Recently, readers of The Kansas City Star were treated to an intriguing new audio-electronic feature. In a box above a six-paragraph feature story about a rock band headed by Chicago White Sox pitcher Jack McDowell, readers were invited to dial a number to hear some of the band's music. Thirteen hundred people dialed into the newspaper's audio "StarTouch" system to hear brief samples of McDowell's songwriting, singing, and guitar playing.

These days boxed invitations abound as reporters at the Star strive to turn the newspaper into a "navigational tool" for readers using their telephones to gain access to the Star's new audio system. "We're turning this technology over to the newsroom," says Scott Whiteside, until recently the Star's vice-president for new product development. "We've told them, 'You have the privilege of redefining journalism. Nobody has done this before.'"

After decades of wringing their hands about the coming of the Information Age but doing little about it, newspaper executives are embarking on the "reinvention" of the daily newspaper -- the newest buzzword in industry circles. They have been frightened into doing so by the persistence of their circulation problems, by setbacks in their fight to keep the Bell companies out of the information delivery business, and by the depth of the recession, which has sped the collapse of the industry's retail advertising base.

Gannett's "News 2000" program is a case in point. Editors of local Gannett newspapers are quite literally remolding their beat structures and newsroom organization to respond to perceived reader interests. The just-implemented program is part of Gannett's effort to encourage its local newspaper to pay greater attention to community issues. At the Gannett-owned daily in Olympia, Washington, for example, editors have replaced traditional beats with "hot topic" teams, slapped limits on story length and jumps, added extensive reader service lists, and replaced some reporters with news assistants who gather "news-you-can-use" data from local agencies.

Gannett has taken its cue from the trend-setting Orange County Register, which shook up newspaper traditionalists two years ago with its switch to reader-friendly beats like "malls" and "car culture," and from Knight-Ridder's experimental newspaper in Boca Raton, Florida, with its test-marketed formula of news nuggets, pastel hues, multiple graphics, and reader-grabbing features.

Newspapers are also experimenting once again with electronic videotext systems. Many journalists thought videotext was dead when Knight-Ridder shut down its pioneering Viewtron program in the mid-1980s because it couldn't sign up enough subscribers. (see "What Zapped the Electronic Newspaper?" CJR, May/June 1987). These days newspapers in Albuquerque and Fort Worth are making a go of modest, low-investment videotext systems that give readers access to electronically archived material that can't be fitted into the daily newshole. At the same time, newspapers in Denver and Omaha shut down more elaborate and expensive videotext experiments, saying there was not yet a market for videotext in their cities. Meanwhile, newspaper executives are watching (nervously, in many cases) as new computer developments point toward the time when today's newspaper, television, computers, and the telephone will be blended into a single multimedia instrument.

Futurists say that all this is just the Information Age finally catching up with newspapers. Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California, argues that paper is becoming outmoded as computers become society's principal way of storing data. "We'll become paperless like we became horseless," he says. "There are still horses. But little girls ride them."

Amid all the flailing about as newspapers prepare for an uncertain tomorrow, three general strategies can be discerned: effort to save the newspaper as it is, efforts to augment the newspaper electronically, and efforts to look beyond the newspaper-on-print.

THE FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER-AS-IT-IS

In recent years, front pages with more "points-of-entry" and "scannable" news, marketing programs developed in tandem with the news department, and "news-you-can-use" and reader-written features have proliferated. And yet there is no evidence that the focus on readers -- and the fixation on marketing and packaging and redesigns associated with it -- has done anything to improve newspapers' prospects. Indeed, even the industry's own consultants now caution against expecting circulation growth from redesigns or the adoption of reader-drive marketing formulas.

James Batten, the chairman of Knight-Ridder, a chain known for the high quality of its journalism, launched what he called a "customer-obsession" campaign, an important part of which was the redesigned Boca Raton News. It showed initial circulation jumps. However, last summer the News dismissed two circulation managers after their departments allegedly overstated the newspaper's paid circulation -- a sign of the pressure the newspaper is feeling to show results for Knight-Ridder.

