Steffens will talk about the state of the newspaper industry, where it might be going and how it might get there at his 9 a.m. session to kick off the two-day workshop.

In addition to his duties as communications director, Steffens is an adjunct assistant professor at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, which is based at the University of Missouri. Before joining the staff at RJI, Steffens was executive director of the National Newspaper Association, associate director of New Directions for News and senior vice president and editor at the Editor & Publisher Co.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s charge is to engage media professionals, scholars and other citizens in programs aimed at strengthening journalism in the service of democracy. RJI generates and tests new techniques and new thinking that promise to improve journalism. RJI focues on ideas, experimentation and research.

Other sessions at the Feb. 11-12 workshop include “Doing more with less,” “Managing social media,” “Integration or innovation,” the “View from the newsroom,” and the “View from the top,” among others.

Registration for the workshop is $50 for the first person from a newspaper and $40 for each additional member from that staff. Registration includes breakfast and lunch.

To register, contact John Ryan, MPI executive director, at jmryan@eiu.edu or by calling 217.581.7939.

Sheraton room rates for the conference are $89 for single and double suite, $99 for triple occupancy and $109 for quad occupancy. Reservations can be made by calling 314.231.5007. The Sheraton is located at 400 S. 14th St.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LZ5V7HG

Workshop Schedule for 2012

This year we have seven workshops planned. Three will be two-day seminars and four will be  one-day seminars. Two will be based in St. Louis and five will be held in various parts of the MPI membership region. Mark your calendars and plan on attending a workshop near you in 2012.

Feb. 11-12

Managing Change

Planning for our first workshop of the year is under way. The conference will be held at the Sheraton St. Louis City Center Hotel & Suites, and will coincide with our annual board meeting. The workshop will center on management issues and the ever-increasing digital demands on newspapers.

April

Watchdog Journalism

Being awarded a McCormick Foundation grant, MPI and Investigative Reports & Editors Inc. will team up for a one-day workshop in the Chicago area. An exact time and place will be announced soon.

May

Watchdog Journalism II

MPI will present a variation on its April workshop in May in Indianapolis. Plans are under way for a repeat performance of the one-day April workshop.

June 17-18

Sports issues (coincides w/St. Louis v. Kansas City Royals game)

Our annual sports workshops have become very popular, especially when our keynote speakers the past two years have been the general manager of the Cards and the vice president of the Rams. Start making plans for this year to see what we do special. The workshop again will be held at the Sheraton St. Louis City Center Hotel & Suites.

Sept. 27-28

Elections & New Media

In our effort to continue to reach out to our membership, we are partnering with the Wisconsin Press Association for a two-day workshop in Madison. In 2011 we partnered with APME’s NewsTrain and the Wisconsin Press Association for a tremendously successful conference in Madison. In 2012, we will match those results with a workshop on the election and social media.

October

Smart-phone Technology and the News

We’re planning another one-day workshop in either St. Louis or Nashville or some place in between on the smart-phone and how to use it to gather news. We will be joining forces with the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute at a location to be determined.

November

Law & Ethics

Join us in Springfield, Ill., at the Illinois Press Association headquarters for a one-day session on setting standards, discussing ethics, examining Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act and discussing legal issues.

A panel of three experts on the process of mobile news app development discussed what they’ve learned about tablet and mobile news thus far.

Their conclusions: There should be more to news apps than just news, the majority of mobile and tablet apps never should have been made and most publications do not have the right people to create apps efficiently.

The experts on the panel were Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital Works, Chris Courtney of the Tribune Media Group and Ray Marcano of Cox Media Group who spoke at a panel at the Tablet/Mobile Strategies and Visions for News Organizations workshop at the Renaissance St. Louis Grand Hotel in St. Louis on Saturday, Sept. 30.

Although the panel was titled “One (+) Year Out: What We’ve Learned So Far About Mobile and Tablet News,” Courtney began his presentation by suggesting names he felt to be more appropriate including “Mobile 2011: We’re doing it wrong.”

Courtney said 90 percent of news apps are merely modified versions of what the app maker should have on their mobile website and are therefore “completely useless.”

Courtney said the reason why there are so many useless apps is because a few years ago there was a rush to make them.

“Everyone needed an app but no one knew why,” Courtney said.

He suggested to the audience of industry professionals that instead of spending resources making a new app for mobile devices to simply improve the mobile web sites they have already.

Yelvington also talked about the importance of mobile web and mobile devices, saying that currently “mobile web is where the traffic is.”

