July 1, 2010

Memo to Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News staffs

MEMORANDUM
DATE: July 1, 2010
TO: Houston Chronicle Newsroom
San Antonio Express-News Newsroom
FROM: Jeff Cohen and Bob Rivard
RE: The Texas Hub – Moving Forward

It was about a year ago when Steve Swartz at Hearst Newspapers urged us to accelerate the rate of exchange between our two newsrooms. Since then, all of you have done an amazing job to get the maximum out of our shared editorial resources. We’re operating a joint Austin bureau, working closely in Washington, seamlessly synchronizing breaking news coverage in Texas and on the border, coordinating a lot of coverage in Sports and other areas, and jointly producing most of the daily features sections for both newspapers.

In the next step of our editorial partnership, the Business, Sports and Features departments in Houston and San Antonio will begin working even more closely together in planning their coverage and sections. Today we announce the following Texas editors who will lead development of joint coverage for both papers in each of these areas. They are:

* Laura Goldberg, now Houston’s Business Editor, becomes Texas Business Editor, working with San Antonio Business Editor Emily Spicer.

* Brad Lehman, now San Antonio’s Sports Editor, becomes Texas Sports Editor, based in Houston, working with Jeff Rosen in Houston and San Antonio Sports Editor Burt Henry.

* Kyrie O’Connor, now Deputy Managing Editor/Features in Houston, becomes Texas Features Editor, working with Melissa Aguilar in Houston and San Antonio Features Editor Terry Bertling.

They will report to us and to Scott Clark, who will serve as the project manager on our consolidation efforts.

Our top priority is to maintain strong local coverage in San Antonio and Houston with the goal of further building our audience. The task of these Texas editors and those working with them is to do that and to go beyond sharing and exchanging stories to jointly planning coverage, maximizing the opportunities to create content for use in both newspapers.

In Business, for example, this doesn’t mean that both papers will emphasize – or even run – the same stories from day to day. But the editors will identify more opportunities to do advance stories, trend stories, issue stories and other features that will have broad appeal across markets. And they will take advantage of the combined resources of their staffs on others. For example, in covering the recent Big 12 realignment, Sports would have developed a joint coverage plan, assigning stories, graphics and other content to reporters at both papers, effectively treating them as one staff.

In the end, it will be up to the new Texas editors – and the assigning editors and staffs in Houston and San Antonio – to identify other ways to take advantage of their combined resources.

Another part of the Houston-San Antonio partnership – the consolidation of the page production for the two papers – is undergoing further study, with a focus on options for improving the technology to support it. While that work is ongoing, Houston will continue to produce five daily S.A. Life features sections, but the move to copy edit and paginate additional sections of the two papers has been postponed.

Changes often beg questions. If you have any, please see me or Bob. Meanwhile, thank you for your part in making our many news products indispensible to so many readers and users in Texas.

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From 1999 to 2011, Jim Romenesko maintained the Romenesko page for the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit school for journalists. Poynter hired him in August…
Jim Romenesko

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