As the media industry struggles in the midst of an existential identity crisis, The Newspaper Association of America changed its name to News Media Alliance. The move, according to the association, is aimed at highlighting the media industry’s evolution to multi-platform, digitally-savvy businesses and premium content providers.

“The industry is made up of so much more now,” David Chavern, president and CEO of News Media Alliance, told News & Tech. “We’re the most multi-channel people out there.”

What happened to newspaper?

Tribune Publishing notoriously rebranded itself to Tronc recently, a combination of Tribune Online Content.

“Our industry requires an innovative approach and fundamentally different way of operating,” said Michael Ferro, chairman of Tribune Publishing. “Our rebranding to Tronc represents the manner in which we will pool our technology and content resources to execute our strategy.”

The New York Times last year instituted a major newsroom overhaul to focus more efforts on its digital endeavors.

“The Times seeks to make great strides in focusing on coverage across all platforms at all times, with more attention given to video, multimedia and other forms of storytelling in addition to print,” Dean Banquet wrote in a note to staff.

And while the trend remains throughout newsrooms across the country, the fact remains that the conspicuous loss of words like newspaper and publishing leave some of us wondering what the future of print looks like.

“I think print has a future,” Chavern told N&T. “It’s just not the future. There’s a lot of history and power behind the word newspaper, but its just not a big enough word anymore.”

Most newspaper companies these days have expanded beyond the printed page, explained Chavern.

“I don’t know if anyone has just a print product anymore,” he said.  

Innovation

The changes News Media Alliance is making seek to open the dialogue and push innovation to all of its partners.

“We’re really focused on the future of the new business and innovation,” Chavern said.

In that vein, NMA opened membership to digital-only publications. Independent Journal Review and Spirited Media are the first members that don’t have a print product. Spirited Media is the parent company of Billy Penn, a Philadelphia-based news organization. IJR is a right-leaning digital news aggregator.

“We wanted to start out with two good ones, and we tried to be picky about who we picked,” Chavern told Nieman Lab. “In terms of digital members for us, first of all, the most important thing is that they have a news culture, that they have newsrooms that create original journalism.”

New tools

The organization also introduced a number of new tools available to members to help transition into digital organizations.

The ideaXchange is a new online community that will launch sometime this fall. It is designed to make sharing, brainstorming and learning from other organizations easier.

“We’ve developed an online community for publishers to share experiments,” Chavern said. “Digital-only members experiment and innovate very fast and they will have a lot of ideas which will help everyone.”

In addition, metricsXchange is a new dashboard that will show comparisons between markets and publications which NMA will use to provide analyses and highlight newsworthy trends mined from the tool.

“It (metricsXchange) will allow publishers to measure digital performance and also compare that performance to others,” Chavern explained.

Investing in creativity

The pioneering spirit of many news organizations old and new is palpable in the industry. Leaders the world over are looking for new revenue sources and new ways to monetize content. Chavern sees supporting this as one of the most important roles of the NMA.

“We want to help the industry get through this difficult period, understanding that people want and need news like never before,” Chavern told N&T. “That’s something to build on and be optimistic about. It’s fun to create and we’re creating something really cool.”