It's axiomatic that editorial quality is in the eye of the beholder. But some beholders are more equal than others -- for instance, corporate news executives. Thanks to industry consolidation, chains now ultimately oversee the papers more than 70 percent of Americans read. And without much notice, a number of these companies have eased in recent years into formal programs of editorial improvement that go way beyond periodic critiques and visits.

Collectively, the programs tell a story not only of what's hot editorially at the corporate level but sometimes spell out business strategies as well. For instance:

• Gannett has had in place for more than three years a news approach it calls "Complete Community Coverage." It charges editors and publishers at the 100 Gannett papers with building readership and "being the primary source of local news and information." There is a twist, though, on this fairly generic goal. Papers are free to build audience either in the newspaper proper or online. "In effect, it doesn't matter whether 18- to 25-year-olds or any other groups come to us via the newspaper or the Internet," the summary of the program states. "We can build products to attract more of them one way or another." It is clearly not the case yet that online readers are anywhere near as profitable, Phil Currie, Gannett's senior vice president for news, said in an e-mail interview last summer, but it is fair to say that Gannett thinks the industry will trend slowly in that direction over time. Meanwhile, it's good business to expand the "footprint" of media platforms in each community and build revenues.
• Last September, Gannett layered on a second effort, titled "Real Life, Real News." Briefly, it mandates editors and reporters getting out and talking more to readers in the community and creating heightened coverage of important shared experiences of everyday life. In a February 13 update in the company newsletter, "News Watch," Currie writes of the importance of follow-through and the danger that editors will "throw a bone to the concept and move on ... unless compelled to do otherwise." Currie advises editors, "Compel!"
• Knight Ridder has had its own good journalism program for 18 months with some parallels and some differences. Editors collaborated with top management in defining a list of "seven tenets" of excellence. These included some traditional values, such as credibility, a watchdog posture toward government, and being the first and exclusive source for local news. Then there were some in a reader-friendly vein: utility, coverage, and caring about "people like me." Readers in each of the 30 Knight Ridder communities were surveyed to determine a starting point for each paper on each of the seven dimensions, then resurveyed at the end of 2003. Like their counterparts at Gannett, Knight-Ridder's top managers have made clear they really, really mean it. Editor bonuses last year and this depend partly on progress on the seven tenets.
• Both Gannett and Knight Ridder programs draw on some of the key findings of the multi-year, multi-million dollar Readership Institute studies. Both were implemented in collaboration with the Institute's sister Media Management Center at Northwestern University. The influence of the findings can be judged, in part, by how many corporate news quality/readership programs have been built around them. The list includes Media General, Tribune, Cox, Lee Enterprises, and Community Newspaper Holdings (the Alabama-based company that owns more small newspapers than any other). So there is an element of paradox at work here. The programs are top-down directives to editors, but there is a bottom-up element at the same time. Readers are the judges — by surveys, by their reading behavior, or both — of what is working editorially.

Asked if the Knight Ridder program was a straddle between the notion that the reader is king and an old-fashioned model that held journalists were the best judges of good journalism, Jerry Ceppos, the company's vice president/news replied, "Exactly. That's your nut graf."

The programs also suggest a revision to the common newsroom grumble that the corporate bosses only care about the bottom line. Many think they have some good ideas for improving editorial quality as well.

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Gannett Initiatives

To start at the start with the biggest newspaper company and the forerunner of such programs, Gannett operated through most of the 1990s with a series of directives under the umbrella title "News 2000." It embodied some of the coverage principles of later programs — reader surveys and identification of community-specific key coverage areas. It also taxed Gannett editors with producing measurable results in staff diversity and broadened representation of minorities in content. The program had a high profile and generated some debate. Was it a good set of goals, implemented with focus and sustained effort? Or did it verge on editorial formula, a straightjacket for editors and reporters?

With the millennium, the clock ran out on "News 2000." "Complete Community Coverage" harvested the same guiding core values, like credibility and "upholding First Amendment responsibilities." The new program was shorter and simpler and did away with a template for annual performance reviews. The big new thing was emphasizing online. For some smaller papers, this meant starting websites, Currie said; for most, it meant expanding online content, as well as supplementing and cross-referencing projects that ran in the newspaper.

