The year in review - 2010 at The Record

This was a transformational year in the history of The Record. We took a firm step into our digital future while buttressing our legacy print business. The year in review:

Digital First
In February, Journal Register Company (our parent company) named a new CEO, John Paton. He met with JRC publishers on his first day on the job and told them to embrace a new “news ecology”, which includes the empowerment of citizen journalists to help us report what is going on in our communities. He demanded we be mobile-first in news delivery; and employ technologies to give consumers what they want, how they want it, when they want it.

To that end, the Record has changed the way it reported news in so many ways:
- All of our journalists were equipped with video cameras in the the spring; we now broadcast an average of about 70 new videos a month.
- Staffers began blogging, and we invited the community to blog on our site as well. Today we have over 30 bloggers.
- We began engaging our audiences more using social media. We launched a Facebook page, which today has 767 "fans". Now more than a dozen staffers use Twitter.
- We live-streamed all of our editorial board meetings with candidates during the election season, and our sports team has been particularly active with the above tools - regularly blogging, tweeting and posting video from games, and setting up special events such as Will Montgomery's high school football chat sessions, and Andrew Santillo's and Tretonian sports reporter Ben Doody's weekly chat about MAAC college basketball.

We promoted one of our staff writers, Tom Caprood, to lead our digital first efforts in the newsroom this spring, and he was named to JRC's Idea Lab in July. The concept is to have 15 employees companywide devote 10 hours a week for a year to helping the company "think differently about what we do and how we do it". Experimenting with technology is a big part of the charge.

We also opened the first phase of our Community Media Lab - a space designed to bring the community in to collaborate with us on all types of projects - from citizen journalism (ie. blogging) to forums on topics of interest to business owners to dialogues with local business, arts, education, government, and non-profit leaders.

And lastly, we added journalists in our newsroom in early 2010 - aiding both our digital and print efforts - and launched a few new features throughout the year. (Among the highlights were two in sports: a roundup of local athletic accomplishments each Sunday, and the presence of an in-depth sports feature that day as well.)

Our audience is growing
Our audience is larger than it has been in some time. Our digital audience is now up to over 163,000 unique visitors a month, and our print audience over the same period exceeds 93,000 adults.

The Record has been defying newspaper industry trends this year - as of last week our paid home delivery circulation was up 9.8 percent vs. the same week last December (while our overall circulation is relatively flat due to declining single copy sales).

Not only have readers have responding positively to changes in our operations; the Capital Region's alternative news weekly Metroland cited The Record in its Best of the Region announcement in late July for "Best Newspaper Turnaround". They said, in part, that we "re-imagined" our product, and "now regularly produce the most satisfying read of any paper around".

Legacy structure
None of the digital first focus represents an abandonment of our print products. In fact, this effort will enhance our newspapers as we refocus our resources to use newsprint to present more compelling journalism.

In many instances our company, as CEO John Paton has blogged about, we have outsourced to reduce our legacy costs so we could invest more in technology and journalism. Buildings, presses and delivery trucks have all been shedded. But in some cases where it  made sense, some locations were identified as printing centers in JRC. So Troy is a print hub now for our Troy, Saratoga and Kingston products. To that end, we invested in our building and printing technology here:

•  In February we went live with new computer-to-plate equipment, which cut down on our prepress costs.
• And in November we went live with new inserting equipment, which improved efficiency in that end of our operations in the week leading up to our becoming printer for a sister newspaper, Kingston's The Daily Freeman, on Dec. 7.

We have also invested in our building, repairing our roof and facade over the summer and fall, renovating two areas of the building for the aforementioned CTP equipment and the Community Media Lab, and installing a new T1 line.

More community engagement
We were active with a number of new community organizations during the year, and we expanded our Clothe the Child effort to a second annual campaign called "Camps4Kids". Proceeds sponsored camp scholarships for Troy Boys and Girls Club kids to its Camp Barker, which was struggling with funding.

Another exciting project came late in the year as The Record rallied to bring the 2010 World Series Trophy to Troy. After a five-week campaign, the San Francisco Giants - whose Major League roots are in Troy - agreed to bring the trophy here in May.

