FROM: KEVIN KEANE
March 12, 2008

Today we’re announcing the launch of the NewPaper Project, a comprehensive examination of the newsgathering priorities for Bay Area News Group – East Bay, both now and in the future.

The NewPaper Project will impact every department of our news operation, and EVERYONE – from news clerks to senior managers – will be asked to participate. We will also be asking readers – and non-readers – for feedback, with the goal of having a working blueprint for change later this year, after the JazBox rollout is complete.

We’re calling it NewPaper, but we’ll focus on every facet of newsgathering, both in print and online. No examination of the news business in 2008 would be complete if it failed to look at the impact changing reader habits and new technologies were having on our ability to deliver the news. Content needs to be provided when people want it and in formats they find useful and convenient, and our newsrooms need to adjust to these challenging reader demands.

We’re launching NewPaper partly in response to the recent buyouts. Undoubtedly we’re a different news organization today than we were yesterday. Every department in the newsroom was impacted by the staff reductions. We will miss the experience and expertise of our departing colleagues, just as we will miss their friendship and support.

With the reduction in force, we would be foolish to continue with business as usual. To sit still and not re-examine our newsroom operations in the wake of the staff reductions would guarantee that we would not only be a different news operation, but that we’d be a worse one. Given the commitment of local management and the quality of the journalists who continue to work here, that need not be the case.

I will not ask you to do more with less. But I will ask you to challenge your assumptions on what readers expect of us and how to best use our time. You should consider the NewPaper Project a unique opportunity to re-examine everything, from what we find front-page worthy to how our news pages are designed and presented. Ask yourself how you would put together a locally focused news operation of our breadth and size if you were to start one from scratch.

For the sake of the NewPaper discussion, we must assume that the business model of newspapers has been permanently altered, and that we will never be able to support a fulltime news operation larger than what we have now.

How, then, do we continue to cover the stories that readers have come to expect of us, and how do we respond to the challenges – and time impositions – posed by the ever-changing online world? Does community journalism hold the key, or do we develop a more professionally trained and reliable network of freelancers? If so, how do we best use our fulltime staff? What are our story priorities? And how should content be shared across mastheads?

Perhaps we should shrink our coverage area and concentrate on what we know we can still cover well given the size of our staff. Or form regional partnerships with other media. With pressure to reduce newsprint consumption, should we combine sections on certain days? How should our papers be organized and zoned? And what elements of design should we embrace?

Some of these issues can be addressed as a large group, but every masthead and department will have their own unique questions as well. The challenges facing the San Mateo County Times, for instance, are far different than those in the Tri-Valley or in East County. And features can be a universe apart from the challenges in sports and business. So to be effective, the NewPaper Project will need to be organized accordingly.

SOME GIVENS

Here are the underlying principles that will guide our discussions moving forward:

1- JOURNALISM MATTERS. Fairness. Accuracy. Balance. Context. Analysis. Informed opinion. It’s what feeds our credibility.

2- OUR MISSION REMAINS THE SAME: To provide local content that is both unique and relevant to our readers and our communities.

3- FEWER PEOPLE DOES NOT MEAN THAT OUR COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE HAS DIMINISHED. We will invest – yes, invest – in staff development and training, and devote appropriate resources to watchdog and investigative journalism.

4- WE WILL NOT FIND THE FUTURE BY DWELLING ON THE PAST. What we did before was very good, but we can be better.

5 – NEWSPAPERS NEED TO MAKE MONEY TO SURVIVE. And right now they’re making a lot less than they did before. We need to be open to new products if we’re to reach different readers.

6- NEVER FORGET THE ART OF STORYTELLING. Good, informed narrative and explanatory writing is essential to keep readers engaged.

7- THE INFORMATION AGE AIN’T OVER. Not by a long shot. We must be ready for the challenges and opportunities presented by the Next Big Thing in technology, whatever it may be.

METHODOLOGY, OR HOW WE’LL DO IT

A single task force will oversee the project and compile results. This master task force will be chaired by me and include volunteers from all levels of the newsroom, from senior managers to line editors and reporters.

It’s important that all departments contribute and buy in to the final blueprint. It’s also important that the discussion be frank and honest as we work through the various newsroom scenarios. We also don’t want to give unfair advantage to our media competitors. So please respect your colleagues and keep all discussions confidential to allow for the free-flow of ideas and debate.

The first few meetings of the task force will be spent coming up with a list of specific questions and issues that need to be addressed. They can be broad and philosophical or detailed and specific, down to a priority list of story lines and news projects. The master task force also will be looking to make recommendations on design, sectioning and presentation.

