-----Original Message-----

From: Bennett, Amanda
To: Inquirer
Sent: 9/28/2005 2:20 PM
Subject: Weekly Progress Note

To the newsroom:

As part of my pledge to be as open and transparent as I can be during this difficult process, I promised weekly emails with at least three sections:

I. Progress on developing the new newsroom plan
II. Expressions of interest in the buyout
III. Answers to frequently asked questions

Here is this week's message.

I. Progress: We met yesterday off-site at a room next door at the Board of Education to begin the planning process. Present were me and Anne, deputy managing editors, department heads and a few deputies sitting in for their absent department heads.

Our goal was to get as clear a vision for an excellent newspaper with 75 fewer people as possible. We spent several hours working on defining the core values of the newspaper – the things that we can't let go of, even as we get smaller - things like our ambition, our watchdog journalism, our personality and voice, and our commitment to reaching all the readers in our region.

We also spent several hours envisioning what our future was going to look like, and how we needed to reorganize, not just to get smaller, but to face a future full of changing media demands. Our commitment to online, and to multi-media journalism, was a centerpiece of that discussion.

We also talked about the way the newsroom is organized, and about the fact that with 75 fewer people, we will need to look at creative ways of organizing ourselves to get our work done more efficiently, and to continue to be ambitious.

At the end, we organized four committees, each of which will be led by a team of department heads.

1) The transition team – will handle immediate issues of continuing to produce a paper of high quality as people are leaving. This team will help with a range of tasks including helping me with communication, job executions, and with helping the paper plan appropriate farewells for the people who are leaving.

2) The new organization team -- will work on the larger issues surrounding preparing our newsroom for the future.

3) The new media integration team - will work on fully integrating our online and multimedia group into our existing departments.

4) The new regionalism team – will work on how better use of investigative stories, narrative, online, and lifestyle reporting can help us find a better way of covering our region in ways that are compelling for our suburban readers.

II. Expressions of Interest in the Buyout

18 applied (17 Guild, 1 Independent)
4 accepted

I got rid of Part III, since it was fairly useless to an outsider. Don't worry, you're not missing anything.