In online era, SF Chronicle sends reporters to digital boot camp

The San Francisco Chronicle, one of America's oldest remaining big city newspapers, is set to announce a radical retraining programme for its staff in order to arrest a slide in circulation and remain relevant in the digital age, according to a report in social media and technology focused website Mashable

Audrey Cooper, the first female managing editor in the paper's 148-year history, will require all staff to enter what is being described as a start-up-style incubator. In a plush off-site office procured from the paper's Food and Wine section, journalists will undergo two months of rigorous training - in effect, a digital and social media boot camp.

"The approach is novel for newspapers," says Cooper. "It physically removes reporters from the traditional newsroom and gives them new digital metrics, such as engagement time, to judge whether their stories have reached our core audience. We also plan to use real-time monitoring of the clicks we get from social media and other referral sites, including LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit."

The San Francisco Chronicle primarily serves the San Francisco Bay Area of California, but is distributed throughout northern and central California. It was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H de Young.

The circulation of the Chronicle, now owned by the Hearst Corporation, plummeted by 50 per cent between 2009 and 2012. The paper now has a circulation of roughly 300,000 readers; and is said to be losing millions of dollars a year – though this may have been partly offset by a deal with Yahoo to rent space to the internet company in Chronicle's office building.

The Chronicle is perceived to have lately lagged in its coverage of technology and social media. Though its website, SFGate, is steadily gaining readers, the pace does not make up for the paper's decline.

Cooper, 36, hopes to change all of that. She intends to rename the paper's business section - to a yet-to-be-determined title - and hopes the 'incubator' will encourage reporters to take risks and think "digital first". The Chronicle's journalists, from its 95-year-old science editor down, will be required to learn how to use analytics dashboards to track their stories.

Though the paper has gone through several rounds of layoffs, Cooper wouldn't say whether reporters' jobs would be at risk if they failed the boot camp, which starts next month. "We're focusing on retraining our journalists, not threatening them," she said, while maintaining that the plan would succeed.

"Failure only means we all lose our jobs - and the Bay Area loses its number one news source," Cooper said. "Failure to reach our goals - both individual and team - is simply not something we can tolerate, and we won't."