At the same time, we’ll ask the individual masthead editors and department heads to form their own task forces on site-specific or department-specific issues. Here’s how the groups will be broken down:

Features/online entertainment
Sports
Business
Tribune
TVH/VT/SJH
CCT metro
East County
West County
Argus/Review
SMCT (with the PADN)
Online/multimedia
Graphics/photo
Weeklies/Hills
Opinion

Some departments and editions – at the Tribune and in features, for instance — have already formed internal working groups and have a jump start on the rest of us. Others will need to start from scratch. We will also be looking for input from reader and non-reader focus groups as we develop a list of newsroom priorities.

Along the way we’ll be asking for contributions from advertising, circulation and other departments within our own organization, as they all have a stake in the outcome. All of this will be compiled into a written report that will be the blueprint for how our newsrooms are organized and function. I’m setting a goal of Sept. 1, recognizing that the rollout of the JazBox system will dominate much of our time over the next few months.

I can assure you that NewPaper will not sit on a shelf and gather dust. Our goal is bring about real changes that will ultimately make us a better news organization. I fully expect that different positions may be created within the newsroom to carry out the recommendations of NewPaper. It will also be used in allocating resources in the next newsroom budget.

TRAINING

Staff training and professional development will be a top priority in the redefined BANG-EB newsroom, particularly as it relates to narrative storytelling and new technologies. Regional training programs involving travel will be considered on a case-by-case, first-come basis. Additionally, interested staffers are encouraged to apply for national and international fellowships sponsored by the various universities and news organizations.

* We will be expanding our in-house training opportunities at all levels beginning next week, when the APME will be lead a course in database research at the San Ramon CNP facility. The course is part of a national project to explore the influence of money in politics, sponsored by the APME. Martin Reynolds of the Oakland Tribune has been asked to moderate the San Ramon session. It’s especially appropriate for journalists with no experience in computer assisted reporting. The class is open to all newspapers in Northern California and class size is limited, if you’re interested please notify Martin by email immediately.

* Making use of our in-house experience, investigative reporter Tom Peele will hold a series of seminars on computer assisted reporting techniques that take advantage of the Web access and spreadsheet capabilities of the updated computer system. Tom’s first session will be held April, and more will be held through the spring and summer. Contact Tom immediately if you’re interested in signing up for his first session.

* Meanwhile, Ari Soglin and his multimedia teams will be visiting BANG-EB newsrooms to conduct sessions on Web-based storytelling. Each session will last about 90 minutes and will cover:

* Breaking news – how to post stories online in a 24/7 news environment.

* Video storytelling – shooting and downloading breaking news video

* Blogging opportunities for beat writers

* Writing suggested Web headlines
* Database links and mashups.

Ari will be announcing a schedule over the next few weeks. We strongly encourage every reporter, photographer and editor at BANG-EB to attend one of these sessions.

MENTORING OPPORTUNITIES

The Oakland Tribune has been recognized nationally for its support of local high school journalists. For the past three years, students from eight high schools in the city have contributed stories and photos to a monthly student newspaper that the company prints free of charge and distributes throughout the school district.

The students work directly with volunteer journalists from the Tribune on newswriting, page design and layout through regular after-school seminars. A team of freelance editors edit copy and help the students through the reporting process, with the end result being a newspaper of exceptional quality. (Copies are available for anyone interested in taking a look).

This year the program has been expanded to Contra Costa thanks to a substantial grant from the Lesher Foundation. The money is being used to purchase computers and software at some of the county’s more impoverished schools. The CCT has held a number of student seminars recently, including one on journalism ethics run by attorney Karl Olson, and the first papers are to be printed in the spring semester.

The reporters and editors who have volunteered in these programs in the past have found them exceedingly rewarding. Your participation is strongly encouraged. Just shoot me an email if you’re interested.

EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

We will be relaunching the Employee of the Month program for all newsroom employees in BANG-EB. It’s been tweaked to adjust for the number of mastheads and editions. Any feedback on how to further simplify the process would be appreciated.

Once a month, each news group will select “best of” winners from staff submissions. Categories include:

* Mastheads/editions
o Best news story
o Best narrative
o Best enterprise

* Regional news team
o Best news story
o Best narrative
o Best enterprise/series

* Features
o Best story
o Best column
o Best enterprise

* Business
o Best story
o Best enterprise
o Best explanatory/narrative

* Photo/graphics
o Best picture
o Best picture-story
o Best information graphic
o Most creative

* Weeklies/Hills
o Best story
o Best narrative
o Best beat coverage

* Production/copy desk
o Best headline
o Best deadline performance
o Best page design (page one)
o Best page design (inside)

* Online
o Best spot news performance
o Best video
o Best audio slideshow
o Best use of reader interactivity
o Best blog

Monthly winners will be selected by supervisory editors with input from AMEs. Winners will be given gift cards.

