Bill Church
Senior Vice President of News, GateHouse Media
Bill Church is Senior Vice President of News for GateHouse Media. His previous jobs included Executive Editor of the Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune and Executive Editor of the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon.
Quotes
It’s a reflection in many ways of what’s happened to our industry for, now, more than a decade. Our industry has continually lost jobs, even at an accelerating level, and yet at the same time the basic structure of newsrooms hasn’t changed. ... It is frightening in its consistency over the years that as the number of jobs have (been) lost, what hasn't changed is the percentage of editors, the percentage of reporters, and the percentage of journalists filling a number of roles in that newsroom.
What we’re seeing is, does it hit a really targeted audience, what would be described as a passion tribe, you know you love great storytelling, or you’re a big sports fan. And then having engaging personalities, who sort of in many ways are filling the needs that have always existed among readers. Are you making them smarter? Are you giving them something to talk about? Are you looking after their interests? Those are the three principles that really came out of the Readership Institute at Northwestern a couple of decades ago. I don’t think as editors we’ve really understood that the work that was done there still holds up now in terms of how do you actively engage with folks.
We actually encourage the differentiation in a market-by-market level, because that’s the sweet spot. But what’s happened over the past few years as GateHouse has grown, we have come across areas of common interests. For instance, we were pleasantly surprised when we did a recent audience engagement survey that moved 57,000 responses, and the No. 1 interest among those email subscribers was regional and state news, even above local news.
I’m actually very optimistic right now. I think it’s the reality of going to the doctor and him telling you’ve got to lose weight, and you’ve got to change the way you live your life. And that’s where the industry is right now, and it’s really up to us to decide whether we’re going to make the changes that we need to make.