Thursday, March 12, 2009

The future appears in Eastern Iowa

Not suprisingly it comes from a privately owned media company, away from the blablabla of the Coasts.

No comments from me. Click on the link to see why it's exactly the right solution, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Below is a snippet from: Transforming the Gaz:
"Unlike other newspaper editors, Lyle doesn’t supervise a single reporter or photographer. The reporters and photographers still work for me. However, we’ll simply call them all journalists now because they will perform more roles than they have in the past. (I’ll explain more about those new roles in the coming weeks.)

It has been clear for years that newspaper companies needed to transform their organizations. We were structured for decades as newspaper factories. Though we staffed our newsrooms with skilled professionals who became experts at specific tasks such as reporting, photography, editing or graphic arts, we were focused on producing a manufactured product each day. We had strict production deadlines and the amount of content we could publish was determined by the space available, which was heavily influenced by the price of a raw material, newsprint."

The following was added March 13, 12:40 PM EST.

A very good follow up was posted by veteran journalist Michele McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center. The headline of the post is New role: Conducting an information orchestra

FYI, Michele is pro. Here's what find if you follow the link on her name.
Michele McLellan is a consultant who helps news organizations and journalism training organizations adapt in a rapidly changing new media environment. From 2003-07, she directed Tomorrow's Workforce, a $2.5 million Knight Foundation project that demonstrated the link between strategic newsroom training, newsroom culture and a news organization's ability to adapt and innovate. She is a journalist who worked for more than 25 years as an editor and manager in newspapers, most recently at The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2001-02, she has taught journalism and journalism ethics nationally and internationally, developed online courses for News University, and is an author of two books, The Newspaper Credibility Handbook and, with Tim Porter, News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change. She has been invited to make presentations at the conventions of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Associated Press Managing Editors. She has been an Ethics Fellow and guest faculty in leadership at the Poynter Institute.

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