This may be too much inside baseball, but we’re developing a plan to change our beat structure.

Beats are the coverage areas to which our reporters are assigned. They can be geographic or focused on a subject, like public safety.

Our current beat structure is fairly traditional and similar to newsrooms around the country. Reporters are assigned to cover the major institutions – city hall, schools, courts, cops, state government, etc. We also have reporters who specialize in topics like health care, the arts, state government and the environment.

So why change? We must adapt to our audience, which is turning to the Web for breaking news. That means we need to be more aggressive about what we’re doing online. We also need to focus our staff on finding and reporting so-called “unique content” – stories of broad interest found only in the Press Herald or at pressherald.com. And we need to make both of these changes with fewer resources.

The question we’re asking now is: Are we covering the right things? What changes, if any, need to be made to our beat structure to meet the demands of a 24-hour newsroom? What new topics should we be covering? Are there stories to which we should pay less attention?

We’re hoping to answer these questions over the next couple of weeks. As always, if you have some constructive ideas along these lines, send ‘em along.

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