By design, the program has less visibility throughout the company than did "News 2000."

It is an overall guideline for managers, Currie said; "some newsrooms might cite it; most would not."

Gannett

The program also looks ahead to what now has become a stampede within the industry of creating specialized weeklies for young readers and other niche publications. (Gannett reported in December that it has launched more than 300 such publications in the last 18 months). Some of these might be done in partnership with other content providers, according to the "Complete Community Coverage" summary.

That set the stage for "Real Life, Real News" -- a much more ground-level prescription for drawing readers and potential readers into the content of the newspaper. It aims at "reporting on people, places, and events significant to the everyday lives of readers and covering other news so that it directly connects to them." Some of the work is to be built around what the Gannett folks call (with their affinity for capitalization) "Moments of Life," that is shared, ordinary — but meaningful — experiences like your child's first day at school (to take one that makes almost any paper's story list).

The debut last fall has been followed by a flurry of training sessions and regional meetings. "News Watch" has followed with round-the-company examples of potential "moments" from diverse cultures (a Muslim child's first Ramadan) or hometown takes on Saddam Hussein's capture (an interview with a judge who had helped rebuild the Iraqi judiciary system).

"This will not be a short-term program," Currie wrote in a follow-up e-mail. "The idea is to keep at this for the long haul, obviously making adjustments as deemed appropriate." As Currie's progress report makes clear, he anticipates some resistance, if only by inertia. "This is not the same old journalism with a tweak or two."

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Knight-Ridder Initiatives

At Knight Ridder, a paper-by-paper measure of general reader satisfaction had been in place for years. (As previously reported on Poynter Online, one among several signals of success at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was that it finished first in the survey for three years running). But Ceppos and colleagues decided it was time for something new, tailored to measure dimensions of journalistic performance as seen by the consumers of the news.

In the interests of both buy-in and expert guidance, Knight Ridder gave the editors a hand in framing the tenets at a meeting in autumn 2002. They hammered out not just the seven tenets but, with the help of research experts, a series of 20 survey questions defining them. For instance, "watchdog" is to be tested by asking readers and potential readers whether the paper "gives you the information you need to hold government, business, and civic leaders to a high level of accountability" and "does an excellent job investigating claims and statements made by government, civic, and business leaders."

RELATED RESOURCES

Gannett's Complete Community Coverage initiative Update from Gannett's Senior VP Phil Currie on "Real Life, Real News" Reports from the Readership Initiative Seven Tenets Identified by Knight-Ridder Editors for Measuring "Good Journalism": Watchdog Trust People Like Me First and Only Useful Easy to Use Story Telling

That part was a challenge since a more traditional assessment of investigative reporting efforts by journalists might turn on such inside-baseball elements as effective use of public records, which wouldn't mean much to the general reader.

While unrelated to the Gannett programs, and a year ahead of "Real Life, Real News," the theme is picked up under the shorthand, "People Like Me." The tests are:

• "Really understands the things that are of special interest and importance to people who live in this area."
• "Has stories for people with your particular interests."
• "Really cares about people like you."

There wasn't any resistance from editors about the tenets, Ceppos said. These were ideas "every editor would be comfortable with." Informal conversation with several top Knight Ridder editors over the last year confirmed a consensus view that this is good medicine. A tougher question, typically falling to deputies the next step down the editing chain, may be how to develop an operational version, for example, of being more useful.

But the first results are in, Ceppos said Wednesday, and 23 of the 30 papers did improve on their baseline score over the course of the year. Collectively, the papers made progress on all seven tenets. Ceppos said he was less sure whether the program was widely understood and embraced by mid-level editors and reporters. "That's the ultimate question. I hope it is. I'm not sure. It's the local editor's call how they implement it. When I was editor (in San Jose), I posted that kind of thing in the Merc newsroom. That way people could agree or disagree, but they knew."

