Archive for February, 2007
Tennessean will be 24/7 within six months
Tennessean Senior Editor Deborah Fisher mentioned during her presentation to the Nashville PRSA chapter yesterday that the paper plans to operate a “24/7 newsroom” within six months that will publish local updates to its Web site around the clock.
Currently, the paper publishes about 100 breaking news updates each day beginning at 6 a.m. Fisher’s goal is for the site to be “dynamic and refreshing constantly.” “Update, update, update is our mantra,” she said.
I’m glad to see this move by the paper. As a media junkie, I say the more news, the better, and it’s always encouraging to see additional local content arriving online.
Shoot the messenger, not the message
If you have a problem with Al Gore living in a colossal Belle Meade Mansion and generating high electric bills while traveling the world to discuss the dangers of global warming, that’s fine. Whether or not Gore is a hypocrite, we need to be aware of our energy consumption and consider how we can change the way we generate the power we depend on.
As today’s Tennessean reports on Gore’s MTSU address yesterday, scientists aren’t questioning whether we need to change our habits. They’re looking for ways to solve the challenges we face:
A 10-year University of California study found that essentially zero percent of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles disagreed that global warming exists, whereas, another study found that 53 percent of mainstream newspaper articles disagreed the global warming premise.He noted that recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth unanimous report calling on world leaders to take action on global warming.
In my opinion, it’s not worth abandoning strategies for smarter, greener energy just because Gore may–or may not–be saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Sports Illustrated’s Farber checks out Preds
Want to peek inside the Preds’ locker room? Sports Illustrated writer Michael Farber has written a great story that includes plenty of details about the team’s behind-the-scenes atmosphere:
[Barry] Trotz, the only coach in Predators history, mixes realism with an inveterate optimism. In the days leading to Saturday’s game, Predators’ coaches were forbidden to bring up their Thursday-night loss to the Montreal Canadiens, in which Nashville squandered three two-goal leads and lost in a shootout. Anyone caught talking about how Nashville had kicked away a precious point would have been expected to contribute to the Negativity Fund — a so-labeled plastic container in the coaches’ office that staff members pay into for spreading bad vibes. On Friday associate coach Brent Peterson wrote energy and patience on a whiteboard as coaching guidelines for practice. Then he began to write NO S-A-R.. before stopping. “How,” he asked, “do you spell sarcasm?”
The stakes will be high over the next few weeks as the Preds continue their playoff run, but Farber reveals that the team engages in other matchups with nearly the same intensity:
The most riveting pre-Red Wings activity came on Friday at the clubhouse Ping-Pong table at which Forsberg, who says he was unbeaten during his season and a half with the Flyers, dropped games to winger Martin Erat and to goaltender Tomas Vokoun, before avenging the loss to Vokoun as teammates yelped. When the table tennis ended, hockey practice began: a sprightly, energetic session. No negativity anywhere.
Forsberg may have his hands full on the ping-pong table, but it looks like he’s starting to fit in just fine in the locker room and on the ice. I’ve loved watching this team on the ice since year one in 1998, and it’s great to hear a little bit about how things play out away from the rink, too.
New business section for The Tennessean
Senior editor Deborah Fisher mentioned today during her presentation to the local PRSA chapter that The Tennessean will launch a redesigned business section sometime in March. The section will feature more local content and include regular features such as “How I solved it” for business challenges, “How I started it” for new businesses, more columns by local business people and an increased focus on entrepreneurs.
Alongside this new content, the paper will include “real, practical information” such as tax deadlines and an expanded calendar page with an emphasis on networking events and opportunitities because, as Fisher noted, “Nashville is a heavy networking city.”
The section will feature a different “niche” page each day with reporting on the following areas: development, Music Row, real estate, automotive, health care and small business. People in Business, the paper’s current weekly business announcements section, will appear on a daily basis corresponding to the day’s niche page. Movers and Shakers, which Fisher mentioned as a popular item, will remain on the section’s front page.
Fisher hopes that the section will reveal more of the “flavor of Nashville.” In my opinion, this is good news for a section that frequently has more stock listings than editorial content. It will hopefully provide increased information about the local business community.
Tennessean’s Deborah Fisher discusses News 2.0
Tennessean senior editor Deborah Fisher spoke to the Nashville chapter of the Public Relations Society of America today and addressed the current and future direction of the newspaper. Fisher became senior editor this past December and has been heavily involved in the recent content changes in the print edition and the paper’s significant embrace of its Web site and social media in the past several months.
While The Tennessean isn’t announcing any major personnel changes or abrupt shifts in its focus, this presentation came in the wake of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s February 21 announcement that it will shift its content for younger readers to the Web and focus its print edition on an older audience. Fisher explained The Tennessean’s reasoning behind its changes in content strategy:
“The Tennessean wanted to restructure because the way people get information has changed so much… It’s not just the paper reaching people any more … So many people have moved online. Many use PCs or PDAs to get breaking news online during the day. Our goal is to provide news when they want it and how they want it.”
Fisher acknolwedged the organization’s concerns about recent downsizing and acquisition trends in the industry and specifically mentioned the AJC’s unexpected announcement. As the Poynter Institute’s Rick Edmonds recently said about the Atlanta announcement, The Tennessean is yet another paper trying “to find the magic balance between print and online.”
