Kyle Geissler
Kyle Geissler is News Flow Editor for the Janesville (Wis.) Gazette and its affiliated radio stations, WCLO/WJVL. It’s a funny title, but it’s apt: Geissler brings together words, video, audio and multimedia, all aimed at enhancing the local news package in print, on the Web and on the radio. He’s a radio man by training, but these days he’s working across all platforms. In other words, he’s the ultimate media covergence person. (He also blogs rather eloquently on media issues; check him out.)
The job gives him lots of exercise. The radio studios are on the fourth floor of the Gazette building in downtown Janesville, and the newspaper newsroom is on the third. Starting work about 4 a.m., Geissler is constantly trotting between the two floors, editing audio clips into brief features for radio and the Web, and tutoring print reporters on the use of digital gear. Two radio reporters have migrated down to the third floor, and Madison’s Channel 3 television now has a remote set-up there too. All this blurring of lines is appropriate, Geissler says: The company’s product, after all, is news; and the means by which the news is delivered are melding together.
The Gazette is family-owned, so to some extent it’s insulated from Wall Street’s nattering over profit margins. The bottom line is still a reality, though. Janesville is suffering the loss of its huge General Motors 
plant, and the Gazette took on debt to build a new printing plant that opened in 2007.
Through it all, Geissler wants to focus on teaching reporters to tell stories well — no matter what the medium. It’s what he calls “Journalism with a capital J.” Sounds like a good formula to me.
Bill Adee
I had a nice talk the other day with Bill Adee, who is Editor / Online Media at the Chicago Tribune. Adee has held the top sports job at both the Tribune and the Sun-Times, so he’s no stranger to managing lots of talented people in what can be a volatile environment. Good thing, too. Tribune Company — in bankruptcy after being saddled with debt when it was bought by real-estate mogul Sam Zell — is struggling to redefine itself digitally even as it faces a very uncertain future.
To me, Adee sounds very much like a realist. At the behest of his bosses, he’s searching for tangible value in the digital jungle, and he is way, way beyond the “gee whiz” phase of thinking that journalism can be saved just by tossing every reporter a video camera. “Seventy percent of the people who look for video on the Web are looking for humor,” he says, and that’s a niche that might better be left to others. While not neglecting video, audio and multimedia, he’s also focusing on traditional journalistic qualities, such as intensive coverage of issues that matter to Chicagoland. The Tribune might be a big organization, but ultimately it’s a local newspaper, and “advertisers want local eyeballs,” Adee says.
Which is not to say that he can’t be whimsical when it’s warranted. About a year ago, Adee and a team of twentysomethings created “Colonel Tribune,” an avatar for the Tribune’s presence on social media sites. The Colonel, of course, is a nod to the Tribune’s famously iconoclastic publisher, the late Colonel Robert McCormick. (The Colonel actually appeared on the cover of Time magazine wearing a goofy newspaper hat in June of 1947.) The Colonel may look like somebody’s drunken uncle, as one observer put it, but he’s helped pique interest for chicagotribune.com to the point where 7 percent of its page views are generated by social media.
Asked about the media model of the future, Adee hedges all bets: “I don’t think it’s going to be anything close to what we previously knew.”
plant, and the Gazette took on debt to build a new printing plant that opened in 2007.