Excerpted from a company-wide memo from Edward Greenspon, the Globe and Mail’s editor, on the paper’s efforts to “reimagineer” itself:

“The Web is Next
… Earlier in the year, we discussed the fact that more people were coming into web sites not through the home page but from aggregators like Google News. We made adjustments to our story pages to turn them from end points into jumping off points to other globeandmail.com offerings. Overnight, our page views jumped from about 2.2-million a day to about 2.8-million a day. Last fall, we put our columnists and some other material behind a pay wall and called it Insider Edition. To date, it has about 11,000 subscribers. The potential to grow through editorial improvements, marketing muscle and understanding our users is enormous.

Also, we began a pilot project at web-newspaper integration in Report on Business. We regularly beat Bloomberg and Dow in breaking stories on the web, thus attracting increased visits to our sites and enhancing our reputation as the place to go for business news and analysis.

As well, the web team has introduced Project Dialogue, which takes greater advantage both of the interactivity potential of the web and the apparently growing desire of many users to “join the conversation” rather than serving merely as passive recipients of news. A host of new web initiatives are underway: from a new design to the introduction of a real estate site and major upgrading of our auto site. The web is critical to our strategy: the easy growth days flowing from new high-speed connections are over; now we must convert users of other sites and intensify our relationships with existing users.”

“Web/Newspaper Integration

As stated in a note at the first announcement of Reimagination, it is no longer web versus paper but web and paper. But what distinguishes the web from the paper and, perhaps more critically, the paper from the web? What are the unique attributes of each and how can we best take advantage of these?

The various Globe web sites attract more than 3-million unique visitors a month. Last month, globeandmail.com attracted 2.3-million unique visitors, some of them coming several times a day, others far less frequently. Year by year, the web accounts for increased company revenues, although it is still small by comparison with the newspaper.

The New York Times plans to fully integrate its newsrooms between now and 2007. Its editors speak of approaching stories from the point of view of “platform neutrality.” But does platform neutrality begin to capture the appropriate relationship between paper and web? Should we be thinking of the web and paper as a continuum, with members of the Globe audience going
back and forth depending on their particular needs at a given time?

Are there certain areas of coverage that should integrate completely? Should Sports, for example, be a web-based section with a secondary newspaper role? Once again, where do we draw the lines and take advantage of the strengths if we view the paper and web as a continuum?

How do we move beyond the issue of posting newspaper stories on the web to exploiting the opportunities to tell stories that exploit the particular attributes of the web, as was done with Stephanie Nolen’s AIDS package, which has been nominated for a multi-media award by the Online Journalism Association? How do we translate a successful newspaper feature like Monday Morning Manager into a value-added web feature? How do we better use our archives and turn them into active tools?

Should our assigning editors be responsible for paper and web? What is the answer to the perennial question of where we should break stories and is that even the question anymore? And how do we really engage the knowledge base of our audiences and tap into the desire of many to participate fully in The Globe and Mail, not just as consumers of information but also as producers?”

Thanks to Paul Wells for posting the full G&M memo.