Today's editors, says Susan Miller, Scripps Howard's vice-president/editorial, have come to believe that reader-driven newspapering can be a "higher calling." The vast majority of staffers are becoming accustomed to the idea that "newspapers are to be of service to readers and are not staffed by a Brahmin class that was chosen to lecture the population," Miller says, adding, "People who refuse to be service-oriented will leave in disgust and say we're pandering and will call us bad names -- but they will leave."

Bill Walker, a former Sacramento Bee reporter, is one who left. In a piece titled "Why I Quit" in The San Francisco Bay Guardian, he wrote: "Nowadays, editors spend their days taking meetings in glass offices, emerging only to issue reporters instructions like this: 'Get me a 12-inch A1 box on the city's reaction to the tragedy. Talk to teachers, kids, the mayor, the bishop. Focus on the shock, the sadness, the brave determination to move on. And don't forget the homeless. We've got color art from the shelter.' Meanwhile, the promotions director is already producing a cheery drive-time radio spot to plug the story. . . . We used to have a saying: no matter how bad journalism was, it beat selling insurance for a living. But no more."

Miller, for her part, predicts that the economics of the industry will lead to a thinning of the ranks of mid-level management. At many organizations those ranks were swollen as newspapers put more emphasis on the planning and packaging of the news product. Miller thinks that the leaner newsroom of the future will mean that more power will be placed in the hands of front-line troops. Bill Baker, Knight-Ridder's vice-president/news, says that the emphasis newspaper companies will be putting on innovation will make entrepreneurial thinking in the newsroom more valued. He adds that several new information products being developed by "The Edge of Knight-Ridder," an internal product-development program, were created by veteran reporters who have "the appetite to follow through on them."

Still, newspaper managers may find it difficult to abandon the traditional hierarchy or change their ways of thinking. Publishers oriented to the bottom-line and newspaper managers who made their way up in a safe, monopolistic environment tend to be wary of creative risk-taking. The temptation to hire another consultant, order up another readership survey, or let an industry organization do their thinking for them will, in most cases, win out over coming up with their own ideas and then investing in them.

BEEFING IT UP ELECTRONICALLY

Newspapers are making a marginal profit at best in their efforts to find an audience that wants access to an electronic menu of items like restaurant and movie reviews, expanded news stories, sports scores, advance classified ads, business news, and public records. The most popular form of access has been telephone info-lines, and newspapers like The Kansas City Star are integrating them into the full operation of the newspaper. Videotext systems are still considered risky, but even editors at newspapers that have abandoned videotext agree that the market for electronic newspapering is growing.

That's certainly the way Gerry Barker, marketing director for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's "Startext" electronic information service, sees it. "The generation coming out of school who are very computer-oriented -- these are the readers of tomorrow," Barker says. "People have misjudged it. It's a social revolution that's happening out there. You can't throw dollars and technology at this and expect it to hatch. It's evolutionary. Just because we built a few Edsels doesn't mean the car is wrong."

Many analysts attribute the failure of early videotext efforts to the attempt by newspapers to transfer the newspaper-on-print too literally onto the computer. "The newspaper's approach to news has to change in order to be successful in transmitting information electronically," says Richard Baker, director of corporate communication for CompuServe, a twenty-two-year-old computer communications company with more than 900,000 customers. "Newspapers and magazines have to embrace the concept of sharing the creation of the news. There needs to be a willingness and openness to let the readers have a much greater hand in determining what's the news." Baker adds that the key to CompuServe's success is the development of customized information and interactive "bulletin boards."

