Mingling in Minneapolis: A staff of 10 produces the web site (far left).

Times team: A staff of six editors, two artists and 'some technical and business' people puts out LATimes.com (near left).

Is the newsroom the place for new media editorial work?

As recently as five years ago, the only place newspapers and magazines were putting "content" was onto the printed page. Then, three years ago, they started sending material to proprietary on-line services, such as America Online and CompuServe. Today, the recipient is the Internet's World-Wide Web, perhaps on a server in the newspaper building.

As publishers become more immersed in on-line media, they are forced to confront an important issue: Who does the work?

If they aren't part of the newsroom, then these stand-alone on-line operations have to care completely for themselves. Everything -- retrieving and updating stories, coding HTML, handling the automation systems that do the "shoveling" -- falls to what is surely a small group.

On the other hand, if the on-liners are part of the newsroom, reporting to the paper's editor, then the newsroom chain of command can compel sports editors to do some HTML as well as typesetting coding, or require the wire desk to push through the latest in breaking Middle East news to the on-line desk.

Thus, while a core on-line staff handles the big stuff, tasks can be spread across the entire newsroom. Further, by keeping the work in the newsroom, diehard print people begin to learn the issues of being on-line; if it is a separate division, the print people learn nothing.

We checked in with three of the larger on-line operations run by newspaper companies to see how they are addressing this issue.

Raleigh rebels
The on-line staff for McClatchy Newspapers' NandO Net in Raleigh, N.C., fills three floors in a building separate from the newspaper.

The staff operates independently from the print newsroom for the most part, since NandO (http://www.nando.net/) uses almost no local news; sites for the News & Observer in Raleigh and the California McClatchy Bees (Modesto and Sacramento) cover that themselves.

President and Publisher Christian Hendricks reported that NandO Net gets none of its content from entrepreneurial web suppliers. It does use "plenty of stringers," Hendricks said, draws non-local copy from the various McClatchy papers, and plucks wire copy from AP, Reuters, AFP, the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post and New York Times syndicates, Copley News Service, Africa News and Tribune Media Services.

With a larger staff than many on-line desks, NandO Net's 20-person editorial crew provides a large quantity of original content. "We sent reporters and photographers to both conventions for our political server," Hendricks noted.

Because his on-line newsroom is heavily supported by a cadre of web designers and sales and technology folks, "our editorial people focus on editorial judgment and moving copy," he said, "not HTML."

Hendricks believes the ideal future will have print and on-line newsrooms reintegrated. But for now, "we treat the on-line newspaper as a completely different medium," he said.

"Newsrooms are in a pretty tried-and-true business model -- it's a machine that's already running, and we're trying to put on a new piece that doesn't mimic or look the same as traditional newsrooms," he explained.

For one thing, on-line newsrooms don't have deadlines and then publish; they are continuously updating, always changing and dynamic, he noted.

For the two newsrooms to be integrated effectively, suggested Hendricks, problems of newsroom staffing, mindsets, resources and technology will have to be solved. That's happening in the newsroom, he said, with new technological practices such as computer-assisted reporting.

It will also happen as new technologies make it as easy to publish on the World-Wide Web as in print, and with improved distribution and storage technologies.

L.A. keeps efforts inside
The vision: As newspapers gain skill in automating delivery of content from archaic computer systems in print newsrooms to electronic services, on-line staffs will have more time to manually assemble special reports and bring together other pieces of information that don't come through the newspaper.

Eventually, they'll build a unique network of information suppliers, encompassing other web sites, third-party sources, the community and the public, to create special places that audiences will want to visit.

That's how Terry Schwadron, deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and editor of the paper's on-line effort, LATimes.com (http://www.latimes.com/), described the work of his staff.

So, he explained, "if we really care about Pasadena as a topic, we have a lot of information, but we're not the sole people who have information, and we should reach out to other sources, and then explore how best to put the balance of materials together."

Schwadron believes the job of an organization like the Times is to produce interesting things for the newspaper and other vehicles. By extension, it is the job of the LAT's on-line staff to harvest the best and most interesting produce grown in the print newsroom, which is about two floors away from the electronic newsroom.

(His "small operation" of "six editors, two artists, some technical and business staff" is far smaller than that of the print newsroom, leading him quickly to say, "I would like it to be bigger.")

Today, more than half of the on-line content comes from the newspaper, but Schwadron expects that percentage to drop in the future. While the size of the contribution from the paper will remain relatively fixed, he explained, the on-line site itself will grow, drawing more content from other sources such as cities and museums.

"We have to leverage the thinking of what's behind those public affairs reports and then add sources from outside the newspaper," he said.

At this point, those outside vehicles include Hollywood Online and Careerpath.com (a compilation of classified advertising from several other newspapers), as well as material from financial services, weather, real estate listings and the traditional wire services.

Much of the added content targets specific concerns, interests and business opportunities -- everything from classifieds to notices about poetry readings to in-depth political analysis.

