Rosemary Pennington | Jan. 24, 2008
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| Photo by Abby Tonsing |
| Graduate student Zeynep Altinay talked with Herald-Times editor Bob Zaltsberg after his talk with professor David Nord’s J510 Media and Society class Wednesday afternoon. |
“We are in a period of transition,” Zaltsberg said. “That’s the best way to describe it.”
Zaltsberg described that period, as well as how the Herald-Times is adjusting to it, to students in J510 Media and Society Wednesday. In class last week, the graduate students learned about the rough climate of the newspaper business, a lesson amplified Wednesday when the Los Angeles Times fired editor James O’Shea.
But some of these worries, especially those of declining revenue, have been overblown, Zaltsberg said.
“Newspapers are making a little less than they used to make,” Zaltsberg said. “But they’re still profitable. The idea that newspapers aren’t making money is not true.”
But pressure to make money isn’t the only thing newspapers are worried about. Increasingly, papers also are feeling pressure to create multimedia portals that pull readers in and keep them. The hope is the video, audio and blogs on a paper’s Web site will be able to compete with all the other forms of information available on the Web as well as generate ad revenue.
“The math just doesn’t work out,” Zaltsberg told the students when asked if the Herald-Times will push harder for advertising on its Web site. “People are still tied to that print ad and they’re willing to pay much more for it. Online advertising just doesn’t bring in as much.”
Adding multimedia isn’t the only transition underway at the Herald-Times. Just a few months ago, editors changed the approach to how the newspaper covers news, breaking the staff into breaking news and non-breaking news teams. The breaking news staff covers the traditional newspaper topics such as crime and court beats and feeds news to the Web site. The non-breaking news staff focuses energy on enterprise stories that help readers understand issues, Zaltsberg said.
“We think these are the kinds of local stories we need to be doing. It’s the business of being a journalist,” Zaltsberg said. “And we think it’s going to help us get through these trying times. I think the local thing is all we can do.”
Graduate student and former Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader intern Stacie Meihaus Jankowski said that philosophy makes a lot of sense.
“I think it’s intriguing,” she said. “and smart. These small papers aren’t going to compete with papers like the Indy Star or the Chicago Tribune.”
Toward the end of the class, when the business of running a newspaper had been hashed out, graduate student Daniel Robison had a much more practical concern.
“What do I need to do to not get fired?”
“Do what we’re doing, these enterprises stories,” Zaltsberg said. “Learn to tell stories in a multimedia style. If I have to make a firing decision, it’s not going to be based on who the last one in the door is, but who’s pulling his weight. Make yourself indispensable.”
