By 2006, newspapers across the United States faced a crisis of growing proportions, triggered in large part by the exploding popularity of Internet-based news sources. The Web was pushing traditional newspapers into uncharted territory, threatening them on the one hand with extinction but offering on the other a potentially wider audience than at any time in history. Newspapers suffered as they struggled to prevent the first and take advantage of the second.

The Times Union , the dominant newspaper in Albany, New York’s state capital, was no exception. Circulation had dropped more than 10 percent from 1996, advertising dollars had declined, and the costs of running the newspaper had increased. Readers were migrating to the Web, but the Times Union had no clear plan how to use the new technology to maintain editorial excellence, serve readers, and still make money.

Ironically, in the late 1990s the Times Union had been cutting edge in its approach to the Internet. It had been among the first regional papers to use the Internet to reach readers and early on covered a major story on the Web with graphics, photographs and up-to-the-minute reporting. Multiple awards had recognized its entrepreneurial mettle. But by 2006, it was no longer a leader among newspapers its size.

Part of the problem was technology: Editor Rex Smith and other newsroom managers recognized that the newsroom’s early 1990s-era content management system—which helped staff organize and share information—was inefficient and outdated. But process was also to blame. The workflow in the newsroom, established incrementally over the paper’s 150-year history, no longer made sense. Existing procedures served a hot-type and printing press model, not an electronic one.

But Smith had loftier ambitions than a technology upgrade or process redesign. He wanted to initiate nothing less than a wholesale overhaul of the newspaper’s editorial model, moving it from a traditional print daily toward a hybrid print/online, round-the-clock product. As a first step, Smith and his new publisher, Mark Aldam, hired a consultant—Patti Myers—to map every aspect of the newsroom’s process flow. A clear picture of the paper’s current inefficiencies and redundancies would, they hoped, clarify its best path to the future.

When Myers delivered her findings in January 2007, their implications were far-reaching. To position the paper for success, Smith and Aldam realized they would need to reevaluate staffing needs, change job descriptions, retrain reporters, revamp the news production process, redesign office layout, and purchase new equipment—and that was just the beginning. While Smith and Aldam were eager to adopt an ambitious plan for change, they were leery of the potential costs—to staff morale as well as to the bottom line. Adding to the challenge, there were no role models; no newspaper had attempted to overhaul its editorial process in the exact fashion Smith and Aldam were considering. Over the next days and weeks, they would have to make critical decisions about which reforms to pursue and in which order—and which to put on hold or ignore altogether.