He said one of the reasons for that is because younger users are using smart phones over tablets. He said this is critical because studies have shown life media habits start when you are young. He said it is important to see if the twenty-somethings who use their smart phones will continue to do so and never use tablets.

Marcano focused on the nuts and bolts side of mobile news app development. He said if a company is considering making a mobile app, they need to get someone on their team who “knows it all.” He said often companies will have their knowledge about the app making process spread between several people, rather than just one well-versed person.

The Daily is a canary in a cold mine.  If it comes out alive, newspapers will know the mobile platform is a route they can follow.

A design heavy, iPad-only publication, The Daily has a magazine look with a newspaper schedule. That means they put out a new edition every day.

“Design is one the most important things at The Daily,” said Mike Schmidt, creative director.  ”Especially the editorial design.”

Because of the iPad’s interface, The Daily actually designs two versions a day, one for a vertical format and the other for a horizontal format.

Schmidt spoke alongside Claus Enovoldsen, a senior marketing manager at Next Issue Media, spoke during the Tablet/Mobile Strategies and Visions for News Organizations workshop in St. Louis, Mo. Sept. 29.  Their presentation covered designing newspaper editions for tablet users.

“Tablets are still in diapers,” said Enovoldsen.

The Daily has gone through four updates in less than a year.

Growth is in the future for the tablet market.  By 2015, the sales of tablets will equal today’s desktop computer sales.

According to Schmidt, readers are very engaged. “People are commenting a ton,” he said.

Readers can leave audio-only comments in the application as well.

At Next Issue, they specialize in making enhanced versions of publications for tablets.  Next Issue looks to publications like The Daily for inspiration when it comes to enhancing stories for the iPad and other mobile platforms.

Because of these efforts, readers of Next Issue’s publications found themselves reading stories they probably would have skipped.

“It’s not about a video or this or that, it’s about the package,” said Schmidt.  ”Telling a story is important with text and pictures and video and everything you’ve got.

Employees of these publications also aren’t the typical designers or copy editors.

“We had to find people that knew HTML5 and were graphic designers,” said Enovoldsen.

“This industry is ripe for smart young talented people,” said Schmidt. “Hire documentary film makers who don’t use the word multimedia – they just do.”

What won’t change is the feeling of closure when reading an interactive edition. People like the newspaper experience where there are pages to swipe through. On the web, a site can seem endless with endless content.

“You have a start, and you have an end,” said Enovoldsen.  ”People crave that.”

Overall, Schmidt and Enovoldsen could agree that the newspaper is not dead, but it is sick.

“It’s time to rip the Band-Aid and go all out,” said Enovoldsen.

Studies show that 50 percent of people surveyed searched news and 70 percent searched weather on their phones.

Regina McCombs, a Poynter Institute faculty member, said a Nielsen study shows the most valued features on phones are GPS, social networking, downloading and playing music and web browsing, in that order.

McCombs spoke along with Roger Fidler, Reynolds Journalism Institute program director for digital publishing, at the Tablet/Mobile Strategies and Visions for News Organizations workshop in St. Louis, Mo. Sept. 30 in a segment titled, “Mobile and Tablet Research Roundup.”

She also said that the research shows we are using phones while doing a variety of other things such as watching TV, shopping, eating, driving and even during sex.

“There’s actually not included here some research that some 10 percent actually use it (phone)  while they are having sex,” McCombs said. “Really, nobody notices?”

McCombs said that people are using their phones in all aspects of life and expect the same things they get from a desktop, like search engines and email.

She said trying to figure out what people are  doing on their phones is a wasted effort because clear defined groups cannot be drawn.

“There is one really interesting study that said it is actually kind of stupid to try and figure out what people are doing on their phones,” McCombs said. “Because they are doing everything and different people are doing some things and you can’t even tell with any success.”

McCombs said on March 11, 2011, the day of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, CNN had 13.9 million mobile page views that day, along with over one million app downloads over the next 10 days.

Overall she said that mobile is driving a lot of the traffic on the internet and 60 percent of people are on the internet when they are watching TV.

She also said that iPads account for 69 percent of tablets sold and are predicted to dominate the market until 2015, but these numbers were out before the release of the Kindle Fire. Studies are showing that people are primarily using their tablets early in the morning and then during leisure hours at night.

Studies also show that an increasing number of people want long form professional videos, McCombs said. People are watching videos, looking at magazines and news on their tablets.

“We know that mobile is local, personal, social,” McCombs said. “Mobile phone is fast. The tablet is in depth, it is news, weather and video.”

Fidler said it is hard researching  information about mobile devices and their use because some information is old and some have conflicting information.

