it. However, I think there may be a tendency among some news leaders to fall back a little bit too hard on this argument. While I don’t think it’s intentional, it may be somewhat of an excuse that is used to push responsibility for change downward.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and was thrilled this morning to also see it reflected in a post written a couple of days ago in Mindy McAdams blog, Teaching Online Journalism, which I just discovered…and I think she says it more eloquently than I just did. She notes that the same phenomenon in j-schools as well. Check this quote out:

“The dean, director or department chair says a lot about convergence and updating the curriculum, but then sits back and waits for the faculty to somehow magically transform themselves from worried, frightened people (or just plain overworked people with no spare time) into the innovators and early adopters who have already made the change. These are different types of people. The worried ones are not going to change into the other type. However, the worried ones are not the same as those crouching behind the barricades with a barber’s basin on their head.”

Thought I would share a couple of things I’ve read out there on those darn Internets that have puzzled me lately.

First is Poynter’s Rick Edmonds calling for newspapers to substantially raise their prices, noting that US newspapers are much more of a bargain in the United States than in most places abroad, especially in an era in which we all plunk down a substantial chunk of change for gussied-up caffeination at the ‘Buck or similar. Apparently he found an international analyst that agreed with him. This runs counter to what almost everybody I talk to lately is saying, which is that the exact opposite is a much better idea — going free and therefore increasing your penetration and thus, of course, your value to advertisers.

If you ask a room full of college students if they would be more likely to read a paper if it is given to them in a convenient manner for free, the vast majority will raise their hands (although these are, of course, journalism students and obviously there is a response bias, e.g. wanting to look good in front of the teacher.) A fellow doc student, Karen Boyajy, is studying the impact of going free on the business model for her dissertation, and I can’t wait to read the results. Several papers including the Columbia Missourian and the Examiner in DC and other cities are experimenting with a free weekly edition delivered to everyone in town.

I’m no media economist, but I have to say that I’m not sure Edmond’s idea makes a whole lot of sense to me — it just seems like you’d have to raise prices pretty high to make up for your losses in classifieds and elsewhere — and there isn’t much value-added in the print edition of most papers that you can’t get online for free, at least not yet. Not to mention that some of your best customers are people like me who read newspapers avidly, are willing to pay for them — but would actually just PREFER to read them online because it’s easier.

Second, I’m trying to figure out what’s up with the bad news at small newspapers, which many of us were holding out hope would be keepers of the flame if all the metro dailies crashed and burned. After all, with everybody all abuzz about hyperlocal news, it seems obvious that small papers, which are somewhat hyperlocal by definition, would have a leg up. But Jennifer Saba of E&P did a story awhile back on how, surprisingly, small papers declined more than big ones in circulation recently. My friend and fellow doc student Jeremy Littau points out that the numbers don’t distinguish between small dailies and weeklies — many of us have heard that weeklies are thriving, at least relatively speaking. But none of us could quite figure out the explanation for this, unless it’s the bad economy or an erosion of quality at these papers, many of which have probably also undergone some cuts to staff or other resources.

I’m reading a book (when I have time, which is clearly not very often) called The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School.  It was recommended to me by my very smart friend and colleague Jonathan Groves.  I’m not very far along, but thought I would share a bit of what I’ve read so far, and maybe post a few updates as I go along.  In a nutshell, it’s downright creepy how well this book appears to apply to the news organizations — and I suspect there are many things we can learn from it.

Not to be too dire, but Christensen researches failed companies.  He wants to understand why sometimes, extremely well-managed companies who do everything business schools and consultants and self-help books prescribe still manage to go under.  They are responsive to their customers.  They invest in research and development and come up with advanced, highly functional new products that could bring them higher profits. They are extremely well-respected in the business community.  But still, they fail.

Why?  Well, it turns out that good firms fail when what he calls a “disruptive technology” comes along.  Disruptive technologies are a strange breed of innovation.  At least in the short term, they often actually perform WORSE than the products they are replacing.  Loyal, already-established customers may not want them (hello, older newspaper readers).  They often promise lower profit margins, and they first become popular in emerging or insignificant markets.

So these smart companies, listening with respect and astute care to their current customers, can’t build a case for investing in these technologies — until it is too late.  There are huge “first-mover” advantages, but relatively little solid information to go on before making the leap.  This scenario plays out often in the computer industry.  It also happened to Sears, which failed to see the threat of the discount retailers until it was too late.

I haven’t gotten to all of Christensen’s advice on how to deal with disruptive innovation yet.  One thing he recommends is that managers set up a new and autonomous organization that is charged with developing a new business around the technology.  This new business would be unburdened by the profit expectations of the established organization.  Interesting.

Here’s another one that I find even more interesting and relevant to my own work on how newspapers manage change.  “Once they’ve found the right people, too many managers then assume that the organization in which they’ll work will also be capable of succeeding at the task.  And that is dangerous…People are quite flexible, in that they can be trained to succeed at quite different things…But processes and values are not flexible. A process that is effective at managing the design of a minicomputer, for example, would be ineffective at managing the design of a desktop personal computer.  Similarily, values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products.  The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context define its disabilities in another context.”

Although process isn’t the whole story, organizational research also generally reflects Christensen’s point, and anyone who has spent time in the newsroom can see the truth of this.  When an entire newsroom is geared around the process of putting out  the daily paper, it is extremely difficult to do things differently.  It’s not that the people involved in that process aren’t smart or flexible.  Sure, it makes people justifiably nervous to have to learn new skills, but most journalists I’ve talked to are willing to try, and even tend to get excited about it or find out it wasn’t as bad as they thought.  But until the processes change, little true change in the product can occur.

I’m finding myself wondering what a new spirit of competition will mean for local news.

My research shows that it is finally dawning on newspapers that they can rev up that news engine that invariably is the biggest one in town and, with an increased focus on immediacy, compete with local TV news and radio at a game they have owned for years.  Indeed, when I have asked people how their job has changed the most in the last few years, the most common answer is that that newspapers are operating much more quickly and that they have more of a wire service mentality.

Newspaper folks eyes start to glow when they talk about how readers now can come to their Website to get information on how the blizzard is affecting their commute or to get the latest updates on a breaking political scandal rather than relying on television or radio.  At a time in which the blogosphere often depicts most newspaper folks as doing nothing more than weeping in their beer over the lost glory days, this actually injects extra enthusiasm in many folks who  still remember fondly the days when they counted other local papers among their competition.

This has been obvious of course for quite some time on the national news front, where the networks, Websites and cable are all valid sources of election returns and the like,  but I haven’t heard it discussed as much at the local level (I’m probably just missing it).

In terms of managing change, I think that anything that raises buy-in levels for a Web-first philosophy is a good thing; getting the scoop has long been a part of journalism’s value systems, and research shows that it is easy to make changes that are consistent with values. Also, to break news consistently, you have to invest in original reporting, which I think is important.

The potential drawbacks are obvious.  The advent of the 24-7 news cycle has made everyone aware that pressure to be first can inhibit the most critical journalism value of them all, verification; some argue that this will push newspapers into doing  softer or sensational stories like the crime news that now dominates most local television.  It doesn’t have to be that way, though — a lot of it will depend on how newspapers decide to execute their goals of greater immediacy.

What do you think?  What will this competition mean at the local level?