Daniel Eizans: Content Strategist, Geek

A little over a week ago the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News made major changes to their product offerings and moved to a limited home delivery.

And while the The Detroit Media Partnership changes are not even a month old, I’m of the opinion that the bold and forward thinking moves that leadership has made are among the most important (if not the most) experiments with journalism going today.

What the Detroit papers have done is revolutionary. It’s a real roll of the dice when it comes to their business models. Where every other newspaper going defunct is moving to an entirely digital approach, slashing its staff and reducing coverage areas, David Hunke and the Media Partnership are staying the course, committed to keeping two newspapers in Detroit, keeping their staffs as robust as possible and continuing the tradition of thorough, deep reporting – and they’re doing it and still PRINTING, 7 days a week.

So why is that such a great thing? The former journalist in me thinks this is the best option, because it provides two different sides to every story, allows Detroit to be one of the few cities in America to provide printed newspapers 7-days a week and keeps the integrity of news intact.

I’m ecstatic there’s still a print edition and two full editorial staffs, because while I’m definitely more of a digital guy, most blogs don’t have the same standards for reporting the news, or industries that journalists do.

Sure, I’ll read Jalopnik for car reviews, some rumor about the auto industry, etc., but those guys just don’t have the connections of the Freep or the News. I want the analysis, journalistic integrity and the experience that those papers bring to the table. Trained journalists are irreplaceable in my humble opinion, and it’s nice to know I can still pick up my copy at a newsstand and hop a plane with it. For me, I still pick up a newstand copy of the paper and use the mobile versions and web sites to consume my news, but there are options for just about EVERY delivery method.

The five major keys to that made this move a good one:

1. Both the Freep and The News are still printing 7 days a week

2. Home delivery still occurs every Thursday, Saturday and Sunday

3. Subscribers have access to an E-Edition, an exact replica of the daily printed edition that features interactive ads and various visual formats

4. Both papers were able to continue their normal publishing cycle and plan with minimal impact to newsroom staff. (Journalists keep their jobs, Detroit continues to be a two newspaper town and journalistic integrity remains intact)

5. Plans were announced to begin delivering the newspaper to the Kindle and a new E-reader device being developed by Plastic Logic. Freep.com, Detnews.com and both newspapers mobile sites remain free of charge.

What remains to be seen is how the papers will react to suggestions of its readers, or if the digital editions will be as consumed as the print editions, but based on some of the commentary I’ve seen, the defectors are more few and far between. I’ll be curious to see if any other major cities follow Detroit’s lead, because I believe the moves are really smart, albeit a bit risky. I’m just glad to know the papers I love didn’t lay down and die a slow and painful death.

Photo: Sanja Gjenero
–

In the interest of intellectual honesty and integrity, I’ll go ahead and disclaimer here that the Detroit Media Partnership is one of the clients that my employer represents and that I do work on the account. My opinion and any opinion you see on this blog are certainly not to be considered to be the same of the clients I work with.

When I was still a wet nosed reporter (which was only in 2003 mind you), I would have told you that you were insane if you were claiming that traditional media would die out before I did. Then again, this was before iPods had video and WiFi capabilities, before Facebook and Twitter and before Google News.

Fast forward a few years and it’s a whole new ballgame. Newspapers are cutting staffs, magazines are calling it a day and headlines are being broken by Twitter users and bloggers far faster than the traditional media and it’s so-called 24-hour newscycle. The rise of the blogosphere, social networking and changing consumer attitudes have turned content production on its head. And if newspapers and magazines don’t make adjustments, pool their resources and begin listening as much as their shouting, the death rattle will be coming sooner than later.

Content sharing isn’t a new idea by any means. I grew up in Detroit, and remember when the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press published a single joint weekend edition between 1998 and May of 2006. Prior to that, the News and Freep entered into a Joint Operating Agreement on the business operations side of the shops to cut cost as part of the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. They are one of the few sets of papers in joint operating agreements that ever shared content.

