(Mary Nesbitt)

One of the small news companies we've been watching is the Pocono Mountains Media Group, whose story demonstrates, once again, that good things often come in small packages.

This little gem has maintained circulation of the Pocono Record, has almost doubled visitors to its Web site, offers text messaging, electronic news alerts and email services and publishes other news products -- a weekly paper (Eastern Poconos Community News), Sage (a monthly for 50+) and soon a new entertainment tab for younger interests.

Lest you think that the Poconos in northeast Pennsylvania is an area that time forgot, it's a burgeoning region that is attracting tens of thousands of new residents from the greater New York area. This kind of scenario is playing out, of course, in many other places across the country and presents both challenges and opportunities.

Bill Watson, editor of the group, says print circulation has held fairly steady at 20,000 daily, 25,000 Sunday, and online unique daily visitors have grown to more than 13,000 (compared with 7,800 at this time last year with more than 22,000 on major news days.)

Members of the RI listserv (if you work for a newspaper or related trade organization, you can join by going here) know that Watson is generous in sharing his experiences, trials and tribulations, so I asked him for an update on developments in the beautiful Poconos.

Q. Your market is a mix of long-time residents and, increasingly, commuters moving out from the greater New York area. How do you engage the latter?

A. The conflict between new residents and born-here natives is one of the ongoing themes of our coverage. The best information we have is that people need to be here three to six years before they are interested in local affairs and, therefore, in a locally oriented newspaper. Since many are extreme commuters, and commuters lose interest in community involvement the longer their commute, we have many thousands of people who are disengaged from the community where they live and the newspaper that serves them.

There is some good reason to believe we can speed up the process of engagement with online news with commuters in mind; a great many seem to monitor our website now from their offices in New York and New Jersey during the working day. We will have an online commuter section starting in September.

Q. We encourage news organizations to think about quite different content and audience strategies for print and online. How does that play out with the Record?

A. Our strategy for print is informed by the need to serve a reader base that is more long-time-resident than the population of the entire growing county. It is known to be biased against graphic depiction of violence and to have a higher interest than the general population in local civic affairs and community affairs. Additionally, we often assume the position that if it is major news, by the time it hits print most people will already know the bare facts. Therefore we go more for context, analysis, meaning, etc., both locally and in selection of national material.

Our strategy for online is informed by the duality of online: Fast, basic coverage of breaking news and careful building of database material. We have a lot of folks who want to know about local news of significance as soon as it happens. And we have a real opportunity to be the Web site everyone references when you want to know anything about the Poconos, whether you are visiting here, already a resident with a need for specialized information, or thinking of buying here.



Additionally, we presume we have a much smaller window of opportunity to interest an online reader than a print reader, so we're revisiting the need to make the first information the user sees pretty much a "pitch" for the whole story.

Finally, we do not have multiple headlines and photos and breakouts and pop quotes helping us explain a story online, so we have to give more attention to that same pitch, for yet another reason. Our section headers are great examples: It's "Out and About" on one of our Sunday section fronts, with stories and headlines and photos making it clear this page is all about the Poconos Outdoors. The navigation button for that same content on line is the prosaic "Outdoors." Clever often equals cryptic online.

Q. I recall you talking, via the listserv, a while back, about the need for news organizations to get out of the "we decide what is news" paradigm. What have you been doing to tackle that issue?

A. We -- the newsroom in general, some folks more than others -- monitor our story forums to see what things resonate with readers, what they have to say, what they thought we missed, etc. What they want to talk about is news, and when someone asks "are you going to cover such and such," we pay attention and usually end up covering it, if the meteor doesn't hit that day. Additionally, some of us monitor "clicks" on the Web site to continually get a better idea what is being read and what's not. Finally, we are occasionally still just asking people in the community how they spend their time, then thinking about what we might do as a community-oriented information business to be of use to them in their activities.

Q. You've also said: "I get the uneasy feeling we're doing a great many things right, they just aren't the right things." How have you tried to judge whether you're doing more of the right things?