The pressure on newspapers to become all-service information companies has grown recently as the newspaper industry has lost court efforts to keep the telephone companies out of the electronic information business. The experience of the French Minitel system, which gives telephone users in France access to telephone directories and a variety of interactive and communications services via mini-computers, is seen as the model for how U.S. telephone companies may use their monopoly powers to move in on newspapers' most lucrative business. Yet everything ultimately argues for a partnership between newspapers and the telephone companies -- and that may already be happening. For example, The Seattle Times (whose publisher, Frank Blethen, has been one of the vocal critics of the Baby Bells) recently announced that the Times was negotiating to team up with US West to be a data provider on the telephone company's information network.

THE PAPERLESS NEWSPAPER

With the coming developments in electronic data delivery, many newspaper futurists believe the newspaper-on-print faces a perilous future. They say videotext operations and the new computer pagination systems -- by means of which newspaper pages are fully designed and laid out on the computer screen -- are simply crude, first steps toward the multimedia systems that will come to dominate the information industry. In software systems that are already on the market, computer users can pull from the computer's memory a variety of audio-visual material -- including printed text, mobile graphics, video images, music, special effects -- which let users create their own multi-media productions.

These developments -- combined with the advances in computer-transmitted television -- present enormous implications for both newspaers and broadcasters. Digital broadcasting -- by means of which images are transmitted in a code used by computers -- promises to provide a truly multimedia system that will allow text, graphics, and video images to be transmitted to the computer screen. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how this development will increase the pressures to blend the now-separate media forms, and companies in the U.S. and Japan have been hurrying digital technology to the marketplace much faster than many predicted.

Many communications conglomerates, now integrated across newspaper and broadcast divisions, are well structured to take advantage of those developments. Knight-Ridder officials are planning for the day (which they see happening within this decade) when these multimedia newspapers will be available on portable, touch-sensitive, flat-panel displays.

Roger Fidler, the director of new media development for Knight-Ridder, predicts a "bright fugure" for the "essence" of the newspaper. "I don't see print disappearing," he says. "But I see it taking a different form. The question is not whether there will be newspapers in the next century, but who will publish them. I'm not convinced the majority of the newspaper companies today will be in business in the next century."

So what will it be like to be a journalist in the brave new information world? The minimalistic journalism brought about by reader-friendly newspapering has done much to turn news into just another commodity in the marketplace. And as newspapers join the electronic competition, newspaper journalists are likely to find themselves ever more subject to the forces of technological change, the demands of perpetually updating the news for electronic services, and the pressure to think of their work in marketing terms.

As with many other professions in the go-go 1980s, marketing and the bottom-line have become the by-words of newspapering, and new information technologies offer much to encourage that trend. In the years ahead, newspaper companies -- and newspaper professionals -- can probably expect to bump up and down on a rocky ride of diminished profit margins, failed efforts at experimentation, and intrusions into their markets.

That's the potential dark side. But there are also reasons to be optimistic. The endless newshole promised by computers does offer an answer to the ever-shrinking news columns -- and could hold hope for journalists frustrated by the design gimmicks that have increasingly circumscribed the work life of those who produce the text. Newspapers have always been at the base of the information pyramid, providing much of the in-depth information that is then compressed and marketed by the electronic information purveyors. As the explosion of information continues, there will be even more need for highly skilled journalists to root through it, filter out what's important, and help put it into perspective. The demand for more specialty reporting skills, the opportunities for more creative and analytical writing, and the chance to use data bases to do more sophisticated investigative reporting are all potential upsides of electronic newspapering.

Newspaper journalists should also take heart from the fact that virtually none of those who gaze into the future are predicting the near-term demise of the newspaper-on-print. Technology, so far, has been unable to match the efficient way the eye can scan the newspaper page or the way a newspaper can be folded up and carried around -- or the way it can be read while breakfasting over coffee and bagels on a Sunday morning.

Newspapers understand their local, or their specialty, markets. And they can offer an intelligent voice in a world where the cacophony of other media seems to be drowning the public in noise it doesn't want to hear. "There are things about a newspaper that are attuned to the human spirit," says Bill Baker of Knight-Ridder, "and it'll be there forever."

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