Once a quarter, BANG-EB best-of winners will be selected from the group winners in the three previous months. Winners will be given cash stipends.

Categories:

* Best story
* Best narrative
* Best column
* Best photo
* Best graphic
* Best use of online
* Best deadline/online performance

Hope you’re doing well. We’ve been pretty busy the last couple weeks as the
guild organizing effort has picked up steam. And if last week’s scary letter
home summarizing the recent roadshows was any indication, management
has been pretty busy too (5 grafs of gloom and doom; 11 grafs about the
dangers of joining the guild).

So newsroom layoffs are getting discussed here as a possibility. I figured that
would happen sooner or later, and we should expect the gloom and doom to
continue and worsen as weeks pass. It really could happen — could always
have happened, at any time — but we have no real way of knowing what the
company plans to do at this point.

Our industry is growing increasingly inhospitable, and not even a strong guild
can do a thing to prevent layoffs driven by economic necessity and change.
Don’t look here for that kind of protection. The guild can only help around the
edges – by negotiating for contract language that influences the layoff process,
such as advance notice, severance pay, rehire benefits and seniority.

One argument against the guild that we sometimes hear is that it cannot
guarantee that everyone will keep their jobs. But what kind of an argument is
that? Is the company promising no layoffs if we reject the guild? Doesn’t sound
that way to me. Right now they do whatever they feel they need to do, without
our input. If they feel they need to lay off some employees for whatever reason,
they will do it. Their decisions change with their business needs.

But I don’t think we can assume an inverse relationship between worker
compensation and the number of workers. The Bay Area is an important market
for MediaNews. There are several MediaNews papers around the country that
have negotiated excellent contracts (see Denver and St. Paul). We know that
times are hard, but corporate is still profiting from our labor. The question is
whether MediaNews would, if forced, invest more here. I don’t think there’s
enough information on the table to know. But I also know we’ll never find out
if we don’t explore our options.

LUNCH WITH THE BOSS (by Sara Steffens):

So, Karl, Mary and I had lunch Monday with John Armstrong and Kevin Keane.
None of us walked in expecting to change each other’s minds.

We were hoping to share our core goal, one we hope everyone will support:
To organize our newsroom in the most respectful, least divisive way possible,
without insulting our colleagues, our newspaper or its managers. We want to
bring people together, not tear them apart.

John and Kevin doubt this is possible. They already feel stung, they said, to
hear that we think our papers are getting worse, that our newsroom staffing
is suffering, that our managers have limited power in the face of the profit
expectations and business model of the MediaNews corporation.

If we trust them, they asked, why do we need a union?

It’s an interesting question, and one that gets to the heart of why we are all
doing this.

In my years at the Times, I’ve always jumped in headfirst to things I believe
are good for the paper, good for the community, and good for journalism.

In my early days at the paper, I started a little committee to find ways to
keep reporters from leaving for dot-coms. Radical stuff like offering free
cleaning supplies for our desks. I founded the Times’ annual school-supply
drive, and soon found myself personally lugging mountains of backpacks to
and fro. I signed on to help a reporter run a brown-bag writers’ group, and
when that group died, I signed on to help with the next one. I chaired a
strategic planning subcommittee on youth readership. I helped plan Chris
Lopez’s company Christmas party, lugging booze through a very miserable
rainstorm while several months pregnant.

Never before have I been accused of stepping up because I didn’t trust the
company to do the right thing. Always, my managers have understood what
I do: Good ideas come from all of us. Work gets done by those willing to do it.

Here’s how I see it: John and Kevin probably want better for us than what
MediaNews has offered. But just as I have no power to negotiate a lower
co-pay for my prescriptions, they have no power to convince the company
that the new health plan is a mistake – one of many small aggravations that
will over time drive away the talent we need to survive these turbulent times.

We like our managers. We want to help them do what’s right for us, and for
journalism.

EATIN’ CROW (by Karl Fischer):

I made an error last week in a message I wrote to you, the one responding
to the roadshow “scary letter” that got mailed home.

Both John Armstrong and another particularly savvy co-worker pointed it out
to me Monday. Here is the suspect sentence:

“While a guild cannot prevent layoffs if it really comes to that, a guild does
have extensive legal rights to information — they have to open the books –
and we can know better whether it really needs to come to that.”

