It's a Wrap

In the new Information Center, Yost has been switched to a beat covering "Scottsdale events." It's a far cry from a European assignment.

Karina Bland is a respected award-winning news reporter who, in 2002, spent nearly a year covering problems at Child Protective Services. Her work single-handedly made the agency one of the biggest issues in that year's gubernatorial race.

In the new Information Center, Bland is the Republic's "busy mom reporter." She now writes occasionally for the printed newspaper but blogs regularly on a new Web site for young mothers. (That site, www.az central.com/families, is closely based on one that originated last year at Gannett's Indianapolis paper.)

Five of the Republic's news reporters are now mobile journalists, or "mojos." And two of the paper's five columns — the ones by Jon Talton and Richard Ruelas, both left-leaning by Republic standards — were cut.

Ruelas was shifted to a job writing features, which at today's Republic is the equivalent of interning at Ladies' Home Journal. (Ruelas used to be one of the only Republic reporters willing to dog Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Instead, his big story last week was called "Keep Your Cool: Five Ways to Prepare Your Home for the Hot Times Ahead.")

Offered a reporting gig, Talton chose to quit.

"Gannett and the Republic took a lot of heat for me, but they supported me for six and a half years," he says. "They offered me a different job, but it's not why I came here. I wish them well, but it's not what I came here to do."

A hometown boy, Talton returned to Phoenix after a long, successful career as a reporter and editor. (Talton also writes mystery novels.) He's skeptical that shorter stories and mobile journalists are the best way for a newspaper to weather the Internet age.

"There's an amazing amount of group think in this industry that values stories that are shorter and dumber," he says. "You could argue that in the age in the Internet, you have to do more in-depth, more authoritative coverage. But newspaper executives don't have a variety of ideas of how to succeed, because they're so used to monopoly markets."

Faced with slumping ad revenue, newspaper executives sought salvation in Web-based advertising, hoping they could make enough money to compensate for the printed paper's circulation losses. After all, many people who don't subscribe to the printed edition now read it online for free. Online ads, some newspaper executives assumed, could reap the benefit of their page views.

But it hasn't been that easy.

Newspapers' share of local online advertising has actually shrunk in the past two years, according to the consulting firm Borrell Associates. That's happening even as newspapers have invested more money into online products — and more time into figuring out how to make the Web pay off.

An Inland Cost and Revenue Study, which appears to have been first cited in the Wall Street Journal, found that each subscriber is worth $500 to $900 in advertising revenue for a newspaper. But a unique visitor to a Web site, the study found, is only worth about $10, if the paper is lucky.

Tom Mohr, former president of Knight Ridder Digital, spent last year running ASU's New Media Innovation Lab, a public-private partnership aimed at helping the Republic figure out how to make money online.

He knows that's a difficult task. "In 11 years of newspapers being on the Web, there hasn't been a single success story from a product coming out of newspapers," he says.

And that's because the model has shifted, he says. It's not about local ad reps persuading local businesses to buy online ads on the local newspaper's Web site. People don't go to azcentral.com to buy plane tickets — even tickets out of Sky Harbor. They go to national travel sites, like Orbitz.

Mohr believes that, for the Web to become a real revenue source, newspapers will have to form a national consortium and force search sites like Google to cut them in on their ad profits. For all his excitement about the idea, he knows it's a tall order. "It requires the newspaper industry to do something it's never been able to do: work together," he says.

Until that happens, papers like the Republic are going to have to tough it out — or find their own way. Bushee gets that. "It will take time for the online revenue to grow to the level that print has enjoyed for many years," he acknowledges.

But Bushee doesn't seem to question whether hyping the Web is the way to go.

"Journalism has always resisted change," he says. "The most scary thing would be to do nothing. I think we all wish we had started five years ago rather than five months ago. We had to start catching up."

The question is whether the Information Center is moving in the right direction to do that.

Jon Talton, the paper's former columnist, remains unconvinced that briefs are the way to attract dedicated readers, the kind willing, perhaps, to subscribe to an online newspaper.

"The Wall Street Journal is able to sell its content online, and the New York Times is able to sell some of it because they have superior journalism that you need to read," Talton says.