“It’s hard to really get a feel for what’s happening on out there,” Fidler said.

He said that when RJI is doing online polls they also do not know if their data may be skewed.

Video by Brandon Goodwin, University of Kentucky

College journalism students are going digital with already published content.

Roger Fidler, program director for digital publishing with the Reynolds Journalism Institute, spoke about the Reynolds Journalism Institute-Digital Publishing Alliance (RJI-DPA) tablet project at the Tablet/Mobile Strategies and Visions for News Organizations workshop in St. Louis, Mo. Sept. 29.

At the University of Missouri, Fidler worked on a Newsbook project, for which more than two dozen Newsbooks were designed for DPA members between 2007 and 2010.

“[We are] taking stories newspapers have done as investigative reports and put them into e-book format,” Fidler said.

He has worked with graduate students and other students at Missouri creating Newsbooks for the New York Times and the Washington Post, among other publications.

“The New York Times did an open secrets Newsbook taking all the WikiLeaks material and telling how it happened,” Fidler said.

The WikiLeaks investigative piece was put together as a Newsbook for Amazon’s  Kindle and iBooks for the iPad. According to Fidler, the story in the New York Times said this was the first time the paper had done a Newsbook.

Fidler also spoke about creating a Newsbook store as a pilot to see if there was enough interest in buying.

“The whole point was to create another source of revenue to support quality journalism [and] investigative reporting,” Fidler said.

They found that the Newsbooks that sold best were the ones where the newspaper promoted them on the website.

“[They were] directing people to storefront we created,” Fidler said.

Newsbooks are designed in InDesign and converted to a PDF format. Fidler’s team worked with embedded multimedia and layered content. The team also produced advertising for local advertisers and within the first 10 weeks of the trial, Fidler said they made money.

“The point of Newsbooks is that [they] represent opportunity,” Fidler said.

Fidler said the Newsbook Project is a new opportunity offered by the emergence of media tablets and third generation e-readers.

Fidler also spoke about RJI-DPA surveys in relation to the iPad. For the fall 2010 RJI iPad survey, there were 1,598 U.S. respondents. In a spring 2011 panel survey, 561 people from the original panel were followed up with. The summer survey, which began July 15 and is being extended through October, had more than 500 international respondents. It is being continued for one more month in hopes of building up to around 1,000 respondents, according to Fidler.

Future surveys include a phone survey that will be done this fall, probably in October or November, Fidler said, and the survey is being done in conjunction with the Center for Advanced Social Research at Missouri. They will survey about 800 people through random selection, with about 60 percent with landlines and 40 cell phones.

“It will be a much broader survey looking at how they consume news and how they’re using different mobile devices to get their news,” Fidler said.

Another tablet survey will be held in the spring, looking at a longitudinal study to see how attitudes change over time.

A second follow up will be conducted in fall 2012. The results of the first two surveys are available at rjionline.org. DPA members are given first access to the results of the surveys, which are posted on the RJI website after reviews by DPA members.

Guy Tasaka

 Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., and Guy Tasaka, the self-proclaimed “Forrest Gump” of digital publishing, agreed the best way to describe the role of newspapers’ transitions to the mobile medium was by way of baseball.

Peck and Tasaka spoke at the Tablet/Mobile Strategies and Visions For News Organizations conference in St. Louis in a session titled “Integrating Tablets into a Paid Digital Strategy.”

Peck said the St. Louis Cardinals’ narrow win over the Houston Astros Wednesday, Sept. 28, that unexpectedly led the Cardinals into the playoffs, was not unlike newspapers nationwide attempting a comeback after years of declining profits.

“If you think back a month ago, the Cardinals were out of it,” he said. “And through a combination of events, some good fortune and some gritty play at the end, they made the playoffs. The newspaper industry is trying to draw some strings from that.”

Chris Peck

The two organized their session by explaining to a group of around 40 media and consultant representatives how they had worked together the past year on a nearly $1 million dollar project to unveil a new mobile presence for The Commercial Appeal.

Peck said significant staff layoffs and circulation cuts of up to 100,000, had not rescued the CA from declining profits over the past three years – a trend he said is not uncommon. He didn’t blame the low profits on a lessened demand for news content, but rather on a shifting consumption base.

“This country needs journalism more than it ever has,” he said. “Unfortunately, (newspapers) have never been at a more weakened state.”

Tasaka agreed and cited forecaster’s reports that Apple, Inc., may have up to 100 million iPods on the market by 2012.