A. Outcomes, for one thing.

We went wild this spring with coverage of our school board primaries, which have a way in Pennsylvania of being the real election. (You can run in both Republican and Democratic primaries. If you win in both, as is often the case, you win. No opponent in November.) We managed to devote four print section fronts across four weeks to each of the four school board primaries here, with detailed information about where each candidate stood, for a total of more than 500 column inches of coverage. Online, that expanded to the equivalent of more than 1,600 column inches of coverage, giving the precise position of every one of the 40 or so candidates on each of 10 important issues. We had a 15 percent voter turnout, despite the information and despite making it clear to people that this election, not the one in November, would be the key.

So obviously overwhelming people with information doesn't work. For the fall general elections, we will provide an online, interactive quiz; answer 20 questions about your beliefs, click a button, and we'll tell you the candidate that most agrees with you and give you a link to find out more if you want. Fast, clean, there when the reader wants it, you don’t have to wade through a lot of reading. We’ll see how it goes over. (We'll reference the online quiz in print, but there's no way we have the resources to handle mailed-in questionnaires. We'll still have to do basic stories for print, and they'll be what you link to online if you decide you want to find out more about a candidate.)

But in a larger sense: If we are spending a lot of time and energy with basic bread-and-butter government coverage, but getting lower readership for it than other stories, maybe that's a sign we’re not covering it effectively.

And in another arena: "Right" traditionally may not be the same as "right" for the world we now live in. How did newspapers go from being must-reads in the 1800s to turgid and opaque catbox liners by 2005? The blindingly obvious answer that there’s more venues for communication now may obscure a less obvious difference: Some of those other venues are much better at putting a human face on the information, especially in how it is presented. Newspapers of the 1800s featured reporting that was obviously biased; everybody knew that, and got variously outraged or pumped up by it, and if you didn't like the Republican paper’s radicalism in 1859, there was a Whig paper to read to find out the other side's take. Heck, there were even writers who were Know-Nothings. All the fire and spirit was driven out of newspapers when economics dictated one paper, one town for much of the country and publishers claimed, in defense, to be fair and objective to all. Very often this has meant being obscure and boring, lest a paper be accused of taking sides in its coverage. Look at the blog explosion on the internet; it's like 1859 all over again. We might not need to get foaming-at-the-mouth partisan, but giving the reader some indication that a living human being with feelings and emotions and opinions and the ability to know right from wrong, and favor right, is telling the stories, can't hurt. Or we can just go on being turgid and opaque and think people owe it to us to read our stories. Yeah, that's working.

Q. I know that you advocate trying a lot of things, seeing what works, re-tooling and moving on. How is that working online?

A. So far most of our new online stuff is still in the "let's see how it does" stage. We have locally themed, standing, online sections for outdoors, golf, consumers, fishing, home and garden, local schools and younger-stuff entertainment. Some do better than others; even the less-visited, though, are getting more traffic than some of our traditional fare. So if fishing just doesn't have an audience, we reduce it to occasional stories and features and put the resources into something else. I think generally most new business ventures don't succeed; since we've been really picking up windfall fruit with our efforts, the ratio for success is going to be higher. Ask again in a year, after we try some marginal stuff, and there might be another answer.

Q. You've also used measurement of different sorts to reinforce change. You've measured content to ensure you're getting what you want to get in the way you want it -- or rather, what and how readers want it. There were rewards tied to meeting readership goals. How has that worked?

A. We began reinforcing change in the appropriate direction four years ago, with a modest incentives program aimed initially at getting more advance promotions into the print product. As we mastered a particular goal, we’d add new ones.

Just about the time we'd incorporated a lot of readership-oriented things into standard operating procedures, we were presented with a need to expand our online readership. No big deal. Everyone was used to the idea of incentives as a way to focus on particular things.

The nice part now is that rather than having separate goals for the copy desk, the reporters, etc., it's all one goal: More unique users each month on the Web site. We track it through Omniture. Our goal, roughly, is 43 percent more traffic than same month, last year. So far we've made it with some to spare, every month.

Q. Editors often ask us about innovative beats or traditional beats approached in innovative ways -- to get away from institutional stories, to find more original stories, or to find more stories of relevance to people's lives. Have you tackled that?

