Kiesow 7.0

If you like New England and you like digital media you have come to the right place. The Telegraph is hiring a Managing Editor / Online upon my departure on August 4. I will let the job posting below generally speak for itself but I have been here for 5 years and have loved every day of it.

The Telegraph has been named one of the best papers in New England for at least the past 5 or 6 years and we have done some great work in reader engagement, multimedia, enterprise reporting and community development during that time.

The staff and management of the paper buys into a Web-first approach and they are looking for a Managing Editor who is a good journalist and a digital innovator to take them to the next level.

Contact info is at the bottom of the listing but feel free to email me directly if you have questions about the position.

Job Posting
Managing Editor Online

Telegraph Publishing Company and its affiliate, the Cabinet Press, seek an online editor with a strong background in journalism, a thorough understanding of Internet technology, and proven leadership ability to help continue the transformation of our news organization in the digital age.

In addition to The Telegraph, of Nashua, N.H., (circ. 25,000, daily), the company also produces four weekly newspapers along with multiple niche publications and Web sites. The online editor is responsible for editorial content and presentation of NashuaTelegraph.com, Cabinet,com, and the company’s niche Web sites such as FeastNH.com, EncoreBuzz.com and TelegraphNeighbors.com.

The successful candidate will have at least five years of newsroom experience as a reporter or editor, and must be familiar and comfortable with the conventions of community journalism and the operation of a small daily newspaper. The online editor coordinates content, projects and communication between newsroom and digital media teams.

He/she must also:

• Understand online content, revenue models and strategies; lead our community and audience development efforts and play a lead role in the implementation of our social media strategies.
• Be familiar with all facets of publishing process from story pitch to publication in multiple media on multiple platforms including print, web and mobile.
• Develop work flows and training plans to facilitate publication of news, videos and photos to multiple digital platforms.
• Be immersed in the trends inside and outside the news industry that impact digital publication and audience development.
• Be comfortable working with print and digital vendors, including writing product specifications, project management and contract review and negotiations.
• Assist in building a newsroom technology strategy that supports mobile journalism capabilities for reporting and photo staffers.
• Be familiar with the technology of digital publishing including Web servers, HTML, CSS and Javascript.
• Assist in daily news coverage discussions and decisions and make independent judgments that serve both print and online coverage needs.
• Monitor metrics for all Telegraph sites and develop relevant business and content reports and strategies.
• Serve as a member of the Telegraph Editorial Board and contribute one editorial per month.

This is a salaried, management position; compensation commensurate with experience.

Interested applicants should apply via email to Executive Editor Dave Solomon, dsolomon@nashuatelegraph.com, with “online editor” in the subject line.

No phone calls please.

I spent the morning at a workshop in Worcester, MA focused on reader comments and the law – and for some reason started thinking about ice cream on the way home.

The session was organized by an informal group of New England media lawyers (shout out to Rob Bertsche and Rick Gagliuso) and the lunch keynote was delivered by Josh Benton of the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. I joined three other journalists on the morning panel: Jim Bodor of the Telegram & Gazette, Jessica Kosowski of the Sun-Chronicle and David Olson of the Salem News.

We had a great crowd and conversation, none of which had to do with dessert. On the ride back I started wondering if any of us were doing enough online (reader comments aside) to make digital news really different than print.

So try this analogy on for size: For 200 years we have been selling basically the same product – call it vanilla news ice cream. Maybe some papers have been selling vanilla bean or French vanilla. It is still vanilla – albeit fresh and tasty and delivered right to your doorstep every morning.

When newspapers went online we started by offering the only flavor we knew how to make – vanilla. Vanilla online is basically as good as vanilla in print – assuming you really like vanilla. And we bet the farm on people really liking it. Sure, one click away were 10,000 other store fronts selling Youtube and Flickr and Face… I mean chocolate and butter pecan and rocky road. But we were sticking with our sure thing.

The question becomes – vanilla is great but what it only 20% of people want to buy it on a regular basis? What if adding multimedia and comments and text alerts is great but is really just hot fudge on top of the vanilla? Yummy, but still intrinsically the same as the print product.

So, what exactly do newspaper.coms need to do to learn how to make pistachio? And butter pecan swirl. And maybe mint chocolate chip. Is the answer mass customization, user generated content, local business recommendations and reviews, free classifieds, hyper-local databases, cell phone video or social networks? Or are all of those things really just news with sprinkles on top?

Is someone out there already building the next great ‘news’ thing and if so, any chance they are building it for a journalism company?

If you know please leave a message – I will be at Baskin-Robbins.

The 2008 Readership Study from Northwestern University is out. For online managers – the news is not good:

… 62 percent of respondents said they had never visited the local newspaper’s Website, and only 14 percent said they had visited between the last seven to 30 days, numbers that have improved only a little over the last five years.

I need to dig into the numbers a bit – they seem quite divergent from what our own local surveys have shown. But in any case I think the ‘bad’ news could be ‘good’ news.

The online effort at many papers has gotten a lot of attention in the past 3 – 4 years. We have seen a rapid growth in (or at least an attempt at) improving usability, Web-first content, multimedia, and community building. Generally speaking there seems to be an impression that newspapers are taking online seriously now and real progress is being made.

Newspapers thought the same thing from 1940 – 1990 when newspaper circulation increased by around 30 million copies nationally. Advertising boomed, news staffs grew and newspapers turned 20% profits.

Unfortunately, during the same period the population of the United States grew by about 150 million people. We thought we were doing great but we were not even keeping pace. Newspapers were losing their cultural significance but the problem was obscured by a growing population.

Is online in the same position now?

Traffic to news Web sites has grown sharply over the past 10 years. But, the percentage of people online has grown even more sharply – and is now starting to level off somewhere south of 90%. We still have some bounce to come via broadband adoption – but for the most part the boom is over.

So, have we been doing a good job over the past 3 or 4 or 10 years – or have we once again simply been the beneficiaries of simple population growth. Ten or 15 percent traffic growth annually does not look so good if our real potential was (hypothetically) 50 or 60%.

The good news about the Readership Study is that even if your paper is doing well – growing readership and revenue – maybe the report is the excuse we need to kick-start a discussion around the thought that ‘good enough’ may not be good enough.