"Declining readership among our younger demographic segment. It's no great revelation, but as our older, loyal readers are retiring and dying off, we're not getting the younger readers like we should."
Brian Cooper
Executive Editor, Telegraph Herald (Dubuque, Iowa)
"Trying to stay competitive in the multimedia environment. It used to be that you had two- newspaper towns or three-newspaper towns. Then it was newspapers vs. TV and newspaper vs. TV and cable and now the Internet. We're trying to stay alive within that environment."
Fran Coombs
Deputy Managing Editor, News, The Washington Times
"This is really geared toward smaller newspapers, but our greatest challenge is finding and keeping qualified personnel. You often get beginning reporters, coming out of college, who are looking to go to larger newspapers. It puts the real onus on seasoned reporters and editors who've been here for awhile to pay more attention to what reporters are covering and what they're writing. This process repeats every 12 to 18 months. Once reporters have some good clips they move on to a larger newspaper."
Jim Cato
Editor, The Beaufort Gazette (Beaufort, SC)
|
| Rob Elder
|
"Capturing young people as part of our audience and keeping up with new technology without losing our older readers who make up the core part of our readership. For example, at times we have put at the end of a column a note saying that we have three other columns posted on our Web site. We've received calls from older readers complaining about us not including the columns in our paper version. We have to work with both groups."
Rob Elder
Editor, San Jose Mercury News
|
| David Zeeck
|
"Trying to find the right place for newspapers in our Internet world. We have to be nimble enough to figure out how to defend what we've got but also migrate into the new media."
David Zeeck
Executive Editor, The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA)
"I think we have to look at a media-wide credibility issue. We all get lumped together and the concerns of people reflect on all news organizations. The sourcing issue affected everyone within the past year. We have rigid rules regarding unnamed sources. Yet we all received wire stories with unnamed sources every day during the Clinton-Lewinsky story. We need to have those standards throughout the industry, including the wire services."
Dennis Ryerson
Editor, The Des Moines Register
|
| John Craig Jr.
|
"How to retain the attention of readers and maintain market share. The technological explosion - not just the Internet but also cable, satellites, all the things going on in the last 10 years - makes everything more complicated than it used to be and gives everyone more choices for news. ... You have to stop thinking that you're in the newspaper business seven days a week and understand that you're in the news business."
John Craig Jr.
Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Making sure that the content of newspapers is relevant to readers. A lot of times the community changes and we put out a newspaper that was great 10 years ago but is no longer relevant. You have to spend time in the community and really understand the issues and people on a kind of breakfast-counter level."
Mark Silverman
Editor and Publisher, The Detroit News
"If you had to choose
one thing, what do you see as the greatest challenge to newspapers today?"
