The San Francisco Chronicle will soon require all staff to undergo two months of training in digital and social media. The program will encourage reporters to take risks and think “digital first.”
The venerable newspaper, one of the country’s oldest remaining outlets, has hired Audrey Cooper as the first female managing director since its inception.
“The approach is novel for newspapers,” Cooper says. “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 move hopes to revive the newspaper’s flailing readership, which currently has fallen under 300,000.
The Chronicle is owned by the privately held Hearst Corporation and does not make it financial statement public, however, the paper’s PR team claims they are profitable.