Complete Community Connection: more reinvention in Cedar Rapids

You can’t really call it a blog post when the printout stretches to 33 single-spaced pages, but it’s highly recommended reading: Steve Buttry, the “information content conductor” of Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has published “A blueprint for the Complete Community Connection” as a nine-parter on his blog. More conveniently, you can download the whole thing at Scribd (very simple registration required.)

In his previous incarnation at the American Press Institute, Buttry worked on the Newspaper Next project, which urged newspapers to adopt disruptive innovation as a strategy, rather than being disruptively innovated against. (Newspaper Next is now apparently dormant — why is it that various efforts to start up innovation engines to help the industry peter out after a while?) Buttry came up with the first version of the Complete Community Connection concept (C3 for short) at API; Gazette Communications, willing to try out-of the-box ideas (perhaps because it is led by an executive with a non-news background, Chuck Peters), has become the laboratory for testing his ideas.

In a nutshell, C3 envisions that Gazette, or any company adopting the concept, will become what I would call “community glue”:

Our company will provide an interactive, well-organized, easily searched, ever-growing, always updated wealth of community news, information and opportunities on multiple platforms. We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa. We need to change from producing new material for one-day consumption in the print product or half-hour consumption in the broadcast product to producing new content for this growing community network of information and opportunities.

Ultimately, in Buttry’s view, this includes finding ways to “connect the business with the customer and collect the money, taking a reasonable cut for ourselves.” He outlines a number of “community content opportunities”:

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Conducting journalists: The Cedar Rapids Gazette in startup mode

Back in December, at my old blog, I posted a set of media predictions for 2009, including: “Some innovative new approaches to journalism will emanate from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”

Around that time came the unveiling of Newsmixer, a project by Medill School of Journalism students working in collaboration with the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Newsmixer, which has not progressed beyond a demonstration stage, is a concept for social networking around news, something the industry urgently needs to develop.

But Newsmixer came out in 2008, so it doesn’t count to fulfill my 2009 prediction. This does:

The Gazette’s Steve Buttry last week announced bold changes in the organization of the Gazette newsroom. Buttry was editor of the paper, but that role has passed to Lyle Muller, and Buttry has assumed a newly coined title: Information Content Conductor. I’m sure he’s the only guy in the country with that title right now.

The change is part of a broad and ongoing functional reorganization being led by Gazette Communications CEO Chuck Peters. Chuck, you may recall, achieved some blogospheric fame last fall by liveblogging the American Press Institute’s Summit for an Industry in Crisis. Unlike most news executives, his previous experience includes leadership of a completely different business — he was president and COO of Amana Refrigeration, the kitchen appliance firm. He also has a law degree. His background is a key reason Gazette Communications (which includes TV broadcasting and commercial printing divisions) is coming up with innovative new strategies for dealing with the challenges printed newspapers face...

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.