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Readership Study Recommendations

The Readership Institute study is massive, set out in several dozen papers on a well-organized website. The most basic findings and recommendations around which companies are building editorial improvement efforts include:

• Intensely local, people-focused news. Story-length obituaries of ordinary people are a good example of an idea that has been around awhile but is now being picked up by more and more papers.
• Feature-style, personalized, and non-traditional forms of storytelling instead of over-reliance on the inverted pyramid.
• Making the paper easy to navigate.
• More summaries, more prominently displayed, of updates of running stories — breaking out what's happened to date and what's new today.
• In-paper promotion of that day's content and what's coming up the next several days.
• Attention to appealing ad content, which has a surprisingly high potential as a reader attraction.

All these are the fruits of surveying thousands of readers at a sample of 100 papers back in 2000 and of follow-up studies since.

The Institute suggests measuring the payoff with what it calls RBS (Reader Behavior Score). The metric seeks to capture not just ups or downs in the number of readers but also other dimensions, like the length of time they spend with the paper, how thoroughly they read, and how many days a week they read.

Is it working? The Institute's interim finding is that papers that have implemented with "breadth" and "intensity" are showing some significant gains. But the detailed and candid follow-up reports also indicate some bumps in the road.

A survey of 81 participants in the initial study found that as many had gone backward as forward in RBS. There was a positive difference, but a very modest one, between those who said they were following the recommendations and those who had done little. Also, the Institute is finding that publishers (and their corporate bosses) have a lot more favorable view of progress in their newspapers becoming reader-oriented than do editors (or for that matter, advertising directors). There is also concern about whether awareness of the findings and recommendations makes it down to the day-to-day news-gathering ranks of mid-level editors and reporters.

None of this is too surprising. The Media Management Center has been a leading proponent of the theory that newsrooms have a negative and defensive culture, strongly resisting changes in how the work is done. Also, the center's director, Mike Smith, notes, "We never said this was a menu of things you could pick from. You have to do them all in a sustained way to be effective."

That matches the structure of the various company editorial programs described here -- a strong push from above and a commitment to what Gannett's Currie calls the long haul.

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Toward 2006

It is beyond the scope of this story to try to assess how the various programs or more informal applications of Readership Institute suggestions are playing in the trenches. (However, since many Poynter Online readers do work in the trenches, please do tell us!)

Phil Meyer of the University of North Carolina devotes a chapter in his upcoming book, The Last Newspaper Reader, to the effectiveness of changing editorial content. His conclusion: to date, the approach has not shown as much relevance to circulation retention and penetration as have indicators of higher levels of news department resources like staff, budget, and space.

Thus, strong results from emphasizing the recommended content, story forms, and other measures would buck the trend Meyer has identified. But the Readership Institute is also a bigger, longer, more systematic attempt at identifying appealing content.

My own perspective comes from three years studying issues and measures of news capacity. I think I see at least some resource questions hidden beneath what look to be simple tradeoffs of better content for routine coverage.

Take, for instance, the recommendation of more people-oriented, feature-style storytelling (echoing an earlier study by ASNE and Poynter a decade ago). Good idea, why doesn't it happen more often?

My colleague Roy Peter Clark, who has been toiling in these vineyards for 30 years, notes that not all editors and reporters know how -- at least that kind of story isn't in their comfort zone. Then there is this question: will assigning editors with many reporters under their wing and reporters under the gun for a high story count pause long enough in the daily rush to identify stories that would benefit from a non-traditional telling?

That's not to say, though, that the better practice is not worth pursuing with whatever combination of research, training, and cap letter programs it takes. In fact Clark came back from a recent consulting job at Florida Today on "Real Life, Real News" with a very positive take on Gannett's latest.

It's a supplement, not a frothy substitute for basic local news coverage, he said. Local news staff has plenty of autonomy in deciding how to carry out what's asked. The nature of the stories forces some exploration of alternative storytelling techniques — they don't work at all in inverted-pyramid. And what he saw there — a piece about a boy getting his braces off, for instance -- was often just a good story. Told you something about the business of orthodontia along the way.

Probably the safest conclusion about the wave of editorial improvement programs and the Readership Institute work is that they are midstream and poised for a run of several more years. The Institute is deeply into disseminating its findings. New research is in process on urgent topics such as content with special appeal to minorities and young readers. So check back in 2006.

By then, we ought to have a better sense of whether these are appealing concepts that come into fashion and then fade as team reporting did in the 1990s or whether there has been a lasting industry advance in providing what readers look for in a daily newspaper.