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[exerpts from remarks by Howard Weaver at the McClatchy Washington Bureau, 31 May 2007]

... Let’s lay one tired issue to rest right away. We don’t have to debate and worry any more about the future of the news business. While there are a lot of fundamental variables still much in play, we know enough to assert a great deal right now. We will occupy a distinctly hybrid, multiplatform, multimedia future in which we exercise far less control but enjoy far greater reach and opportunity. We will touch more people in more interesting ways. We will collaborate with our readers and audiences, we will operate more transparently, and we’ll find ourselves adjusting and recalibrating constantly as we do.

Here’s the really good news: we get do all of that on the most solid possible foundation, this bureau’s unequalled capacity for producing significant, exclusive, public service journalism that sustains our unchanging mission as a company. We’ll talk a lot more about that in a few moments.

There are three big themes emerging simultaneously in our world right now. The first involves the revenue reset that’s under way – and it truly sucks – but the other two are both positive for us: an unprecedented public appetite for news and information, and a splendid set of new tools that let us serve that appetite better than ever before.

You know how tough operating conditions are right now. Throughout the industry, McClatchy included, [reported] revenues continue to decline ... let it suffice to say that we haven’t seen a bottom yet ... We believe part of that is based on structural changes and part on cyclical patterns, that some but not all of the lost revenue will come back, and that things [may] get worse for a while before they start getting better. As a result we have to significantly reengineer our cost structures, and that’s underway – reducing employees through attrition; looking for ways to use technology and contracting relationships to accomplish things more efficiently; sharing more; negotiating harder; refining our focus.

You know how McClatchy operates: through this process we will try to sustain our “athletic company” profile, working to be as trim and fit as possible while preserving the muscles – meaning feet-on-the-street resources aimed at producing quality journalism and selling advertising.

Because of that appetite for news I mentioned and our growing ability to serve it in new ways, we do have a powerful story to tell about where we plan to end up. The “hybrid” future I forecast means one based on many different delivery systems, built on an enduring print foundation and rapidly expanding into all kinds of digital, multimedia platforms. We’re already doing this well enough that the audience for what we produce continues to grow.

You know the catechism by now: add our newspaper readership – still one of every two adults in the country – to the unduplicated reach of our online audiences and we’re growing. More people want what we produce today than wanted it yesterday. This is the fundamental truth upon which our future success depends.

Print readership is going to continue its decline – more slowly in the future, we believe, once the current purge of unwanted peripheral readership [bonus days, NIE, advertiser-sponsored copies and the like] is shed. Still, in a world of constantly proliferating choices, every individual medium will lose share. It’s important to recognize that modest, managed decline is not failure in that environment – it is the foundation of success.

But the growth imperative means we have to increase audience everywhere else, principally online. Growing online audience is not optional. It’s at the heart of both our revenue results and our public service mission. It’s how we remain a relevant mass medium with a real chance to do good and serve the public.

You have a rare chance to contribute to that success. You’re not a newspaper and you have more options about how and where to allocate your resources. What’s more, our imperative for audience growth coincides perfectly with your need for reach and impact. Everybody here recognizes how the absence of a Knight Ridder presence in Washington and New York stunted the impact of pre-war reporting. We’re going to fix that once and for all by building a front page they can’t miss and fueling it with enough traffic that they can’t ignore it.

This is obviously built on the foundation of your high quality journalism. Far from abandoning that effort, we need you to step it up. We’re at a crucial point in a very big game here, and we need our best players on the field. Your productivity, your energy and your talent need to be hitting on a high cycle right now. This is no time to pull up for a breather.

We also have to adapt to the new landscape. Some of this is as easy as my old story about the circuit-riding preacher who explains his choir and piano player by reminding people “I can’t convert ‘em till I get ‘em in the tent.” We’re going to play a little music to attract people, too.

Much of that will be ancillary to your daily work, but not all of it. We’ll explore video with freelancers and audience participation, we’ll look for alternative story forms from outside contributors with different voices, we’ll test the waters of participative or distributed reporting through alliances.

But we will also need alacrity and enthusiasm from you. Some of you will be extending almost immediately into the blogosphere – in a few cases exposing that tender flesh to the world’s largest news audience on Yahoo. We have to learn how to blend the strengths of professional journalism with the immediacy and voice of the blogger, and to do so both surefootedly and spontaneously.

We’ll sometimes need you to come back from a complicated interview and find a way to produce a few paragraphs of breaking news before you settle in for heavier lifting. We need some of you to see whether video can work for you. We need editors to think about multiple audiences, to flag great stuff we can promote on Yahoo, to be gentle with reporters who are trying things for the first time.

We need you to step up for online Q&A forums, learning to respond to audience questions – even unreasonable ones – with both candor and grace. I hope we’ll soon be helping readers create social networks or communities of interest built around your journalism, and we will need you to understand that process and help nurture it.

And we will need your indulgence, I suspect, as we wander out into the traffic. We’re going to make some mistakes, occasionally ask too much, sometimes reveal to little. Some of the bromides you learned in journalism school or from your first city editor are going to get violated. You may not like all the alternative voices I’m hoping to round up for our revival tent.

But I think you’re going to like the results.

I had a columnist in Anchorage who wrote, “All a reporter really wants is to be at armageddon with a notebook and a pencil.” Well, bullshit. She wants a notebook and a pencil and an audience.

We’re planning to get you a great one.