Gabordi: Watch the future unfold at FLORIDA TODAY
For the better part of two weeks, I've been away from home traveling and thinking about the future – mine and ours – and teaching my grandson how to swing a baseball bat and my granddaughter to hold a ball. Well, kind of – she's only 5 weeks old.
The first part of my trip was to a leadership summit for the new Gannett Company, the company formerly known as Gannett, which publishes 93 local news sites and newspapers, including FloridaToday.com and FLORIDA TODAY, in the United States.
It also owns Newsquest, one of the largest publishers in the United Kingdom, with more than 200 daily, weekly and magazine titles, including Berrow's Worcester Journal, which dates to 1690 and claims to be the oldest continuously publishing newspaper in the world. It's interesting and offers some grounding.
But we weren't at the summit to talk about our past. Instead, we focused on understanding a strategy for moving ahead in the aftermath of the division of the old Gannett into two companies: TEGNA, formed from the letters in Gannett and comprised of the old Gannett's former broadcast and digital platforms, and the new Gannett, comprised of our digital news sites and news publications.
What is that strategy?
In part, you are watching it play out in the transformation of FLORIDA TODAY, which has seen explosive growth on mobile, video and social platforms, greater engagement in the community and an increasing emphasis on watchdog and breaking news reporting.
In other words: even more local, involved and caring while adapting our methods to changing audience habits.
At the same time, we're part of the nation's largest company of professional journalists and we're organizing into a nationwide news network. More to come on that down the road. But suffice to say that the new Gannett celebrated its birthday with parties last week at sites across the nation, just as we did at FLORIDA TODAY.
What does all this have to do with baseball and my grandchildren? A lot, if you think about it.
Just as some have with our industry, people have been predicting the demise of baseball as a major sport for as long as I can remember. The naysayers and doubters have been proven wrong time and time again.
The audience for Major League Baseball has never been bigger with 32,000-plus attending a typical game in 2007. That's prior to the deep recession years taking somewhat of a toll, dropping average attendance to about 30,000 now, according to the website SB Nation. By comparison, in 1979, fewer than 21,000 attended a typical game, the website says. And that's much higher than the supposedly Golden Years in the 1950s and '60s.
Add into today's numbers the availability of all baseball games live in most markets on cable, satellite and the Internet and you have to conclude, despite stubbing its toe in the performance enhancing drug era, America's game has never been healthier. So teach your kids to play baseball – there's a future in the game.
So, too, with news operations. More than 93,000 people follow FLORIDA TODAY on Facebook alone. That's just our main branded page and says nothing about specialty pages, such as Mobilize, Florida Today Space, Florida Today Education, among others, or our staff members' personal pages.
Add in Twitter with 27,600-plus followers, Periscope, Instagram and other social platforms and you can see why our combined reach on desktop and mobile platforms is strong and growing.
For example, we reached more than 1.2 million unique visitors who viewed more than 9.2 million pages of information on our digital platforms in June alone. Combined with our strong print editions and powerful e-edition (the electronic replica of the print edition), which had more than 2.3 million page views in June, and you can see why I say we are well positioned to build a strong future.
Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply wrong or – worse – feeding a personal agenda.
As for how my grandchildren fit in: well, come on, they're adorable and had to be mentioned in any article I write about the future. But the bottom line is this: I cannot imagine their generation – or any generation – of Americans growing up without a strong and independent press.
Coming off our celebrations of America's birthday, it is fitting to mention that our Founding Fathers knew that there can be no freedom in a land without the public being well informed by a free press. I have great respect for all ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, but there was a reason freedom of the press and expression were listed first.
So teach your children and grandchildren to consume FLORIDA TODAY media, too. Read them stories. Get them involved with their community and its happenings. There's a future in that, too.
Special note to Insiders
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Bob Gabordi is executive editor at Florida Today. His direct dial number is 321-242-3607 and cell phone is 850-591-2229. He is @bgabordi on Twitter and /bgabordi on Facebook. You can also find him on LinkedIn. His email address is bgabordi@floridatoday.com