He said his work with launching The New York Time’s first web editions and recent consultations out of a digital publishing solutions media group has given him firsthand experience in consumers’ shift to mobile media.

“I know what worked, and I know what didn’t work,” he said. And Tasaka said, while he knew making profits with news applications for tablet computers and smart phones could be done for the CA, it would take a well thought-out strategy.

Peck and Tasaka laid their initial strategies out for the audience.

They showed how The Commercial Appeal, one of oldest papers in the south, and the longest-lasting business in Memphis, maintained three objectives in the platform and subscription redesign of last year.

The first was to create and maintain a revenue model for mobile products that could generate both advertising and subscription revenue. Second, the paper set out to link new paid digital subscriptions with print subscriptions to add value to the Sunday edition, which Peck said generates a significant portion of the paper’s weekly profits. Finally, the paper purposed itself to design an interface that would allow for digital expansion, while providing the optimal news consumption experience for readers.

Tasaka displayed a graph that showed the monetary trend of how developing more digital interface while removing the free-for-all feature of the content could add greater real and perceived value to print subscriptions.

The three factors represented in the graph showed a less severe decline in profitability the more media content was provided on and the stricter the content source was on preventing free-rider use.

“That space between the lines,” he said, “that’s revenue.”

Peck said the complete content normalization engine he and staff built with the help of Tasaka included a 10-story per month limit before paid online and media subscription, along with a complete news app suite on both tablet and smartphone formats.

The new formats, officially launched Sunday, Oct. 2, will represent a changing of times in the newspaper industry, Peck said.

His daily paper, the largest of the E. W. Scripps Company, will still be published, but with further efforts toward mobile digital media formats.

“We can’t let go of print, because that’s where the money is,” he said.

Peck admitted that, while advertising on the new apps is limited – a single advertisement thus far – his team is working on broadening that number.

The two-day conference was co-sponsored by The American Society of News Editors, the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Digital Publishing Alliance and the Mid-America Press Institute.

Brandon Goodwin
University of Kentucky

Within the next few years, home desktop computers as we know them will be obsolete.

The replacement: tablet devices.

Steve Yelvington, a senior strategist at Morris Digital Works and founder of the now startribune.com, made that point in his presentation at the “Tablet/Mobile Strategies and Visions for News Organizations” workshop in St. Louis, Thursday, Sept. 29.

Yelvington’s presentation, called “How do Tablets Fit Into Newspapers’ Mobile Strategies,” focused on tablet and mobile innovations that could change how consumers will interact with information, and what news companies are missing that prevents them from succeeding in the mobile market.

For example, while tablets have potential to take over the mobile device market, Yelvington said that has not happened yet.

Part of the reason falls with the design of news applications. Designers are struggling with “finger-friendly interaction design,” he said.

Most newsrooms’ digital strategies include covering what is happening in the immediate present, but lack an open forums for community conversation and useful reference information.

“But, It’s not just the newsroom.” Yelvington said. “A lot of what we ought to be doing with this [tablet] technology is commerce, and connecting people with buying and selling.

“When you look at most of our mobile sites and tablet applications you see coming from news companies, that stuff is just completely missing.”

Yelvington also said Morris Digital Works focuses on improving their mobile web, mobile app and tablet apps. What they ignore in their strategy is tablet web development.

“At this point, our thinking is the size of the tablet market is still pretty small. We can’t justify rebuilding everything that we do on the web to meet the needs of the tablets.”

The current web frameworks that adjust for traditional web viewing and tablet viewing are broken, and he expects HTML5 to be a solution.

Programmers will then be able to move from a page focus to application focus, he said.

He cited the recent bostonglobe.com HTML5 based framework, which adjusts the layout of stories according to screen size, as a structure as a working model, compatible with multiple devices.

With mobile websites, Yelvington predicted the next generation of mobile websites will be more finger-friendly with large app-like button, use geolocation services and include non-news related fields, like daily deals.

Tablet consumers tend to be more affluent and hold more traditional views on how news is presented, Yelvington said.

“If you are going to charge for a product like this,” he said. “You really don’t want it to be a representation of what you are doing on your website.”

Newspapers also have an inherent advantage over news websites, he said. They are better able to show editorial judgment, and have a beginning and an end. Websites are template and are hold nearly endless amounts of information.

That influenced the form and shape of their tablet app to look and feel more like a newspaper, with the additions of videos, slideshows and interactive media.

The two-day conference, co-sponsored by The American Society of News Editors, the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Digital Publishing Alliance and the Mid-America Press Institute, includes national leaders and innovators in the digital publishing industry.