The Very Model of the Reader-Driven Newsroom?

For the bottom-line executives of the Gannett Company, the way The Olympian has embraced the chain's News 2000 program is a testament to the success of the company's campaign to turn around the fortunes of its eighty-three daily newspapers. Circulation growth at The Olympian -- the 35,000-circulation monopoly newspaper in Washington's capital city is healthy, despite a late-arriving recession that has slowed growth in the Olympia market. The readers who sit on the newspaper's numerous reader panels say good things about the newspaper, and a recent study indicates that reader satisfaction is up from low levels in 1990. Even some reporters who have grumbled about Gannett's News 2000 program -- which calls for each of the chain's dailies to find out what readers in their communities want in their newspapers, and then give it to them -- acknowledge that Olympians seem to like the changes.

"When [the News 2000 program] came through the door, I was as big a skeptic as anybody was," says Mike Oakland, a former legislative reporter recently appointed the newspaper's editorial page editor. "I saw it as another attempt by corporate to tell me how to do my job. But I'd call myself a convert. The bottom line is, I think this is a better newspaper because of News 2000. More importantly, I think our readers think it's a better newspaper."

But many of the newspaper's forty other newsroom staff members don't see it that way. For Gannett, The Olympian has become the epitome of the reader-driven newspaper -- a concept that the company has embraced with special fervor through its News 2000 program. And staff members are chafing under the constraints of a micromanaged newsroom. "The Olympian is the poster child for News 2000," says one veteran Olympian reporter. "They've taken News 2000 to places where no reporter would want to go."

Since the program was unveiled two years ago, The Olympian has finished near the top in virtually all the assessments that Gannett makes to insure that its newspapers are working within the News 2000 pyramid -- a formula designed to reconnect newspapers to their communities by involving readers in the entire news production process (see "News 2000: A Pre-Millenium Preview of Gannett's Big Changes," CJR, March/April). At The Olympian, this meant readers were asked to send in coupons about their preferences for news coverage; editors held nine public forums (some of which were sparsely attended); three reader panels were organized in which members of the community were asked for their views about the newspaper; and reporters were sent to shopping malls and other public places to conduct surveys of readers. All in all, about 700 survey forms, ranking issues of greatest community importance, were collected. This and other material served as the basis for The Olympian's News 2000 plan, which was submitted to Gnett headquarters for approval (as were the plans from Gannett's eighty-two other newspapers). Since then, the plan has served as a blueprint for redesigning The Olympian's news pages, restructuring the newspaper's beat system, and instituting a system of editor oversight that insures that Gannett's concept of community-based news dominates the news columns.

The result, says Oakland, is a system that has broken staff members of routine habits, forced reporters to be in regular contact with readers, and made the newspaper more responsive to community interests. An example, he says, was the concern mentioned by a readers' panel about gangs and the newspaper's neglect of the topic. Oakland says that resulted in a monthly feature called Gang Watch. "Face it, you had to shake up the place," he says. "You had to essentially start from scratch."

For their part, many staff members -- including ones who processed the reader coupons and attended the reader forums -- say they aren't convinced that the newspaper's new format reflects community feeling. They note that, although old marketing research was examined for clues about reader preferences, Gannett spent no money on new scientific readership research during the News 2000 planning process. And they say that, for all the coupons and focus groups, editors seemed intent on implementing their own concepts of community news rather than the community's. For example, they say the readers they have talked to (both informally and as part of the News 2000 evaluation) consistently fault the newspaper for its lack of depth in news coverage -- a lack they feel has only been exacerbated by the newspaper's implementation of a policy that severely restricts jumps and by its emphasis on brief stories, graphics, and news-you-can-use. Such practices, they say, are more a reflection of the formulas in vogue at plas like USA Today than of the interests of Olympian readers. The editors "heard what they wanted to hear and ignored the rest of it," says one staff member. "I didn't hear one single person [who attended the reader forums] say anything about story jumps."

Journalists at The Olympian say that the new format makes it virtually impossible to deal adequately with a complex story. In a newspaper in which most stories run no longer than six to ten inches, "You just have to get into your piece and make your points -- bam, bam, bam," says a reporter who has left the newspaper. "Journalism there just became more and more like clerical work."

There is irony in the fact that The Olympian's News 2000 plan, with its emphasis on reflecting community interests, is being carried out by editors with little connection to the community. In the past ten years five top editors have come and gone, with a sixth arriving last year. In the past fourteen months alone The Olympian has had a new executive editor, managing editor, city editor, and night city editor, all from outside the newspaper and the community. And yet, under the formulas of News 2000, more and more ideas are generated in the meetings of these transient editors and fewer and fewer come from reporters, who now have less time to go out into the community and follow leads and hunches.

This "meeting culture" requires that reporters coordinate their work with a design desk and keep editors briefed for each new round of meetings.

Reporters are expected to write memos updating their story files in the computer as often as five times a day, with additional files geared toward what they are writing for tomorrow, for the weekend, for the following week, and long-term projects. The system, complains one reporter, is run by "journalistic technocrats" who have "bought the company line" and "just want to advance." This reporter adds, "We've become functionaries. It's an absolutely oppressive system run like the Keystone Kops."

