Newspaper War

The message Fish delivered when he assembled employees on the Monday morning after the Edgies ceremony was, naturally, about the team effort. "We've taken our multimedia work to a higher level. We've worked hard to offer quality content across a wide variety of platforms. One of our primary goals is integration. We want to be a 24/7 news operation. We've reorganized our staff to do that. It used to be, not that long ago, newspapers focused on producing a quality product once a day. Now we're producing a quality product 24 hours a day."

Editor Phil Lewis has a clear vision of where such changes are headed. "[Soon], I'll be able to sit in my family room and access the Internet on my flat-screen television. I'm not going to turn to channel 2 or 4 or 5. I'm going to go to

naplesnews.com. I'm going to be able to watch video and get the latest story," he says without a trace of regret for the passing of whirring presses and printer's ink.

"It's very important whoever's first, whoever gets those eyes every day; that's where people are going to turn to. We're reaching working-class people, people here who want to know what's going on in their community. I see that whole audience growing. If we get really good at giving them that, they'll turn to us."

For Lewis, the competition boils down to the old rubric of journalistic success: who has the story first. But in the digital age, scooping the competition, like almost everything else in the newspaper business, has shifted into high speed. The recent resignation of Florida Gulf Coast University president Bill Merwin is a potent example.

When the university called an emergency meeting of its board of trustees to discuss "operational and personnel" matters, editors in both Naples and Fort Myers suspected Merwin might be leaving. Three hours before the meeting, the Daily News broke the story:

The president was resigning and admitting to an extra-marital affair with a female faculty member. The News-Press posted a story about the resignation-sourcing Merwin himself-90 minutes later.

In his weekly column the following Sunday, Lewis congratulated the Daily News on its scoop, calling it a victory for old-fashioned news skills, even amid the quickly changing landscape of the information business.

Marymont, The News-Press editor, is quick to point out that she received a phone call at 7:30 on the morning of Merwin's announcement from a reliable but off-the-record source, but decided not to run the story until Merwin himself confirmed it.

Two weeks later, when the FGCU board met to decide on Merwin's severance pay, The News-Press was first with the story outlining the terms of the package. "It's just a joy to be able to beat the competition," says Betty Wells, The News-Press online metro editor.

No one in either newsroom believes that readers decide which Web site or newspaper to read based solely on such relatively hairsplitting victories. But who beats whom is also more than a matter of bragging rights. "One day doesn't mean crap," Lewis says. "But over time, you have to establish your reliability and get people in the habit of coming back to your site. Right now, it's all about video; that's what TV stations have always been able to give that we couldn't. But that's changing, and there's no way they can match the news crew that we have."

"It's a fascinating time to be in the newspaper business," says Marymont. "I think back to life before the Internet and I think I'd go nuts if I had to return to that. What we're doing [now] is community journalism. I think we got away from that."

Mojo working

This year, The News-Press designated 14 of its reporters as mojos, a term Marymont admits is a bit of marketing. The mojos often work out of their cars, focusing on modest stories about the goings-on in a community-usually accompanied by a gallery of digital photos-as opposed to articles of great scope and impact.

By 9 a.m. on a recent Friday, mojo Chuck Myron has already filed a story and photos about the owner of a new Cape Coral pizzeria who used a blown-up photo of his 21-month-old baby on the sign above his restaurant.

Myron, a reporter since 1999 and at The News-Press since 2005, spends the rest of the morning cruising suburban neighborhoods in search of news. The first two stops are fruitless. The manager of a liquor store that had recently begun home deliveries is being interviewed later that day by another News-Press reporter, and the same result awaits Myron at the home of Petra Kaiser, where a distinctive glass sculpture piques the reporter's interest. Kaiser, a glass artist and teacher, is hosting an exhibition in her home the next day, and The News-Press is scheduled to cover it.

"Beaten by my own people," Myron says as he leaves the house. He shrugs but admits he is feeling a bit of pressure to come up with another story. A few blocks away, Myron pulls into Jaycee Park, where a group of youngsters wearing matching blue T-shirts are playing.

"Kids in uniform at a park," Myron says. "Looks like a story."

For the next 45 minutes, Myron talks to preschoolers, parents and teachers, taking notes on his computer notepad. He pulls a small digital camera from the pocket of his khakis and begins photographing the kids at play.

"I'm going to go online tonight and check it out," says Valerie Anderson, one of the preschool teachers.

"It'll be up in a couple of hours, actually," Myron says.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Anderson says.

"You'd be surprised how many people will be interested in a story like this," says Myron, heading back to his Nissan. He plugs the laptop into the cigarette lighter, writes a short story about the Four Freedoms preschool's field trip to the park, crafts a headline, crops and uploads five photos, writes the photo captions and prepares to send the package onto the paper's Web site. But something is wrong. For the next hour, he tries four more times to upload the story. It turns out that there is trouble on the wireless phone network; he'll have to go into the office to finish his work.

He has no control over the complicated array of technological features and services that must come together for him to do his job. No longer mobile, he remains enthusiastic. "I like just driving down a side street and noticing something and finding a story," he says. "I like the variety of it. And I think it's important. I like being at the cutting edge of what's happening."