In short, newspapers are neglecting three critical needs:

Let's look at each of these re-engineering needs.

Rethinking reporting

In a speech last year, Los Angeles Times Editor Shelby Coffey answered the question, "Will newspapers survive the shift to new media?" with these words: "They'll succeed because they understand the key transformation of turning information into readily graspable knowledge."

He's right, sort of. While reporters have always been good at turning information into useful knowledge, they aren't rethinking how reporting could be done in this radically different medium.

Shovelware

The old news product is linear, but this new technology uses hypertext, so a user can jump from point to point. Too many electronic news products are simply shovelware -- scooping up the old flat text used in the ink-on-paper product and throwing it on the screen, in familiar linear fashion.

We have to rethink reporting as a layering of news. News reporting for new products will have content with depth, not just by providing explanation (as has always been the reporter's strength) but by providing links to relevant documents.

Finding these relevant documents and providing links within the text of the story will be part of the reporter's job (or, perhaps, the job of a new category of worker in the interactive products newsroom).

There may be some entirely new models for what we call the news story. Imagine this: Instead of having a news story on the president's speech, the text of the speech is displayed. Embedded in the text are links which explain the event alluded to, or the history of the proposal mentioned, or compares his position on the topic as stated in previous addresses, or gives a brief bio on the person mentioned, and why they were mentioned.

I call this annotative journalism. This approach takes advantage of the technology to do a different kind of reporting, and provides a value-added feature over the other thousands of content providers who also will make the speech's text available.

The bottomless newshole

The newspaper's limited newshole is the bane of reporters and editors, but it also is a great aid in making content decisions. Space allocation is based on the relative merit of one news story against another.

What happens to the new electronic news product without that limitation? How will the electronic editors make decisions about what goes in? Or, since there is no space problem, does everything go in?

Here are some questions you should be asking yourself as you make content decisions for the electronic product:

How much of the print product will you put on the electronic service -- all, some, none?

Will things that didn't go into the print product, because of that dreaded newshole, go in the electronic product?

Does the print product's content represent 10 percent of the electronic service's content? Fifty percent? Eighty percent?

While those questions are quantitative, there are also some key qualitative questions you should ask:

Are there features your electronic product customer would be interested in that you would not offer to the print customer?

What is there in your traditional circulation area that you could focus on, that would give your information service a unique and identifiable content?

How can you take advantage of the medium to do something new, fun, different than what you could do on paper?

So many of the information products have the same content and coverage, the same wires available. Your task is to develop a content mission that gives your service a unique identity.

True multimedia

Text, photos and graphics will be joined with sound and video; this is where television has an advantage over print. Broadcast journalists have always understood how sound and video enhance the words used in reporting a story.

How well are you preparing your reporters to work in a truly multimedia product? If you aren't thinking about all five of these components, you aren't rethinking the product. And once you have rethought the product, it will be obvious that you'll be needing to retrain your content creators.

Imagine General Motors engineers all arriving at work on bicycles, because they don't know how to drive. Pretty absurd, right? Well, many of the news organizations where some of the most innovative news products are being developed share this dirty little secret:

The majority of the work force, the ones responsible for creating the content, know virtually nothing about the ways of the wired world.

A recent survey on the use of new technologies in the newsroom found that most of management's enthusiasm focused on cutting costs, doing things faster and providing more glitz. Using the technology to enhance quality of the information was barely mentioned. In one telling statistic, 79 percent of the newspapers surveyed had computer graphics capability, but only 29 percent had a computerized library -- and even smaller percentages had access to on-line or CD-ROM databases for information gathering.

I have heard of too many news organizations developing an on-line service but providing little or no access to the service in the newsroom. These services are not being used as tools in the creation of the content being sold through these new products.

We all know newsrooms are notoriously bad at providing training for their employees. Rarely does a capital budget for a major outlay in hardware include any budget line for the wetware -- the people who will be operating the equipment. Here are the things the journalist in the era of electronic media must be able to do:

Reporters need to explore this medium to envision the possibilities of this new platform for reporting.

So, you've rethought the product, you've retrained the work force to build the product. Now, what's your plan for storing and recycling the inventory you've created?

It used to be called the morgue, then the library; now, in lots of places, it's the news research center. But what the electronic products newsroom needs is an information recycling plant.

Imagine an oil company going to all the trouble of finding a drilling site, digging the well, pumping the oil -- and then letting it run into a ditch. Unfortunately, too many newsrooms are still treating their primary product, information, that way.

As that survey I mentioned said, only 29 percent of the surveyed newspapers had an on-line library. I find it appalling that 30 percent of the newspapers which have invested time and money into developing bulletin board services don't save their text in electronic form.

Their librarians are still slashing at newsprint and filing it in envelopes. This means missed opportunities for recycling this content as intellectual compost for reporting and for reuse in the electronic news marketplace.

What you should do:

Publication date is no longer just one day. Time of day might be an important archiving element in a constantly updated product. Graphics or photos associated with a story might change. A story might run for a while and then be pulled, then be re-used as a background link from an updated story.

Policies and procedures will have to change. Anticipate as many of them as possible. And then, go out and arrange your alliances, spin your webs, build your bulletin boards. It is important to your future.

But remember, before you go too far, to rethink your product, retrain your employees -- and recycle your information.

Provide substance before style;

Provide content before interface;

Acknowledge your roots;

Aim for the transparent paradigm.

-- Daniel Drennan

Poynter your browser: To see the Poynter Institute's World-Wide Web pages, point your browser at

http://www.nando.net/prof/poynter/home.HTML

-- Nora Paul

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.