Getting MoJo

It appears that the Gannett newspaper chain is trying a radical approach to staying afloat in this brave new world of the internet age. Instead of fighting the web, they are embracing it and going to an intensely local strategy. This is actually smart as hell and I'm really impressed with what they are trying to do.

Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. The glow of the screen illuminates his face.

Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or "mojos." The mojos have high-tech tools — ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras — but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper's Web site, and often for the print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content — regardless of its traditional news value — is key to building online and newspaper readership.

Myron and his colleagues are part of a great experiment being conducted by their corporate parent, McLean-based newspaper giant Gannett, which is trying to remake the very definition of a newspaper. Losing readers and revenue to the Internet and other media, newspapers are struggling to stay relevant and even afloat. Gannett's answer is radical.

The chain's papers are redirecting their newsrooms to focus on the Web first, paper second. Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up "hyper-local," street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes. Web sites are fed with reader-generated content, such as pictures of their kids with Santa. In short, Gannett — at its 90 papers, including USA Today — is trying everything it can think of to create Web sites that will attract more readers.

"Whatever you spend your time and money doing," said News-Press managing editor Mackenzie Warren, "is news."

This is actually a very interesting article for anyone wondering about the future of media. One innovation that could put Gannett far out ahead of the pack? Something they call "crowdsourcing":

Enlisting the help of dozens of reader experts — retired engineers, accountants, government insiders — to review documents and data to determine why it costs so much to hook up water and sewer service to new homes in the area. The result: an investigative report that resulted in fees lowered by 30 percent and an official ousted. Gannett calls the practice "crowdsourcing." The News-Press and other Gannett papers also are building searchable online databases on as many topics as they can think of, in part to "enable people to do digging themselves and maybe find conclusions we won't," said Michael Maness, Gannett's vice president of strategic planning. "It's having thousands of investigative reporters instead of three."

Glenn Reynolds called that "An Army of Davids" of course. But Gannett will be able to weed out stupid mistakes and become very, very credible using this technique. This is some very smart stuff on the part of that organization. Kudos to Gannett.