Overview of newsroom family meeting with Steve Smith

• The economy still sucks, the budget situation is still dismal, stuff is expensive, and other newspapers are worse than here. But the best antidote to news industry doom and gloom is to focus on doing good work, editor Steve Smith said.

• No layoffs for the time being, and a quasi hiring freeze. The budget will be reexamined in the fall. More details then, but meanwhile we’ve been “extraordinarily conservative” in spending when it comes to extras like travel and other personnel-related costs.

• The possibility of reorganizing the newsroom structure in an innovative way (Smith handpicked 8 younger staffers to conduct an efficiency study and make recommendations about how they’d build an ideal newsroom)

• The aforementioned decreases in word quantity (scroll down to the Newsroom News heading )

Online redesign update

Two months later, the first phase of redesign is done. Online director Ryan Pitts’ walkthrough of the new prototype site led to intense inside-baseball debate. How much of the online audience overlaps on the print-paper audience? Will it look mildly familiar to the print newspaper? How much of the newspaper’s identity will it include? (FYI SpokesmanReview.com will gradually ease into Spokesman.com url eventually)

The Web site content will not only reflect what appears in the print edition but have the super-cool breaking news or audio/visual stuff. Features the new site will include: ability for readers to instantly bookmark their favorites, email a story to friends, maintain one’s own “profile” and have a user account, comment on stories, view stories by location, e.g. by neighborhood, browse story by tags/other metadata, browse stories by media type (e.g. text, video, audio, data…), view the multimedia associated with any particular story, without going to another section of the site…

More later.