Newspaper War

It's not yet noon and the most recognizable figure in the rapidly changing Southwest Florida newspaper landscape is already knee-deep into her day.

Just two years out of the University of Kansas School of Journalism, Denise Spidle is poised, confident and professional, perhaps remarkably so, considering all that is riding on her young shoulders.

Neither newspaper reporter nor TV anchor exactly, Spidle is a new kind of journalist, adept at writing and interviewing as well as reading the news in front of a camera. Her show, Studio 55, is produced for naplesnews.com, the Naples Daily News Web site, and it's also shown on cable.

Not long ago, jobs like Spidle's were an afterthought at newspapers, a mere nod to the nascent information revolution. But the revolution has arrived, and Spidle's work may be no less than the future of newspapers.

"We're getting a lot of attention," she says. "The more Studio 55 catches on, the more we get noticed. It's a great problem to have."

Perhaps you've never seen Spidle or her vodcast (video-on-demand broadcast). The printed version of the newspaper still attracts the lion's share of readers and ad revenue. But the news industry is watching Southwest Florida. The Daily News and The News-Press in Fort Myers have been hailed as being in the vanguard of the newspaper business.

It's no coincidence that the two organizations are squared off in a competition for readers as intense as any market in the country. In the past year, both organizations have experienced change unlike any that veterans of the business can recall. No one at either paper claims to have solved the mysteries of the cyber world-but neither is there much nostalgia. "The good old days," Daily News publisher John Fish says, "ended yesterday."

Says Fish, "We're up against very worthy competition in The News-Press, but competition in our business has always been healthy. There are not many 'newspaper wars' anymore, but we have one here in Southwest Florida. We watch each other very closely. The competitive landscape is much more crowded than it's ever been. It's much more than just about newspapers."

"I've been in this business for 30 years," says News-Press president and publisher Carol Hudler, "and this has been the biggest change in the local market I've seen in a long time, basically where each local media outlet is working on multiple platforms. We've gone beyond the idea of convergence, at least the old convergence where a TV station and newspaper would get together and do some stuff. Broadband has changed all that."

Information is being gathered, sliced and diced and distributed in ways that would make an old ink-stained newsman want to yell, "Stop the presses!" if that old line, too, hadn't gone the way of the buggy whip. After years of losing readers to the infinitely more immediate TV media, daily newspapers are no longer bound to reporting news the morning after it happens. Both papers see themselves as round-the-clock information providers, equipped to bring readers events great and small, almost as soon as they occur. Now the presses never stop.

"It's generally recognized that both papers are at the front edge of what the industry is trying to do in being multipurpose," says Rick Edmonds, media business analyst with the Poynter Institute, the journalism think-tank in St. Petersburg.

Edmonds predicts that in 10 years newspapers' online ad revenues will equal revenues from print ads. Online revenue, currently about 6 percent of most papers' ad sales, is expected to slow some this year, growing at about 22 percent, compared with about 30 percent in recent years. But the publishers of both papers say they're already exceeding these national trends.

"Our goal in the next four years is for our multimedia revenue to represent at least 15 percent of our total ad-revenue budget," says Fish. Currently, online revenues are about 9 percent, he says.

For Hudler, one of the advantages of the Internet is being able to track online readership far more closely than was ever possible with the paper's print version. "We measure our success with annual page views, how often people return to the site, their stickiness, how long they stay on the site," she says.

Hudler looks forward to the day when technology is able to match advertising to individual readers. "It's called 'behavioral targeting,'" she says. "If you're interested in a particular thing, the ad will be able to follow you around the Web site like a dog.

"We're all taking different approaches," says Hudler. "We're experimenting. We're not sure what will work and what won't. But we're all going after the same thing: audience, aggregate eyeballs."

