U.S. Oldest Newspaper Plans To Go Digital

Bangalore: The 148 year old San Francisco Chronicle is set for a complete overhaul, as it plans to get on to the digital front from being a traditional circulated newspaper. Drastic decline in the circulation has changed the company’s approach to make its presence on the digital platform, reports Mashable.

America’s oldest city newspaper has come out with a two month training camp led by its oldest female managing editor Audrey Cooper, who plans to put the newspaper’s journalists into rigorous training, which will prepare them to work on the digital and social media platforms.

"The approach is novel for newspapers," exclaims Cooper. "It physically removes reporters from the traditional newsroom and gives them new digital metrics, such as engagement time, to judge whether their stories have reached our core audience. We also plan to use real-time monitoring of the clicks we get from social media and other referral sites, including LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit."

The company faced a decline in its circulation by 50 percent during 2009 and 2012 along with reduction in its average circulation to less than 300,000, as it did not make any progress in covering news related to technology and social media, but it was also said that the San Francisco Chronicle had lost huge money, around $50 million a year during the recession period.

There is also an atmosphere created within the company, where the reporters feel they may lose their jobs if they fail to make any progress in the training which is due for a start in the coming month, but Copper stated "We’re focusing on retraining our journalists, not threatening them," and she further added "failure only means we all lose our jobs and the Bay Area loses its number one news source," and "Failure to reach our goals both individual and team is simply not something we can tolerate, and we won’t."
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