That bit in the middle about opening the books is inaccurate. Even with a guild,
the company does not need to open its books — at least not completely — to
the guild. It would only need to do so if it claimed that financial hardship were
the reason they were unable to meet the guild’s economic demands, and that
typically does not happen.

The point I was trying to make was that the company does legally have to
provide information needed for the guild to bargain effectively. For example,
if there’s a takeaway proposal on the table, the guild can ask for relevant
information relating to the issue. What is relevant and how much information
must be given are sometimes points of contention, but at least the guild has
rights to more information when bargaining than non-union employees do
when trying to cut their own deals individually.

In the near future I’ll send out some examples of the kinds of information
some local guilds have requested recently during contract talks, along with
more discussion about how the bargaining process works.

LUNCH REDUX II (by Sara):

Any of you frightened by the letters mailed to your homes last week may be
relieved by John’s clarification on Monday, supplied to us at lunch.

The paragraph on potential layoffs, he said, just happened to directly precede
the 11 following paragraphs on the “unfortunate” aspects of our organizing
effort. John assured us, on the record, that any determination of whether to
pursue layoffs will have nothing to do with whether the newsroom chooses to
organize.

In other words: what’s going to happen is going to happen. The question then
becomes: in these uncertain times, will we benefit from a legal structure that
represents our interests as employees and journalists?

Obviously, we think the answer is “yes.”

For the record, John also was offended by our characterization of the letter as
a scare tactic. He told us he didn’t mean to scare you, or your families.

ONE BIG BANG IS ONLINE:

Check out our retooled web site at onebigbang.org. We hope you’ll find the new
content more useful, particularly for those of us at the Contra Costa papers.

We plan to add photos, messages from your co-workers and news about the
organizing drive every week, all written by people you know. We’d like the
site to become a place for nuts-and-bolts answers and we think we’re off to a
pretty good start. Let us know what you think…

Keep an eye out for the anonymous salary survey, which we hope will go live
in about a week. I hope you will participate, because we in the newsroom have
never had a good grasp of relative compensation at the Contra Costa papers —
how much money people who do what you do should expect to earn. Informally,
we’re finding that salaries are all over the map.

JOIN US (by Karl):

If you’re feeling especially brave today, go see Sara Steffens (or me) for a
“Go Guild” button. Then wear it at work.

Nothing bad happens to people who do this. I know, I’ve worn one. It’s allowed,
and if management were to bug you about it, you would want to let us know
immediately.

If you’re feeling less brave but still want to help, you can always do something
small but important like forwarding this message along (on personal email
accounts) to your friends who don’t now get this update, or getting their email
addresses to pass along to me. Just a hair fewer than half of guild-eligible CCT
employees are on my list, in large part because you folks actually do this every
week. So thank you, lots. But we still need more help.

If you’re interested in talking, or if you have specific questions, call or write me
or Sara.

And if you’d like to see what we’re doing up close, we’re always happy to see
you at our 10 a.m. Saturday meetings at the Media Workers Hall, 1831 Park
Boulevard in Oakland.

ARTIE’S (by Karl):

I will be drinking at Artie’s, the bar over in the Countrywood Shopping Center
in Walnut Creek, for the next few Friday nights starting around 11 p.m. I’d like
to have a beer with anyone who’d like to come by, particularly desk and sports
people who want to know more about the guild but haven’t gotten a chance to
talk with organizers because of our differing shifts.

So come out, and tell your friends.

CAL J-SCHOOL, THE FUTURE OF THE NEWSROOM, 2/20:

Anyone with time should check out a discussion February 20 at UC Berkeley,
“The Future of the Newsroom: New opportunities, collateral damage, and effects
on journalists in the digital era.”

The event, presented by the journalism grad school, runs from 6:30 to 8 p.m.
at North Gate Hall, Room 105. It’s free. Here’s a description by the J-School:

“Everyone is talking about the future of the newsroom in this new digital world
where young people get their news from YouTube and Facebook, and traditional
print journalists have seen hundreds of their brethren laid off or bought out.
Join us for a discussion of how these changes are affecting journalists. What can
media workers unions do? Should journalists hurry up and learn how to blog and
podcast before its too late?”

Speakers include Salon.com managing editor Jeanne Carstensen, California Media
Project director Louis Freedberg, San Jose Mercury News guild rep Luther Jackson,
and Matt Mansfield, deputy managing editor at the Merc.

Thanks!

Karl Fischer
Sara Steffens