Eye on communities

The News-Press has invested heavily in the Internet, with an emphasis on "hyper-local" community coverage with constant updates. It has added to its coverage and reach in south Lee and north Collier with expanded bureaus, zoned sections and weekly papers in Bonita Springs, Naples, Estero and San Carlos Park as well as in North and south Fort Myers, Cape Coral and Lehigh Acres. It publishes Gaceta Tropical, a paper in Spanish, as well as the magazines Grandeur and Parent and Child.

But it's perhaps The News-Press' inventive use of roving mobile journalists-"mojos," the paper dubs them-that has attracted the most industry attention.

Mojos file "hyper-local" stories-business openings, neighborhood events, club gatherings-to community "micro-sites." Readers can click on, say, the Cape Coral link on The News-Press' main Web site and read dozens of intensely local stories just about that city.

The sites are also full of reader-generated material, which The News-Press calls "citizen journalism."

"[Mojos] are journalists who have been trained to use mobile technology and focus on the community," says The News-Press executive editor Kate Marymont. "If we rushed to convert our whole staff to mojos, we'd probably be missing stories. All of our reporters are going to be armed with laptops, and they all will be writing for online. But we will still have investigative reporters and still cover city hall and the courthouse."

The paper's emphasis on community journalism was the subject of a story in The Washington Post as well as numerous news-industry trade articles, and its newsroom reorganization, encouragement of readers to contribute to coverage, and use of technology have piloted innovations across the parent Gannett Co. newspaper chain.

The Daily News and its owner, the E.W. Scripps Co., have focused resources on video-heavy Web sites with high-end production values and graphics. The paper has spiffed up its Bonita Daily News, Marco Eagle, Collier Citizen and The Banner publications, added a Spanish-language newspaper, Vista Semanal, and soon will launch a Spanish-language Web site.

Curious groups from newspapers across the country, and from as far away as Saudi Arabia and South Korea, regularly tour the Naples newsroom, looking at what has become one of the industry's models for success in what used to be called "new media," a term that no one uses much these days.

But for all the attention paid to the various technological advances, at the heart of the rivalry is the old formula for success: more readers (or viewers or Web surfers) equals more advertising revenue.

The News-Press circulation in 2006 was 89,266 daily and 107,654 on Sunday, down 1.43 percent and 1.10 percent, respectively, from 2005. In comparing the same years, the Daily News was at 58,124 daily, up 0.93 percent, and 67,930 on Sundays, down 2.12 percent. In the heavily contested Bonita Springs-Estero area, The News-Press claims 54.9 percent of subscribers to the Daily News' 45.1 percent on Sundays, with a similar edge daily, though the Daily News' circulation in the area grew 11 percent daily and 5 percent on Sundays in 2006.

But the battle is no longer only about paid print circulation, Hudler says. "We are battling for audiences on our Web sites, on handhelds and through our free papers, like our Bonita Life," she says. "And we don't just compete with the Naples Daily News; we compete with media of all types. Frankly, we compete with anything that consumes time and attention in peoples' lives."

Leading the charge

The booming Southwest Florida market-though now trending downward-has provided both papers ample growth opportunities.

"I think being in this market is a huge asset," says Fish. "This has been one of the country's largest growth markets in the past two years, and that's been a huge help in our being able to start new initiatives."

The payoff isn't only in monetary returns. On Jan. 28 in Las Vegas, Daily News multimedia director Andrea Lynn walked up to the podium in a ballroom at the Mandalay Bay Hotel four times to accept the online newspaper world's version of an Oscar. Out of nine categories recognized by the Newspaper Association of America's Digital Edge Awards-Edgies, in the industry-the Daily News won four, the most ever in one year since the 1996 inception of the awards, in recognition of "the newspaper industry's

most innovative and outstanding online achievements."

The Daily News won awards for Best Overall News Site, Most Innovative Multimedia Storytelling, Best Advertising Program and Best Shopping and Directory Strategy. The paper trumpeted the achievements both in print and online. It was a point of pride, Fish says, because work done on both sides of the building, editorial and advertising, was honored.