Brady: Centralized production of national, international news key to Journal Register’s future

Street Fight
Jim Brady, editor-in-chief of Journal Register Co., tells Rick Robinson that local news operations can survive financially, “but you have to keep your costs down to do it. That’s the thinking behind something like [Project] Thunderdome. We can’t have people at 18 different papers finding, editing and paginating a story about the war in Afghanistan, or a movie review or a Wimbledon roundup. We have to find a way to provide that information centrally to our papers so that they can focus on local issues and coverage.” He goes on to say that local news is “not just our bread and butter, that’s our whole meal. If we’re using local resources to produce national and international news, we’re doing something wrong.” || Related: What’s Project Thunderdome, you ask? Inside Jim Brady’s new job at Journal Register Company (Nieman Journalism Lab) | MediaNews and Journal Register Co. brought under one roof with John Paton at helm (Poynter.org) |  MediaNews considers copy desk, pagination consolidation (Poynter.org) || Earlier: Paton tells News & Tech that “66 percent of our cost structure is devoted to things we don’t want to do. Only one-third is content creation.” (Disclosure: Jim Brady is consulting for Poynter.)