In fact, the tight leash of the News 2000 program extends all the way through The Olympian's editorial offices to Gannett corporate headquarters. Under the strict accountability system put in place with News 2000, editors are regularly assessed on how well they are following the News 2000 formula, their work being judged by a panel of Gannett editors and corporate officials according to a 100-point grading system. Editors, staff members say, are now under intense pressure to measure up well against their fellow editors in the chain. To do so, the editors have in turn made it clear that employees' job evaluations depend on how well they adapt to the system.

As part of its effort to target readers, The Olympian, like much of the rest of the newspaper industry, has knocked down the walls between the newsroom and the marketing and business departments. In the office of Vikki Porter, the newspaper's new executive editor, statistics on the sales of various front-page editions adorn the wall. A circulation person routinely sits in on news meetings. Six staff members from the newsroom sit on a committee with business department employees which, as part of Gannett's company-wide ADvance marketing workshop program, tries to come up with schemes designed to help sell more ads and increase revenue. Recently, a "Sunday Special Report" about more Washingtonians flying to Reno ran on the front page, accompanied by sidebars about things to do in Reno, airline flights and fares, and a telephone number for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority. While the stories apparently weren't linked to any specific promotion or advertising initiative by the newspaper, commity growth reporter Lorrine Thompson, who was assigned to the ADvance committee, says she and others are "fairly uncomfortable" with the newsroom's participation in the ADvance program. "I'm not sure where it's leading," she adds.

Like other Gannett newspapers, The Olympian is also expected to implement various company-wide campaigns, the most notable of which is its "mainstreaming" program. As part of Gannett's effort to get more minority views into the news pages, reporters are told to "mainstream" their stories by including as many minority sources as possible, and to identify mainstreamed quotes at the top of stories so the quotes won't be cut out. They are also asked to produce regular tear sheets of their mainstreamed stories. These are then sent to Gannett headquarters, where a report is prepared comparing the performance of each

Gannett newspaper. Reporters applaud the goal of the program, but say its rigid requirements mean that minority sources may end up in stories no matter how unqualified to comment they may be.

Editors at The Olympian acknowledge that reporters don't necessarily like the changes they've implemented. But they say that the focus is on what readers want in their newspaper, not what journalists think should be there. What matters to them, they add, is that the changes they've put in place receive positive feedback from readers -- a claim backed up by members of those boards who clearly enjoy having their views regularly solicited by the newspaper.

Andy McMills, former executive editor of The Olympian and chief drafter of many of the newspaper's News 2000 changes, acknowledges that some of the newspaper's new practices -- such as its anti-jump policy -- are based on industry research rather than reader forum findings in Olympia. But McMills, now the executive editor at Gannett's newspaper in Springfield, Missouri, defends the newspaper's use of multiple "points of entry," break-out boxes, reader service information, and a policy which requires that longer stories be broken up into a brief article on page one and anywhere from two to five equally brief inside sidebars. He contends that this does not make The Olympian superficial. Enterprise stories are still a priority, he says, but they are simply presented in a format designed to appeal to readers who have less time for the newspaper.

Bob Pedersen, The Olympian's circulation director, sees these changes as directly responsible for making the newspaper one of Gannett's top-growth papers. In a business faced with shrinking or stagnant circulation, Pedersen proudly points out, The Olympian's daily circulation increase of 3 percent in 1993 and 4.6 percent in 1992 has just about kept pace with population growth around Olympia, and the Sunday circulation growth has exceeded it. Critics of the News 2000 program say that, in a fast-growing community like Olympia, circulation should be rising under any circumstances. But Pedersen believes that it is the content changes adopted under News 2000 -- particularly the quick-read formats and the reader service information -- that have made the difference. "Frankly, I don't think I could have gotten the impact with the same sales dollars without those improvements," he says.

The Olympian is clearly a better newspaper than it was ten years ago, when it was a sleepy, folksy publication that reflected the idiosyncrasies of longtime former editor Dean Shacklett. Since Shacklett was replaced in 1983, his successors have focused the newspaper's coverage on state government, and a recent University of Washington study showed The Olympian to be the only major newspaper in the state that is devoting significantly more space to covering state government than it was a decade ago. And the newspaper has won regional awards for its investigative reporting on state government, including series on the misuse of state telephones by legislators and on illegal campaigning on state time by legislative aides (although there are staff members who complain that some of these award-winning stories get done despite the News 2000 system).

There are no signs that Vikki Porter, who succeeded McMills in August 1992 after a stint as managing editor of the Reno Gazette-Journal, has any intention of modifying the newspaper's News 2000 plan, although she has eased up slightly on the paper's anti-jump policy. Porter, who has worked for The Denver Post and The Arizona Daily Star, describes herself as an "aggressive" manager dedicated to improving the quality and depth of the newspaper's enterprise coverage without abandoning its reader-friendly format. She dismisses the complaints of reporters who say they feel too strapped in, and too pressured, by the demands of the News 2000 formulas. "I want ideas to percolate up, but when they don't we're not going to wait," she says, adding, "If you're going to go in a direction, you have to be driving the train."

In fact, the direction of The Olympian -- and the rest of Gannett's newspapers -- seems clear. At a meeting of journalism educators in Kansas City last summer, Phil Currie, Gannett's vice-president/news, said that surveys in twelve Gannett markets showed a majority of readers saying their newspapers were getting better and that, company-wide, circulation is up. He went on to say that more News 2000 training is scheduled for Gannett reporters and editors, and he urged the educators to teach the fundamentals of News 2000 as part of their training programs. "News 2000 is working," he said.

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