Times, techniques change, but mission stays the same

We are, it appears, cursed to live in interesting times.

There was a time when the "make money" portion of the Daily Herald's well-known three-pronged mission statement was simple enough that even math-challenged journalists could understand it: Get a lot of people to pay a modest sum for your paper, cover most of your costs through advertisers who want to reach those people and create a strong classified community where people with all kinds of needs -- from employers seeking workers to homeowners seeking a clean garage -- and, voila!, you have a formula for, well, if not success, at least enough stability to let you continue to fear God and tell the truth every day.

Of course, that description is a little like Steve Martin's plan for making a million dollars and never paying taxes ("First, get a million dollars"), but it is at least comprehensible. With the right mix of elbow grease, research and customer attention, a newspaper like the Herald could grow from a small-town weekly into a suburban daily confident enough to see itself as "the voice of the suburbs."

Now come Yahoo!, Google, Angie's List, Craig's List and on and on, and suddenly both the nature of that goal and the means of achieving it are rapidly changing in unforeseen and unpredictable ways. The only certainty seems to be that we should not expect to apply the term "comprehensible" to this environment anytime soon.

We are, it appears, cursed to live in interesting times.

The tenor of those times demands a whole new vernacular for journalists -- with words and phrases like "videography," "reverse publishing," "platform agnosticism," "work to be done interviews," "the 24-hour newsroom," "information centers," and "convergence." It is leading people who once basked in the comfort of the written word and still photographs to embrace techniques of audio and video reproduction and Flash graphics that can help turn a simple statistical chart into a colorful, three-dimensional, moving illustration.

I'm mindful of these things this week for a couple of reasons. One is that we significantly updated and improved our Web site, dailyherald.com, a few weeks ago, and I want to alert you to that fact. Another is the birthday this week of USA Today, the newspaper experiment launched 25 years ago by the Gannett newspaper chain to react to changing habits in newspaper readership. Greeted with a certain degree of condescension and not a little derision by many of us in newspapers at the time, USA Today went on to become the most widely circulated newspaper in America. Its shorter stories, colorful pictures, informational graphics and reaction to readers may not have been copied by most other newspapers, but they certainly influenced how the rest of us report and present news. Now Gannett is famously embarking on a new experiment, converting its newsrooms into 24-hour "information centers" that integrate print with online presentations that update constantly. And, while the chain may be ahead of us in development, its concept is one we're embracing more and more -- as you've noticed if you've followed breaking news stories on dailyherald.com as they change throughout the day or watched a video slide show that supplements a story in the print edition of the paper. Our presentation will continue to evolve and improve as we continue to acquire and learn the most advanced technologies.

But our mission won't change. Being the voice of the suburbs will take on many dimensions, but it ultimately will still be supported by that same three-legged philosophy Hosea Paddock evoked more than 135 years ago. We'll still fear God; we'll still tell the truth; and we'll still, somehow, make money. The process of the latter aim may not be as comprehensible as it once was, but it is manageable -- and better still, it's also exciting, both for us and for you.