Diary from newspaper retreat

I participated in a Minnesota Newspaper Foundation Leadership Retreat for publishers and editors, funded by the Blandin Foundation, this past week joining smaller papers from such diverse areas as Sleepy Eye, Ortonville, Cottonwood County, Park Rapids and Fergus Falls.

Here are some random thoughts that bubbled up during this time.

• Equation for successful newspapers: ? => # => ! => $ 
• Defined: ? (find out what people want to know about our communities) => # (interview or be authority that gives most useful answers) => ! (aha moment keeps readers coming back) => $ (subscribers/advertisers will follow authority). This is different from what we provide today because we tend to cover meetings, not issues.
• Just like hospitals, newspapers are obligated to improve the health of their communities. When all other leadership fails, newspapers are the institution of last resort before anarchy.
• Regardless of where we are with leaders in our community, we should be developing a "training" or "step up" program for our future leaders and not leave it to serendipity.
• What is impossible to do today at the Free Press but if done can make us a success? Shouldn't we focus on how to make it less impossible?
• Those who say it can't be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it.
• What is being yelled at us from around the curve? "Pig!" Talk to me and I'll explain it.
•  The courage and dedication of editors, writers, desk people -- hell, all newspapers people who live in the Red River area to continue to cover the story while their own families and homes are threatened. I'm hard pressed to believe a citizen blogger would do the job just as well. Why aren't we telling this story more?
  
• Think you are prepared for all emergencies? How about a pandemic! (Thanks, Deb.)
• You know your own social capital but what about the links from the rest of your staff? You may have more valuable connections waiting to be utilized.
• What's wrong with using fear to get the community to activate, participate, attend? Because the Blandin process of involvement must carry ethical issues of how to involve the community or shoulder some of the criticism of instigation rather than activation.
• Newspapers can help a community define itself. If you focus on crime, conflicts and rock & roll to sell newspapers, it may be great for newsstand sales but it presents a distorted picture for all to assume. And it can shape the personality of its members -- we aren't a mirror as much as we are a shiner of the light, an educator. Our goal is not audience; our goal is community development so our businesses stay healthy.
• Why would any newspaper editor want to be a mere chronicler of a community's slow, spiralling death?