The executive editor of The Providence Journal, Alan Rosenberg, said the newspaper is trying to raise its digital game while renewing its coverage of cities and towns outside Providence.
“What we’re always trying to do is maximize our resources and make sure that people have the best assignment to get the most of what they’re doing,” Rosenberg said in an interview with RI Public Radio, referring to a recent move to reassign a number of ProJo reporters.
Rosenberg, a 39-year veteran at the ProJo, was named in April as the Journal’s new top editor, succeeding Dave Butler.
Like other newspapers, the Journal has wrestled with dropping print circulation and newsroom cuts due to sweeping changes in the media landscape, particularly the collapse of the traditional revenue base for print products. The ProJo now has fewer than 20 news reporters, a fraction of the number from 20 years ago.
Yet Rosenberg said the Journal maintains a position of strength as it responds to the challenges posed by the Internet.
“I think it’s important, first, to note that we still have a large staff of news gatherers,” he said. “We still have in terms of the number of reporters, photographers, sportswriters, feature writers, we still have the largest news-gathering staff in southeastern New England.”
Rosenberg said the ProJo is adapting to the demand for online news “by making our process more digital-friendly, so that at our morning planning morning we’re talking not about just what’s the big story for tomorrow’s front page, but what are the big stories for the different parts of today on the web.” He said the newspaper is also ramping up its emphasis on video.
Rosenberg’s willingness to sit for an interview marks a break from tradition on Fountain Street, where top editors and publishers have mostly avoided talking with other media organizations. “We are an institution at The Providence Journal that has sometimes tended to talk at people,” Rosenberg said. “My presence here is one example of how we would like to talk with people. We would like to be an institution that is listening as well as talking.”
The Journal helped pioneer the use of suburban news bureaus to cover news from outside communities, although those bureaus were closed in the wake of the changes delivered by the Internet. For a time, the ProJo stepped back in its routine coverage of communities outside Providence, although Rosenberg said he will maintain a return to more local coverage initiated by Butler.
“We have reporters assigned geographically, to each part of the state,” he said. “We have a reporter assigned to Providence, a reporter assigned to Cranston, a reporter assigned to Warwick and Coventry. We have reporters assigned to South County and to the East Bay, but we also know that people look to us for statewide coverage, so that’s the responsibility of the editing team and the producing team to use those resources to make sure that we’re getting to all the interesting and important stories that we want to get to.”
Here are a few other highlights from the interview:
— Rosenberg responds to critics who say Gatehouse Media, which bought the ProJo in 2014 and has implemented a series of cuts, is more interested in higher revenue and lower costs than maintaining a quality newsroom. He said the company is a convenient whipping boy for industry-wide trends, including cutbacks at The New York Times and ESPN.
— Rosenberg also offered a view on how long The Providence Journal will remain as a printed product, saying in part, “This is really going to be a question the market will answer. It could be 10 years, it could be 20 years. It really is something that nobody knows, and if they tell you they have the answer, I think they’re lying to you.”
