(Vickey Williams)

Strange things happen in Vegas every day so it wasn't weird at all to hear a casino mogul and a Google executive advise newspaper editors on the evolution of their industry.

For everyone who missed the recent Associated Press Managing Editors conference because their employers didn't work hard enough on evolution far enough back to preserve the 2008 travel budget, there's good news. The joint conference of APME, Associated Press Photo Managers and the Society for News Design was well-covered online here.

But from my perspective - listening with an ear for evidence of serious change in the operational practices of newspapers, or at least some serious, foot-stomping calls in favor of it - here are a few highlights that stuck with me.

It was MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni who trotted out Charles Darwin's "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

And it was in perfect context, for his story and ours. "Success is tied to (the city's) ability to reinvent itself," Lanni said, leading a jog through Las Vegas' modern history as a weekend gambling destination in the '40s, to becoming a major entertainment venue, to attracting upscale shopping and dining (most of the country's greatest chefs have restaurants there), to catering to spa and golfing vacationers, and today, as a major convention city, hosting thousands of events per year.

Richard Gingras, a senior adviser at Google who has spent the last year studying the online giant's relationship with and impact on the news industry, won over what could have been a prickly crowd by stating the obvious. "Google will impact the evolution of news whether it does anything or not," he said. "Better to impact it in a positive way."

Gingras had a handful of suggestions for editors, including that newspapers do a better job at "leveraging the value of who you are" by deeper linking in their online content – to archived material on the topic, related public documents, the reporter's bio and more. (Pam Maples did a nice recap in her blog here.)

Beyond improving traffic for online content, Gingras echoed the suggestions organizational change experts have been giving newspapers for more than a decade: "re-think work processes;" "embrace reader participation;" "re-think the model from end to end." Sadly, newspapers in Europe, Latin America and Canada seem farther along at tackling wholesale transformation than U.S. newspaper companies.

Sessions led by or APME members predictably got down to the nitty-gritty. In one focusing on practical tips for building multimedia teams, Carol Tarrant, editor of The Roanoke (Va.) Times, talked about the dilemma of leading new staffers hired for digital news production who have skills their managers don't hold and sometimes don't understand.

In the context of bridging the communication and respect divide between online and print staffs, journalists' well-documented issues with collaboration were front and center.

"Journalists tend to try to exert authority" over the digital newcomers, said Regina McCombs, multimedia faculty member at the Poynter Institute and formerly a multimedia producer at the StarTribune.com in Minneapolis. "It's a difference between an online team and a newsroom team. The lines in online are much fuzzier. People who work with the online folks have to be comfortable with that. Online people are a lot more comfortable with dividing things up."

Understanding is the first step to respect, which paves the way for collaboration. McCombs got nods of agreement when she said, "Most people understand the pressman and the truck driver better than the interactive director who, at the end of the day, means success for them."

At a slightly higher level, there's still some ironing out to be done on the online mission, editors said. While every newspaper today accepts that a website is a must, there's still too much simple shoveling going on, said panelist Tim Rasmussen, assistant managing editor for photography at the Denver Post.

"Lots of times the question is: What's the standard for our website? Is it 'Just put it online and it doesn't matter'? Or is the expectation of the online delivery of our paper the same as print," that is, providing a robust, quality experience for the consumer?

Will Sullivan, interactive director of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said the speed of the transition to a day where online staff are looked at as holding the keys to a newspaper's future may have left other things unsaid. "At the start, they were made to feel like a production department. So change the expectations."

In an SND session that offered a valuable nuts and bolts look at several years work toward print-online integration at the Globe & Mail, Managing Editor for Design Adrian Norris said fostering collaboration was a critical goal in reorganizing that newsroom. Even today, he makes an effort to "move people around on the floorspace about every six weeks," even if it's for a single project assignment, to force new contacts. His short list of "things to do tomorrow" to encourage print-online integration:

Encourage risk-taking and allow for failure
Nurture the idea and let that decide its treatment
Great story telling lies at the heart of everything you do
Create a frontline support network to empower your team

All of the above sounded like smart advice for today's change agents to me, and familiar antidotes to the old workplace styles that for years left media workforces standing still in the face of marketplace change.

The theme for this year's APME conference was Thriving in the Digital Age. So the tired old red herring argument that newspapers are all about important journalism and important journalism has no place on the Internet was kept to a delightfully low volume. As reported here time and time again, particularly by my colleague Rich Gordon, smart newspapers are differentiating among their products, and finding ways to serve all their audiences.

Rob Curley, longtime champion of all things related to digital news and now head of the new media division at the Las Vegas Sun, cut a predictably high profile during the recent gatherings of editors in his city. During a panel called "What Editors Can Learn from Top Digital Dogs," Curley pushed back when the conversation threatened to go down the road of important versus popular.

He cited an important and necessary reporting project on the Las Vegas water crisis The Sun accomplished this summer in print and online that Curley said represented a year of reporting. Also this summer, Mojave Max died, a tortoise that had for years been a local icon for desert wildlife education programs. For one online reporting period he reviewed the score was: Water project, 220 page views. Mojave Max, 22,000.

Editors seem to be getting it that it's not either-or, it's both.


By Vickey Williams (vickey-williams@northwestern.edu)
Vickey Williams is director of the Media Management Center's Digital Workforce Initiative.