There is an old habit in the newspaper business that has always fascinated me. A photographer gets an assignment, grabs thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, climbs into a vehicle, burns fuel, spends an hour driving across town, photographs something as ordinary as a utility pole, drives back to the office, processes the photograph, uploads it, files it and eventually places it into a story. Somewhere along the way, several people have been paid to accomplish what an existing licensed or stock photograph might have accomplished in less than five minutes.
There is nothing inherently wrong with sending a photographer to photograph a utility pole. Sometimes the actual pole is the story, and when it is, somebody ought to go photograph the damn pole. But when it is merely an illustration, sending someone across town simply because newspapers have always done it that way is not journalism. It is habit masquerading as necessity.
At the Grants Pass Tribune, we have never been particularly interested in preserving expensive habits for ceremonial purposes.
Efficiency matters. Production matters. The smallest details matter. Running a newspaper, particularly a daily digital newspaper, is not an easy feat conducted between breakfast and dinner. News does not punch a time clock. Fires do not wait until Monday morning. Police activity does not politely arrange itself around publishing schedules. Government does not stop producing documents because the editor would like a weekend. A newspaper is an organism that consumes attention virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and every unnecessary hour or dollar spent somewhere is an hour or dollar unavailable somewhere else.
That reality has shaped the Grants Pass Tribune from the beginning.
We are not a traditional newspaper. We have never claimed to be one, and more importantly, we have never wanted to become one.
There are people who find that amusing. There are people who mock the way we produce the Tribune, the way it looks, the tools we use, the speed at which we operate and the fact that we are perfectly comfortable abandoning traditions that no longer serve a useful purpose. That is fine. History is littered with industries that laughed at the replacement for the thing they were still busy perfecting.
Innovation almost always looks improper to people who have spent their lives memorizing the old rules.
What some people misunderstand is that rejecting the traditional newspaper business model does not require rejecting the traditional responsibilities of journalism. Those are two entirely different things. Accuracy still matters. Fairness still matters. Grammar matters. Context matters. Corrections matter. Public records matter. Government accountability matters. Knowing the difference between reporting and opinion matters enormously.
But whether those principles arrive at your doorstep wrapped around yesterday’s advertisements and secured with a rubber band is another question entirely.
We chose digital production because it allows a small newspaper to operate with an economic structure that would have been nearly impossible a generation ago. We do not maintain printing presses. We do not purchase truckloads of newsprint. We do not require fleets of delivery vehicles to move thousands of physical copies around Southern Oregon before sunrise. We do not need an enormous building filled with departments simply because twentieth-century newspaper production required one.
Our production costs can therefore remain a fraction of what a traditional printed newspaper must carry, and that changes the economics of local journalism considerably.
Every unnecessary expense we eliminate gives us additional room to concentrate on the product itself. Technology allows a small newsroom to accomplish work that once required considerably larger organizations. Digital photography, stock imagery, modern publishing systems, electronic public records, remote communications, automated production tools and rapidly evolving software have fundamentally altered what a newspaper can be.
We intend to use those tools.
There is no prize awarded for making journalism unnecessarily difficult.
Our philosophy toward presentation is equally uncomplicated. We approach the Tribune much like a jeweler approaches a rough stone. The information is the substance, but presentation determines whether people stop long enough to examine it. We do not believe factual journalism must look dull in order to be legitimate. We do not believe an unattractive page somehow demonstrates greater intellectual seriousness. We do not believe readers should have to excavate information from a visual landfill simply because clutter was once a familiar characteristic of newspapers.
We want the Tribune polished.
We want strong photographs, clean pages, readable typography, compelling headlines and a publication that looks deliberate rather than assembled. When something does not look right, we work on it. When technology provides a better method, we examine it. When a process wastes time without improving journalism, we question why we are doing it.
Good journalism and good presentation are not adversaries. One concerns the integrity of the information. The other concerns whether somebody wants to read it.
And readers are changing.
This may be the most important point of all because the Grants Pass Tribune is not being built exclusively for Baby Boomers or Generation X. Those generations, including my own, inherited newspapers designed largely according to the habits of the generations before us. We grew accustomed to them because that was what existed.
The next generation has no obligation to inherit those habits.
Young readers have spent their entire lives surrounded by screens. They expect immediacy, strong visual presentation, intuitive navigation and information that respects their time. They are not going to suddenly develop an emotional attachment to inefficient production methods merely because newspaper executives spent a century using them.
If local journalism expects to survive, it cannot spend the next 20 years demanding that tomorrow’s readers behave like yesterday’s subscribers.
The newspaper must adapt to the reader without surrendering the principles that made journalism worth preserving in the first place.
That is the experiment taking place here.
We are attempting to separate the institution of journalism from the machinery that historically surrounded it. Keep the reporting. Keep the public service. Keep the watchdog function. Keep the discipline of verification. Keep the community connection. Keep the responsibility to publish information people need.
Then have the courage to reconsider nearly everything else.
We are already seeing small independent digital publications emerge around the country because the barriers that once made newspaper publishing extraordinarily expensive have begun to collapse. A determined local operation no longer necessarily needs millions of dollars in machinery and infrastructure before publishing its first edition. That does not make journalism easy. Nothing about gathering, verifying, writing, editing and publishing news every day is easy. What technology has done is make the economics more rational.
There is an environmental advantage as well. A digital newspaper does not require forests of paper, printing chemicals, physical distribution networks or thousands of individual deliveries merely to place information in front of readers. The same story can reach someone across Grants Pass, across Oregon or across the country without a single sheet of newsprint rolling through a press.
That is not a repudiation of newspaper history. It is the continuation of it through different machinery.
The Grants Pass Tribune is therefore not an attempt to recreate the newspaper I grew up reading. I have no interest in building a museum exhibit and calling it innovation.
I want us to build something capable of outliving us.
Someday, if we have done this correctly, the people running this newspaper will belong to a generation that sees media differently than I do. They will undoubtedly change things I thought were brilliant. They will probably laugh at technology we currently consider revolutionary. They may look back at some of our production methods with the same bewilderment with which we now regard hot-metal typesetting and composing rooms.
Good.
That will mean the newspaper kept moving.
Our responsibility is not to freeze journalism at the moment we happened to inherit it. Our responsibility is to preserve what deserves preserving, discard what no longer works and build an institution flexible enough for the next generation to make it their own.
So yes, the Grants Pass Tribune looks different. It operates differently. It thinks differently about production, technology, imagery, distribution and cost. We make no apology for that.
We are not trying to win a contest for being the best newspaper of 1985, and we certainly are not interested in manufacturing our own awards, polishing the trophies and declaring ourselves champions.
We are trying to determine what a community newspaper should look like in 2035, 2045 and beyond, while holding tightly to the fundamental journalistic principles that were important long before any of us arrived.
If that occasionally makes us the strange little newspaper doing things differently in Southern Oregon, I can live with that.
Every polished diamond began as something that did not look particularly impressive to somebody who did not know what they were looking at.