Even now, the on-line edition enjoys an enormous advantage in newshole over the print product. LATimes.com can post listings for 125 Los Angeles-area clubs, while the print version has room for only 25.

Similarly, on-line readers have access not only to the chocolate cake recipe in this week's Times food section, but can download a killer lemon meringue pie recipe from an on-line archive.

"It's a journalistic endeavor," said Schwadron, "but it can be other things as well. What a wonderful thing, to have new and interesting ways to present information."

Minneapolis mingles efforts
At the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, on-line content is considered to be different from traditional news content because of the directed nature of its use, according to Steve Yelvington, editor and manager of Star Tribune Online.

"It's a balance between reference and news," Yelvington said. "People come to our site for reference, not to read news like in a newspaper. Our traffic is people coming in to look things up -- in classifieds to find a job, to look at a sports score.

"We watch our log files very closely, and have discovered that people come to our site with a purpose in mind, but it's not as casual a relationship with information as they would have with printed newspapers. That leads me to say that we should be focusing on utility, databases, and on making all of our news full-text searchable."

Along with a programmer and database expert who sits on the content team, Star Tribune Online (http://www.startribune.com/) has a staff of 10, all with journalism backgrounds. Half came out of the Star Tribune newsroom; all of them work on content and are pretty much insulated from the technological aspects of web-based journalism.

The advantage of putting a technology person on the content team is shared expertise. Web sites aren't just documents, but interactive sites. To make things happen, he said, you have to bridge the structural and technical components to the content.

But Yelvington pointed out that to unleash the potential of the new medium, journalists also have to understand what's possible -- "to understand how things work under the hood."

"Our challenge is to find ways to unleash the power of the computer for the individual," he said. "It goes beyond the things we're taught to do in the newsroom. There's a lot of technology we have to master."

He cited an example of an editor who wanted to learn Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripting in order to "build cool things, how to connect a web site with programs, not just build pages."

The result was a caption contest on the web, where site visitors write their own smart alec comments, the best of them winning a mouse pad or T-shirt.

"If there is too big a gap between technical support and editorial, those kinds of connections won't be made," he said. "Editorial people have to understand what can be done and go get help when they need it. But the ideas won't come from technical people unless we bring them into the fold."

With only 10 people on the content side of the site, Yelvington doesn't feel that the Star Tribune Online team can go out and cover stories, so news continues to come from the print newsroom.

The Star Tribune Online staff directs much of its time and energy toward building databases, a strategy which is based on Yelvington's analysis of how people use the site. "It's personal utility that drives people onto the 'Net," he said.

Distance is the difference
The level of integration between print and cyber newsrooms is already growing in L.A., Schwadron reported. He sees the issue as being "not about development of the Internet but about human and work processes."

As the medium becomes a more familiar tool to journalists, much of the raw material that goes into preparing an investigative report -- from documents to photographs to interviews -- will be seen as material available for publication in entirely new ways.

For example, LATimes.com published 1500 pages of depositions from the O.J. Simpson trials at the suggestion of a print reporter. And 500 people on the editorial staff are already trained on basic Internet and e-mail use, with 300 to 400 actually using it.

Minneapolis' Yelvington agreed that it's an uphill battle to get a newsroom with several hundred people in it to change its culture and support multiple products. But his small-and-not-growing on-line group is trying hard to establish a tighter bond with the newsroom, and to help print people modify procedures so that the needs of both on-line staff and on-line users get met.

That's accomplished in part by the presence in the print newsroom of a capable writer and editor from the on-line staff, whose job it is to keep the on-line newsroom involved in the newsgathering process, he said. For example, when a story breaks off-cycle for the newspaper, she may have to pull information out of reporters, make phone calls and write the story herself.

At the same time, the on-line staff has worked closely with the newsroom to plan how to cover elections and create voter guide information -- which ultimately led to the newsroom adopting new database technologies.

Yelvington believes that the distance between print and on-line newsrooms is often a consequence of their very different histories and traditions.

"Sometimes there are Guild reasons, sometimes you just want to avoid the internal politics of the newsroom. Newsrooms are very big places that can be very ponderous and slow moving, and they're not necessarily up on the technology," he said, a view shared by Schwadron and NandO's Hendricks.

"If you're too tightly bonded to that operation, you can't accomplish what you need to," Yelvington said. "But if you get too far away, you lose the thing that makes you special -- and separates you from two guys in a garage."

For the future that Hendricks envisions to arrive, the mindset in the boardroom also will have to change.

"Lots of people believe it's like CB radio. There's a lot of people used to immediate results who are still waiting for proven revenue streams," he said. "They need to have a longer term view.

"Newspapers can be players, but we have to have the stomach for it. And you have to look at the strategic fit and do good homework to develop the stomach for it and understand. But if you can't explain how and where and why, then people will say you have to show a profit in 18 months.

"We're in the primitive stages of a new medium," Hendricks added. "The whole thing hasn't become a stable business and taken on critical mass."

-- L. Carol Christopher

From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.