From the trenches: John E. McIntyre (Baltimore Sun)

A thoughtful post from John E. McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun offering advice for surviving and thriving in the modern newsroom. Read the full post here. 

His six points are great:

1. Show your work.

2. Work on what matters.

3. Make yourself useful.

4. Don't let writers evade responsibility.

5. Write about what people want to read.

6. Don't give up the ship.

The Next Newsroom.

There's some great discussion going on at The Next Newsroom. The basis of the discussion is built around the following six principles:

1. Place community at the center.

2. Make innovation a priority.

3. Publish to all platforms.

4. Collaborate with others.

5. Promote transparency.

6. Create a sustainable business model.

Number 1 is definitely in the right place on this list, and I would generally agree with the other five. What do you think?

The New Newsroom - Post #1.

This is the first in a series of posts about the newsroom of the future. Don't like this one bit? Wanna give me a virtual high five? That's why we have the comment feature.

I read a thoughtful post written by Jeff Jarvis a few days ago which prodded further thought and a few great conversations. In the article, Jarvis mentions a discussion which hypothesized a 200 to 300 person newsroom could be successfully pared down to 35. Visionary? Yes. Frightening? Sure....but read on.

To drive this point home, I've developed a fancy graphic below of a suggested org chart.

Suggested Org Chart for the New Newsroom

Writers

A few people to make sure the writers get paid

A few people to sell advertising & market the writers' work 

What I'm suggesting here is that solid, engaging news content is more important than the old process of packaging and filtering the news.