A. Change the wording; the innovation is in what content you choose to find, process and present, and how you make that content appropriately presented for the intended audience. There's not really some new beat you can think up that is suddenly going to attract readers; it's in suddenly realizing what content they want, either because you ask them or you figure it out some other way.

Other innovations here include milking the text messaging and email alerts; we have free subscriber bases to various things like education news, traffic news, breaking news, etc.; when we get a juicy bit we send a text message and an email alert to those folks, to let them know new content is up. It has a visible effect on site traffic.

Additionally, we're going to create more elaborate newsletters around content themes that will help people make better use of their limited leisure time: We'll hook them up Thursday and Friday with stories and other content online that help them figure out how to spend the weekend. Rather than having to remember to visit the Web site and try to find stuff, we send one email to you that has all the potentially relevant material one click away. That's a "job to be done" for folks, figuring out how to spend a weekend. It's a big deal for commuter families and useful for everyone, so it should be popular. It's something every newspaper ought to be able to do, too.

Q. I'm interested in how you lead a news operation when there are so many big, potentially distracting things happening in the background -- the erosion of the traditional newspaper business model; the whole what-is-journalism-anymore discussion; and of course the sale of your parent, Dow Jones. In other words, how do you keep people motivated and moving ahead when the future is murky, when some feel it is an exciting time and others are frightened or angry.

A. We're not worried about the demise of journalism, because we can see the numbers holding steady on print and rising steadily online, through our efforts.

We can see people react immediately when we provide them breaking news coverage, and we get feedback daily from folks who are just happy we alerted them with a text message because Interstate 80 was again brought to its knees by a crash.

And there's an understanding that we're doing well, that the collective efforts of everyone mean we’re not only successful as a news operation, we're doing better than many financially even though stockholders are seemingly never satisfied.

There's also the particulars; Rupert Murdoch is probably going to be a lot more interested in the Wall Street Journal than the Pocono Record, which may be the smallest newspaper he’s ever owned.

And there's also the idea that tomorrow is going to have to take care of itself, because we've got more than enough to do today.

Q. When you make a hire, are you looking for different characteristics than you would have, say, five years ago?

A. Yes. Now, more than ever, we're looking for people who are curious and find fulfillment when they can share the fruits of their curiosity with others. We'll mold that into journalism.

Additionally, flexibility is key more than ever before. Our new "workflow" chart is a work in progress, but so many people are doing things outside traditional job descriptions and supervision chains that we’re probably going to a system where newsroom managers supervise functions, not people. Annual performance evaluations are going to have to be done by groups of managers, depending on what functions an individual performs during the year.

The "virtual beat" structure we have here, where a growing number of people who used to be called reporters are now gathering and managing information that goes simultaneously into an online section and a themed section front in the print product, defies traditional organization charting and traditional job descriptions, as well.

And it all fits: One of the things that goes with creating an achievement culture where innovation can take place all the time is pretty simple: Everybody gets a bigger role than they used to have. And that, also, changes the hiring picture: Now, more than ever, people we hire have to be sound in the essentials of communication like spelling and grammar and critical reasoning, and have an almost entrepreneurial approach to their job. Promoting new "virtual beat" content via text messaging and email newsletters and alerts is really going to be handled by the person responsible for that content, not by some separate department or some editor.

We’ve gotten the go-ahead to make those who are "content managers" with responsibility for both print section fronts and online sections experiments for performance-based incentives. It will, like all our incentives, be relatively modest, but it will for the first time mean that people who used to be called reporters will get a little more money if their part of the website grows.

Q. You've been in the business a long time and remain energized and eager to try new things. What keeps you going?

A. The ability to analyze what we do here and as an industry and come up with a system to make it better; the ability to do new things. Those inevitable personality profile "tests" we all have to take sometime in our career showed me as having the outlook and perspective or whatever of an architect. Yeah, that makes sense, but instead of designing buildings that efficiently meet a given purpose, I get to try to design a newsroom for the same overall goal. Apparently for my personality type that's pretty fulfilling.


By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.