Sneak peak at '11
We have a bunch of new products, technologies and ways of reporting news and engaging with our readers that we will employ in 2011. I am happy to announce two projects today to provide a sneak peak:

• The Record's Rensselaer Forum will be a regular gathering of community leaders in the arts, education, health, public service and local business to discuss issues of importance to local residents. The goal is to provide an ongoing process for residents to envision the future of their community. Topics and invited guests will vary, but the format will be the same: The public will be invited to participate in the discussion. A transcript will be published at troyrecord.com, as will stories. And video will be shot and excerpts made available on our web site.
• We'll call it a working name for now - troyrecord.com's CML Concert Series (the CML standing for our Community Media Lab) - is also coming soon. We're inviting in music acts from the region to perform live in our media lab, and we'll post videos from each session and a brief artist biography on our Web site.

Also:

• Electronic and mobile editions of our newspaper will roll out early in the coming year.
• As announced this week by the Business Review, we are looking to expand our Community Media Lab into our newsroom. More on this as the project progresses.
• And we are investing in a new front-end system for our editorial department this spring to make us more efficient, to push news more readily to mobile devices and the Web, and to make it easier to share content with other publications in our company, among other reasons.

In closing
I recommend those interested in the transformation at JRC see the video released this week on our progress in 2010.

And I want to take this opportunity to wish all of our readers, advertisers and employees the merriest of holidays; we look forward to engaging our community even more in 2011.

Metroland on The Record: 'The most satisfying read of any paper around'

A year ago this week I was in my first 30 days as publisher of The Record when I wrote about a shout out in Metroland's Best of the Region issue; they cited The Record for having the area's best sports department.

Well, Metroland didn't cite any award this year for sports coverage but they did again recognize The Record - this time for "Best Newspaper Turnaround" - in their Best of the Region announcement this week. They said, in part, that we "reimagined" our product, and "now regularly produce the most satisfying read of any paper around".

We're blushing. Seriously, the newspaper - and our corporate parent, the Journal Register Company - has come along way in the last year. I've chronicled some of it here: a digital first focus, more editorial staff, new investments in technology and much more. And Metroland isn't the only one to notice; our home delivery subscriber base has grown over 6 percent so far this year.

I want to use this opportunity to say thanks to the folks at Metroland for the recognition, and particularly to our staff for the hard work and dedication to publishing a worthwhile community newspaper for the greater Troy area.

And finally, I want to say that more positive developments are coming. I can't wait to read what Metroland will recognize us for next year. I am confident the staff there and our readers will still be talking about the progress.

A newspaper that chips away at its product's value

I won't name names but a daily newpaper which publishes in the community in which I live decided with today's issue to no longer list where local bands are playing in its Friday entertainment section. Now I know these folks making the decisions - a couple middle-age guys (like me) - aren't musicians (like me), nor do they probably ever venture inside a local tavern or club (unlike me) to see a favorite act. So, in an attempt to make a few coins, they started charging bars, restaurants, et al. to list bands. To their credit they got six businesses to pay (I suspect their regular advertisers get the listing for free) but many of the places that normally appeared in this space are gone.

Now my wife and I are big local music fans and we were trying to figure out where we are going tonight - we usually see one local act a week, though some weeks it might be two. (We got nearly all of our information on where to go from this newspaper.) Presented with this dilemma, it took me all of a few minutes to find a work-around to get the info we needed. Most of the best venues for local music all have Facebook pages so I just signed up as a "fan" and their band listings, dinners specials, etc. are now streaming into my Facebook account. Those businesses that don't have Facebook pages will no doubt reach out in the coming months as their customers urge them to communicate the information in new ways.

This move diminished the value of this newspaper for me. It didn't cause me to cancel my subscription but it did give me pause to consider what I get for my money.

