Ventura County Star newsroom reorganization

In October, the Online Journalism Award for general excellence in the small site category went to the Ventura County Star. The judges wrote: "The site exemplifies how a decision to fully immerse a news organization in online journalism can transform a small local newspaper into a multiple media information source for the community."

The award followed the paper's decision to rethink its mission and reorganize its newsroom for a new era. In deciding how to do it, Managing Editor John Moore wrote to tell us:

"We opted not to take the path of Ganett or even our sister Scripps paper in Naples, Fla., and become a "web-first" newsroom. Certainly all our content pushes to the web immediately. But we did not want to de-emphasize the newspaper and replace that emphasis with online. We wanted to grow our online while maintaining quality (not just reverse published material) in print. Ours continues to be an ongoing project as we try to figure out how to structure ourselves to meet greater demands with fewer people."

Moore agreed to share with us this presentation he gave back in July about the changes in the Ventura newsroom.

By John Moore

The genesis for reorganization of the Ventura County Star newsroom came from our drive to train a room full of journalists on how to be multimedia reporters.

In the fall of 2005, editor Joe Howry decided that to move forward with the evolution of online content, that The Star needed to provide its reporters, editors, photographers and graphics artists with the tools to become full multimedia reporters. This decision came at the same time The Star made the strategic decision to retain control of the content of the website within the newsroom.

In early 2006, The Star hired multimedia consultant Jane Ellen Stevens, who also instructs at the University of California, Berkeley, to do in-house multimedia training. Howry, in announcing this, promised that every journalist in our newsroom would receive the training, if they were interested. Each group of eight reporters, photographers and editors received three days of intensive training from Stevens. We then allowed that training group freedom in the next six weeks to practice and perfect their skills away from the daily beat pressures. They returned to their normal assignments after six weeks of training.

As of June 15, 2007, we have trained 30 journalists in video, audio and Flash.

After the second training group, we realized that our newsroom structure was not capable of managing multimedia content from the same reporters who were responsible for providing stories for the daily newspaper. The biggest problem, we discovered, was the demand on our middle managers who had the responsibility of pushing through the content to fill tomorrow’s newspaper. That was their priority.

They needed that 10-inch story to fill the newshole on page three of the Local news section far more than they needed a 5-button Flash project for the website.

We also knew that we wanted to improve the quality of our story discussions. The focus on news generation had allowed us to slip away from the deeper quality discussions we felt were necessary to provide better, richer stories for readers who were demanding that.

But we did not want to impose a new structure by fiat. So we went to the staff and said: Help us. We created a newsroom wiki and tossed out some off-the-wall ideas to spur discussion (such as: Why not have the Sports writers cover education seeing as they’re on school campuses more than any other reporter? An idea, by the way, that did not have much traction in the newsroom). From the discussions on the wiki, we pulled ideas that we then took to a series of open newsroom “wiki” meetings where we talked about them at length.

It was from those discussions that the newsroom reorganization was created. It was implemented in March 2007 after editor Joe Howry and managing editor John Moore met individually with every member of the newsroom to discuss the plan.

The reorganization has two key components.

The first is a re-emphasis on issue coverage by reporters. This is, obviously, not a new concept. The idea of teams and issue-focused reporting is part of the ongoing yin and yang of newsroom structures. The Star was there 15 years ago and then evolved back to more traditional beat coverage in the past decade. But we found that our readership studies indicated we were not providing the depth or breadth of coverage in content areas that were either high readership, or high interest. So we focused on those content areas.

Our community coverage remains the backbone of our daily content. While it may appear that we deemphasized that in our reorganization, what we did was to try to provide more focused attention on the community. There are six major communities in our coverage area. In the prior structure, two editors had the full-time responsibility for covering those communities. Under the reorganization, each community has its own editor who has responsibility for that coverage in addition to responsibility for an issue area. For instance, the senior editor in charge of our education coverage (with three reporters) also has oversight on our city of Ventura coverage (with one reporter). He has the flexibility, if there are multiple Ventura stories on any given day, to tap his education reporters to do a Ventura daily story.

But that editor no longer has the responsibility for filling the Ventura local news section. He simply provides the content. The production aspect of booking the paper falls to two assistant managing editors. They take content from all areas of the paper and determine where it should be played. This allows greater flexibility in proper play of stories. For instance, a story emanating out of the business staff that really is more of a community story than a business story (say, a local business leader who becomes involved in a community development project) can now be played on the local news section. Or a sports story can more easily be pushed to page one if it’s a good reader. Or a well written profile from a city reporter can play on the feature front.

This freedom from filling section newshole allows the senior editors who formerly had that responsibility to now focus more on story development and content, including more focused discussions on the multimedia aspect of that story.

The change was implemented in March 2007. As with all change, it has not been without its bumps. It was a cultural shift for a newsroom whose mantra for a decade was providing content for six local zoned sections each day. We are just now beginning to see the success of the project with better multimedia stories and more of them. We are struggling to find the balance in local print content, but still believe it is a structure that can serve our readers both in print and online.