But the current economic atmosphere, rising newsprint costs and increases in online readership are forcing papers to look at these sharing partnerships yet again.

Last December, The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun announced that they would enter a content-sharing arrangement, and just two weeks ago, The Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced plans share sports coverage.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we’ll continue to see this trend in newspaper publishing. The question we need to start answering is, when will this begin occurring in the magazine, tabloid or even digital industries?

I think the overwhelming answer is probably sooner than later.

As this PR Week media analysis points out, magazines like AdWeek, BrandWeek and MediaWeek (all Nielsen Media titles), began sharing content in October of 2008. The company points out in the news release that less than 2% of subscribers for the publications, which cover overlapping industries, receive all three titles.

Still, the unfortunate reality is that magazines need to begin examining sharing content with rival publishers, as some of the aforementioned newspapers have done. But there is a particular challenge in that experiment because newspaper content sharing (usually) has the advantage of regional play, or, as we see in the Star-Telegram/Morning News arrangement, the advantage of only sharing sections. Magazines are much more topic-focused, making cannibalizing of issues a given. And where do you make the call on which writers to keep, what sort of voice to carry forward?

Unfortunately, as the PR Week article points out, it’s a “murky” proposition, but one that I believe will be absolutely necessary for the survival of even the most storied titles in the annuls of media history. What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you ever see major media magazines or blogs sharing their content? Could Newsweek and Time one day share stories? I’m curious as to your thoughts.

Photo by : Sanja Gjenero

The short and quick answer to the question posed above is yes. There is no digitally based service that provides a better forum for quickly reporting and analyzing a situation based on the opportunity for a community to collectively report on a situation. But if you want a more detailed case for this argument, keep on reading…

I spent the bulk of my day today at the North American International Auto Show. In the process I became a reporter again. It was far from my first time at Detroit’s annual auto extravaganza as a member of the media, but it was the first time I’ve been to the show armed with so many devices, my iPhone and an array of social networking services that are followed by a reasonably sizable audience.

What happened was pretty inspiring. My coverage of the show Tuesday was truly a collaborative effort – an exercise in citizen journalism. During the course of the day, I had conversations about vehicles and the show with PR professionals (Scott Monty), Bloggers (Andrew Mrozinski at RideStory), Gearheads and interested non-auto professionals (Shelli Gutholm), both via Twitter and in real-time.

For the first time in quite a while, I was a journalist again. I snapped photos, shot video and immediately began transmitting short snippets and thoughts about the show via my Twitter feed, launching into conversations with fellow journalists, PR folks and gearheads. After my initial tweets began, I began talking about NAIAS with journalists and enthusiasts who couldn’t attend and was able to provide several of them with photos and information that they wanted to see on specific models. The photo below, for example, was requested by a Ford fan in Austin.

In short, the community at large shaped my story and the way I approached this year’s show. I didn’t explore and tweet about the show in the way I would have covered it. Instead, the tweets and brightkite posts I made were made about certain the vehicles were shaped by my audience.

What Twitter and microblogging services are providing us is a true citizen form of journalism, albeit a bit underutilized. Twitter needs to evolve to be a place where people go to for news other than just widely-discussed events like the North American International Auto Show. It’s here that traditional media outlets like @CNN, @FoxNews and @NYTimes have a real chance at involving their audience in the coverage of events and integrating it into all forms of media – print, digital and otherwise.

We need only look back to the attacks on Mumbai to see the true power of Twitter’s citizen journalism potential. According to New York Times research, at the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter. But the traditional media outlets should create feeds of these tweets and help decipher, map and weave them into lengthier stories and microsites on their own Web sites to create a richer story. When the big media outlets truly empower the citizen reporter and make sense of the micro-blogosphere, truly powerful results can occur. Blogs have been doing this via commenting for years, but traditional media outlets have the unique perspective to use their credibility to empower truly passionate citizens. This is how newspapers in general began. It’s high time they returned to empowering the community and citizens that they serve.

What do you think? What’s standing in the way of Twitter becoming a truly amazing experiment in citizen journalism?