A few predictions:
- Other readers - music fans - had the same reaction I did. This calendar is no longer a source they can rely on for complete info in the market. They will use Facebook, Metroland, the Times Union, a local weekly newspaper (The Chronicle) or another outlet to get this info going foward, and they will be a tad bitter their daily newspaper doesn't deliver this information to their doorstep.
- Some bar, nightclub and restaurant owners/managers will be ticked off as well. They may have had to cut back on advertising for seasonal reasons, or because cash flow is slow, and they will be reluctant to come back when they might normally do so. All it takes is the loss of one or two display advertisers to eliminate all the gains from paid listings.
- I suspect local musicians - who have no budgets to advertise - will be angry at the slight. These readers are seeing themselves reflected less and less in the pages of this publication, which has cut back on its local music coverage as well.
- I would bet that those few businesses who do buy these listings - now or in the near future - will stop doing so within six months. Someone - a customer or employee - will comment on the changes and confirm their own suspicion that this "marketplace" has limited value because it is incomplete.

Media consumers want information packaged how they want it and delivered when they want. For me, there is no turning back as either a publisher or as a consumer.

Compliments, announcements & promotions, oh my!

This first appeared in The Record.

We recently received a compliment from another local media outlet. We’ll graciously accept it and use the opportunity to make a few related announcements.

First the recognition: The staff of Metroland, in its Best of the Region edition on July 16, cited The Record as having the best local sports coverage among local media. This is the second time in three years the sports department has been cited;

“The Record gives a lot of real estate - in newspapers, ‘real estate’ means pages - to sports,” Metroland reported. “And a big share of this is in-depth coverage of local sports: high school, college, minor league baseball and hockey, you name it. Being able to devote your back page to a dynamic sports photo every day doesn’t hurt, either.”

Not too shabby. Thanks Metroland! We’re very proud of the team here too, which includes six full-timers - sports editor Kevin Moran and assistant sports editor Tim Martin, and staff writers Chris Fitz Gerald, Will Montgomery, Andrew Santillo, and Ed Weaver – as well as some stringers. And I would be remiss if we didn’t add the names of Jim Carras, Tom Killips and Mike McMahon – our very experienced (more than 85 years at the paper between the three of them) and very talented photo staff whose work on the back cover was referenced by the alternative paper.

One of the very cool – and very unusual in our business – aspects of our staff is their local ties. Five of the aforementioned writers grew up in the area: Fitz Gerald in Scotia, Montgomery in Burnt Hills, Martin in Hudsonx, Moran in Waterline, and Santillo in Niskayuna. Weaver is a native of the Elmira area.

Moran says that the local connections ensure the staff is very sensitive and responsive to covering the local sports scene as broadly and deeply as possible. “My philosophy is to cover every event no matter how small. We can’t get to every 8- or 9-year old Little League game. But we know our readers are only going to get the kind of local coverage in The Record that we do so we try to cover every local team and athlete we can.”

And now, a segue to a few developments at The Record we feel will serve readers well:

• The first is we would like to announce that McMahon, who has been with us 33 years, has been promoted to the executive chief photographer. Previously he served as chief photographer at The Record. He now oversees the photo staff of both our paper and our sister paper, The Saratogian. Mike will continue to shoot and be present in our newsroom just about as much as he has in the past, but will now work with both staffs on scheduling, overseeing quality control and training. He will help us continue to evolve in our ability to delivery local news and sports videos on our Web sites as well.
• They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The paper is in development of a Reader’s Choice Awards which will be unveiled this fall. It is kinda, sorta similar to Metroland’s “Best of” effort, but frankly this is not the purview of any one publication - it is a staple of hundreds of newspapers across the country. It seemed to us that more of the businesses and institutions in our readership area deserved recognition than afforded by similar efforts of other publications that cast a much wider net. Look for ballots in The Record and our weekly publications soon.
• Last, but certainly not least … Look for The Record’s 2009 High School Football Preview section the first week in September. Kevin and his staff will be publishing previews and schedules for each of 21 schools in our readership area. This is something we haven’t done in a few years but, as the paper with the title of “best sports coverage”, it is only apropos it return.

If that is not enough, we’ll be unveiling more sports- and non-sports related projects as we head into fall. Stay tuned.