While The Tennessean is not abandoning its print edition or altering it on the drastic level that the AJC is proposing, Fisher acknowledged that the paper’s print circulation is declining, as it is for nearly all papers across the country, and that online page viewing is booming: “The web is definitely seeing a double-digit increase. It’s huge. There has been a phenomenal growth in page views and unique visitors. There’s a whole set of metrics that we look at.”
In discussing strategy, Fisher returned consistently to variations on the following talking points, including references to “getting information to people in different ways” and “continuing the conversation.” These phrases and the messaging below echo the mission and values of The Tennessean’s parent company Gannett:
“Everything in the world of journalism eventually comes down to the reporter. Good journalism really does start with the reporter, and it comes down to the reporter’s passion for his or her beat. That passion ends up leading to a good story.”
When asked, Fisher said that she did not foresee a time when the newspaper would abandon its print edition:
“As long as people want to consume information in different ways, I think there will always be a print product. There are some limitations to the Web. Newspapers will go away when books go away. I think there will be a print edition for a long time. We will have to continue editing it for what people expect. I don’t think the print edition will entirely go away.”
I will share more details from Fisher’s presentation today later this afternoon.
Gore and everyone else: walk your green talk
The Tennessee Center for Policy Research is right to question Al Gore’s personal energy consumption in the wake of his well-publicized efforts to raise awareness of global warming. In my opinion, anyone advocating a strong public policy position or philosophy ought to be willing to subject himself or herself to this kind of scrutiny:
[TCPR president Drew Johnson said,]“We went into this just asking the question, ‘Is the leader of the environmental movement basically living up to his word? Given that he’s a Tennessean, I thought it’s a question we should ask.”
I’m sure the Gores can do more to save their own little corner of the world, and they should, but it sounds like they are doing a decent amount, despite reports yesterday to the contrary. In addition to voluntarily purchasing blocks of green power from Nashville Electric Service in recent months, the Gores also have done the following, according to The Tennessean’s Anne Paine:
They use compact fluorescent light bulbs and are in the midst of a renovation project that includes having solar panels installed on their home to reduce fossil fuel consumption … Their car? A Lexus hybrid SUV… [They also participate in a process known as carbon emissions offset, which] means figuring out how much carbon is emitted from their power use, and vehicle and plane travel, then paying for projects that will offset that with use of renewable energy, such as solar power.”
Could the Gores do more? I’m sure they could, and so could I.
[Asides to TCPR: Thanks for hiring Trent Seibert and keeping him around. How about an RSS feed for your Web site, too?]
MTSU prof: The kids are all right
According to researchers involved with the latest results in the annual Narcissistic Personality Inventory (link leads to PDF with detailed info), which has published an assessment of college students’ sense of self since 1982, today’s college students are more self-centered than their predecessors. The experts blame a “self-esteem trend” that began in the 1980s and technology innovations such as MySpace and YouTube.
Maybe they’re right, but I wonder how people of all ages would fare on such a study these days. If we are becoming more self-centered–and there’s plenty of evidence to support the theory–I wonder whether it has less to do with being in college and more to do with being a 21st-century American. I have a feeling that college students from the 60s, 70s or 80s would answer the survey similiarly if they were exposed to today’s me-focused pop culture.
The Tennessean didn’t post this Associated Press story online, but it did run it on today’s front page and included an interview with MTSU vice president of student affairs Bob Glenn, who has worked on campus for 36 years. He disputes the findings:
“Everybody wants to make out this generation as worse than previous generations … I don’t see this particular group of students as much more narcissistic than those in the 60s, who were engaged in a whole variety of interesting behaviors … I see a surge in a lot of things that are optimistic … I see them doing a lot more service activities. I see these students being much more inclined in doing things that have positive impacts on their communities. I don’t want to be too quick to label them and hesitate to write them off because of what one group of researchers said.”
I’m sure this study is worth noting, but I’m also weighing it with a grain of salt. Why? I remember very well the outcry over my own “Generation X” in the early 90s: We were slackers who were apathetic about everything, and we were going to ruin America. Well, at least that was the most exaggerated of the criticisms leveled against my generation, and in my opinion they’ve turned out to be wrong.
It seems to me that generations in American society tend to have a natural rivalry that evolves over time, and it’s a common pastime for older ones to call out rising successors for their ills. Sure, my generation has its shortcomings, and so do the Boomers and even the Greatest Generation.
There may well be some validity to the study, but I think we’d all be better off looking at how we can change ourselves for the better than trying to nudge our older or younger peers a little further down the generational hill.
Road trip will boost Preds
I agree with Coach Trotz that the current Preds road trip is likely to only help make Nashville an even better team as it enters the stretch run before the playoffs:
One of the plusses of the Predators’ longest road trip of the season — five games over 10 days — is that the team will get some bonding time with recent acquisitions Peter Forsberg and Vitaly Vishnevski. “You can say all you want while you’re at home, but you don’t bond as well,” Predators Coach Barry Trotz said. “Over the next 10 days, we’re going to be on the road and it’s a bunch of guys together on the road, sort of against the world. We just have to bear down and hopefully pull together.”
One benefit of having all eyes on Forsberg since the trade is that Vishnevski has likely been able to integrate with his new team that much more easily. He isn’t the one who’s every move is being watched, and so far he appears to be fitting in well.
