Mary Glick, from the American Press Institute, led a session outlining the institute’s new newsroom program.

She made these points:

• Newsrooms are downsizing and we must learn to live with less.
• New voices are gaining influence in media. Bloggers and local community forums are our competition, whether we like it or not. Look for ways to cultivate good bloggers and forum hosts who you can trust.
• More and citizens are becoming publishers using comments sections, forums and blogs. Get used to it and figure out how to make it work for your organization.
• We need to meet our audiences on their turf. Don’t wait for them to come to you.
• Speed trumps quality in today’s newsrooms, but accuracy is still king. Learn to be fast and accurate. Be right and first.

Newsrooms need to decide their priorities. At the Dayton Daily News they have made these decisions.

1. Getting the days news online in real time is king.
2. Sunday’s print package and enterprise stories come next in line.
3. The daily stories and A1 line up.
4. Niche news and feature pubs are still important.
5. Engaging readers in key communities must be done.
6. Headline SEO and Web links.

Mary explained that many newsrooms she visits with API are changing the layout and where people sit. Pretty basic, but she said it’s working to get staff to look at workflow with new eyes. Mary suggests getting the decision makers in the center of the newsroom so they can easily manage content over the many different platforms on which we are distributing it: Web sites, print, social media. Editors, designers and reporters should not be confined in offices as in the past.

In today’s newsrooms it’s important to make sure reporters and editors are aware of the traffic their stories are generating. Many newsroom are now displaying real time traffic statistics in their newsrooms. It lets you know what is hooking users.

A couple of tips from Mary Glick:

Look at creating a breaking news team whose members know when news happens they are the go-to guys and gals. Create a breaking news blog in advance and know what you want to do with it. Make assignments for web producers, photogs reporters and editors. Check out social media sites when news happens and know how to use it for sourcing. Think about creating social media pages and sites for your lifestyle sections first. They are often very visual and easy to manage than a straight news site. They are proven to help increase site and story traffic.

Think about blogs as beats. They may not be appropriate for all beats, but may be for some.

Editors need to start thinking about themselves as curators. Curators select content to display, cull through to find the important stuff, help explain context, arrogate information to help readers out, organize content for display.

Look at reviving Watchdog Teams and beats in newsrooms. TV does it well.

Developing a way to get started using user generated content will help with staffing issues. Decide when it will work and how to get it. It will give you more feet on the ground. They may need some direction, but can be worth it in the end.