Making an impact in Sarasota

We totally have been on the forefront of digital innovation. At the same time, you can't just throw away the value that print has on a community such as Sarasota.”

Bill Church, executive editor

The Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune is a joint winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and home to an online news and entertainment platform for young professionals.

It also serves a community that Executive Editor Bill Church says "might be one of the last frontiers of affluent, civically engaged retirees." These traditional readers want the newspaper delivered to their homes and can quote stories that appeared in print months ago, but they also keep up with the news digitally.

The goal for the Herald-Tribune (www.heraldtribune.com) is motivating readers to spend time with the newspaper on whatever platform works for them, whether it's a retiree deep into a long-form print story or someone standing in line at a coffee shop reading a piece from www.unravel.us on a smartphone.

"We totally have been on the forefront of digital innovation," Church said. "At the same time, you can't just throw away the value that print has on a community such as Sarasota. And frankly, because we hear from a lot of snowbirds that come into our market, they still value print in their market.

"But they aren't necessarily getting the result from their local paper back home. And I'm a little troubled by that because I think that if we're going to succeed, we can't take an 'or' approach. It has to be an 'and' approach."

Over the last few years, the Herald-Tribune has undergone a newsroom reorganization and setting of priorities that could be adapted to "whatever media environment exists," Church said. A purchase by GateHouse Media in January 2015 did not affect the project on mental health treatment centers that won the Pulitzer together with the Tampa Bay Times, he said.

The priorities? "One, do journalism with impact. A second, engage key audiences. The third, deliver experiences. And the fourth, innovate like a start-up."

Publisher Patrick Dorsey said print remains the No. 1 platform in Sarasota, but the company relies less on traditional advertising revenue.

"We continue to be blessed with a strong financial position that supports our news operations," Dorsey said. "We have to continue to be creative and increase and diversify different revenue streams in different ways to support the journalism we want to do, the journalism with impact."

The commitment to that kind of journalism must come from the top and depends on "hiring smart, creative and passionate journalists, and really letting them loose," Dorsey said. Readers in Sarasota value strong local news and have proven willing to pay for it.

Dorsey said that while readers aren't paying East Coast metropolitan newspaper prices, they do pay premium subscription prices compared with much of the South. "Put out a high quality product and don't be afraid to charge for it," he advises.

Newsroom staff members are encouraged to suggest ideas and experiment. A week after the Pulitzer announcement, about a dozen staffers were pitching a new project that Church said will take the rest of the year to complete. The newsroom focuses on enterprise both on and off traditional beats.

Yet Church maintains a working relationship with the marketing team, which has workspace in the newsroom. The emphasis is on brand marketing and expanding the revenue stream, he said.

An example of different types of coverage on different platforms was a recent graduation speech by actor Mark Ruffalo at Ringling College of Art and Design. It was covered traditionally for print and the website, while much of Unravel's coverage was in photos and tweets.

Unravel's theme is, "We unravel the news so you don't have to." Pieces posted on a recent Monday included a shark that attacked and attached itself to the arm of a woman in Boca Raton, a pizza-franchise expansion and coverage of the local Harvey Milk Festival.

While Unravel's coverage may be more about what young people want to know before they go to work in the morning, the Pulitzer package, "Insane. Invisible. In Danger," is hair-raising (http://www.heraldtribune.com/assets/projects/florida-mental-health-hospitals/).

Based on a heavy dose of data and documents in addition to anecdotal horror stories, the Herald-Tribune and the Times showed the impact of $100 million in budget cuts on security and the standard of care at a half-dozen of the state's largest mental hospitals.

Church said the two papers were more concerned with getting the story told than whether a partnership could save money. "We have a long relationship with them," he said. "It wasn't that much of a leap for the two papers to work together."

Nor was the mental hospital investigation unusual for the paper. Church points to nearly a dozen more projects on hard-hitting topics the Herald-Tribune has tackled over the years, such as child sex-trafficking, immigration and Medicaid.

A different type of project being developed is the SPIRE CoLab, which Church describes as an independent news initiative that will report on education readiness, focusing on grade-level reading. With funding from the Sarasota-based Patterson Foundation, one of the goals of SPIRE is to offer free syndication to other news organizations.

Dorsey said partnerships like those with SPIRE and the Tampa paper are examples of creative ways to deliver important news coverage. "We're willing to try things and see where we can take it," he said.

Church said blending innovation with traditional journalism doesn't need to be difficult.

"That's kind of the culture we have. We let smart, talented people be smart and talented."

For more information, contact Executive Editor Bill Church at bill.church@heraldtribune.com.

Jane Nicholes

Jane Nicholes, a regular contributor to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association's eBulletin, is a freelance writer and editor based in coastal Alabama. She is an award-winning veteran of more than 30 years in the newspaper business. Reach her at jbnicholes@att.net. Suggestions for future stories and comments on this piece are welcomed.