Gannett's experiment in radically reworking what its newsrooms do puts the focus on the Web first and print product second. Reporters' offices are their cars. No story is too local.

An excerpt from the Dec. 4 Washington Post story:

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Could this be the future of newspapering?

Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. The glow of the screen illuminates his face.
 
Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or "mojos." The mojos have high-tech tools -- ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras -- but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper's Web site, and often for the print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content -- regardless of its traditional news value -- is key to building online and newspaper readership.

Myron and his colleagues are part of a great experiment being conducted by their corporate parent, McLean-based newspaper giant Gannett, which is trying to remake the very definition of a newspaper. Losing readers and revenue to the Internet and other media, newspapers are struggling to stay relevant and even afloat. Gannett's answer is radical.

The chain's papers are redirecting their newsrooms to focus on the Web first, paper second. Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up "hyper-local," street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes. Web sites are fed with reader-generated content, such as pictures of their kids with Santa. In short, Gannett -- at its 90 papers, including USA Today -- is trying everything it can think of to create Web sites that will attract more readers.

"Whatever you spend your time and money doing," said News-Press managing editor Mackenzie Warren, "is news."

The frightening thing about this move is what it says about the audience. Apparently Americans don't care about the wider world, or even their own country.

Traffic and school menus are about the extent of what interests them, it would seem.

This reminds me of a speech I heard by Kathy Gannon, who had been the Pakistan-Afghanistan reporter for the Associated Press. In the summer of 2001, she spoke to a group of editors. One of them asked her, "Why should our readers care about what happens there?"

Her internal answer? "You'll see."