First Digital Media Shutters Centralized News Project

An initiative by Digital First Media to centralize the production of national and digital news for its 75 newspapers is closing, a cost-cutting move stemming from a continued decline in print advertising as more readers flock to online sources.

While other newspaper companies, including USA Today publisher Gannett, have adopted the approach, DFM's experiment -- called Project Thunderdome -- was one of the earliest industry efforts to allow local newspaper staffs to focus on local news while a separate team of reporters and editors produced national news and digital-first content at another centralized location.

John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media, has been a leading advocate of the urgency for print newsrooms to heighten their digital news offerings, and launched Thunderdome in 2012 to eliminate repetitive reporting, produce content quickly, and enhance several areas that were emerging at the time -- data journalism, video production, website and mobile developments.

The stories and other types of multimedia content produced by the Thunderdome team were distributed to DFM's newspapers, including San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, Contra Cost Times and Los Angeles Daily News.