Rethinking at the Daily News *

City Editor Barbara Jones is being reassigned as part of a strategy to reconfigure how the L.A. Daily News gathers and delivers its content, online and in print. And, of course, how to do it all cheaper and (probably) with fewer journalists. Editor Ron Kaye's email to the staff:

Everybody: We're on the move in reinventing journalism and towards that end I am very pleased to announce that Barbara Jones has agreed, effective next Monday, to become our overall content coordinator making sense and order out of the chaos the rest of us are creating.

Barbara, who has long been the hardest worker in the newsroom, will apply her energy to working with our sister papers in Southern California and Northern California, with interactive and la.com as well as within the entire newsroom from valleynews to metro, sports and features.

We're already looking at a lot of changes, some to cut costs, some to make the paper more interesting and useful to our customers.

There's a lot of challenges and opportunity and Barbara's skills are needed to make that happen.

I've asked Judi Erickson and Brent Hopkins to a head a combined city/business staff task force to bat around ideas with the staffs on how to organize or reorganize what we're doing.

The mission I've handled them is simple: Liberate more energy from reporters and editors and channel it into a brighter, livelier online-first news product that will make us more valuable to current consumers of our print and online products and attract new ones.

That of course is all our jobs. So I hope everyone will start thinking of how we do that across all departments.

More to come.

Ron

Erickson is an assistant city editor. I assume there will be more at Hopkins' blog.

* Related: Bleak assessment of how Dean Singleton's MediaNews papers work from a former editor in the Bay Area.