Meet the new executive editor of the Asbury Park Press

Phil Freedman talks about his experience after a month in his new role

“My overall message when people asked me about the paper is, I got lucky because I walked into a newsroom with a ton of talented people,” said Freedman, who started at APP in January 2023. “And my job is just to not screw it up!”

After twenty years at Delaware Online/The News Journal, with more than a decade as the publication’s news director, Freedman is excited to helm the APP newsroom and help to bolster its investigative and multimedia offerings.

Freedman took on the new role at Gannett-owned Asbury Park Press following a massive round of staffing cuts made by the parent company last year. Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, owns APP and eight other New Jersey dailies.

In this interview, we talk about APP’s changing readership, the need for more watchdog journalism, the forecast for local news, and how a subscriber-based model can help to leverage powerful stories.

Freedman said that producing excellent investigative work and top-notch content is the key to the sustainability of local news. This means providing added context in every story, and telling readers why and how something happened, but also what the impact is going to be. The extra reporting goes a long way in building a loyal readership.

We also talked about the shift to digital news content which makes multimedia and data available to the public, yet can be challenging for print-only readers who are struggling to adapt. Freedman also acknowledged that the subscription model is necessary to continue producing high-quality journalism, even though many people are still resistant to paying for digital content.

Throughout our interview, Freedman’s passion for journalism and commitment to producing quality content was evident. As executive editor at Asbury Park Press, he wants to continue with the good investigative work the paper is known for while raising the level of the “bottom stories.”

Freedman’s insights provide a valuable perspective on the state of the local journalism industry, the challenges and opportunities facing newspapers today, and the need to continually adapt to changing times.

📄 Below is the full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

CE: How have things been since taking on the role of executive editor at Asbury Park Press?

PF: It’s going well. I was fortunate to walk into a really good newsroom with a lot of talented reporters and photographers and editors, which helps a lot. I’m still trying to put my mark on how we do things a little bit, but pretty much everybody does everything really well already. So, I think part of my job is to keep it rolling, to keep obstacles out of their way, so they can do what they need to do.

CE: You draw on a strong background in investigative reporting, for example, at Delaware Online and the News Journal. Can you talk about what kinds of stories you’re hoping to tell and develop at APP?

PF: I’m very much a proponent of ‘better stories get read by more people.’ It’s a pretty simple sentence to say, but a really hard one to execute.

But as newspapers struggled to figure out what to do with the internet, we went through a lot of fits and starts where we were taking the focus off of investigative and onto page views and just trying to get a lot of people in.

And then when we really hit on this subscriber strategy of having people not pay for everything, but pay for our best stuff, that to me was a big boost of my morale. Because it was the first time I really saw and could really measure that — for the most part — the better a story was, the more watchdog elements it had, the more enterprise elements it had, the more people that would not only read it, but that would sign up and subscribe, because that’s what they were looking for.

And yes, there’s all kinds of readers and some readers just want to read and want to ask why the box scores aren’t in the papers anymore, and things like that. But definitely, our future and our pathway to growth is by doing high-quality journalism. And in Asbury, the reporters do a lot of high-quality journalism, and I want to help them grow and make it a little better, and maybe get more reporters and photographers in the stable of pushing for those stories.

Every editor thinks they’re the smartest person in the world, I get that. (laughs) The strategies, they’re not complicated, not sophisticated, but they’re not super easy to just snap your fingers and have them happen. But I can usually boil down initiatives into really simple terms. And to answer your question, I want to do more of the good investigative work that Asbury is known for, but I also want to raise the level of, I guess, our ‘bottom stories.’ I want them to be starting on a higher platform.

I hate using words like worst and all that, but what is our worst story now? And how do we measure it by the number of people that read the story or how good it is — I want that level to be higher so that when readers come to our website, and our digital platforms, even if you may not be interested in food or football or government, you might still see the headline and say ‘well, if I was interested in that I click on it. That’s really good.’ And, it’s at least in their head that everything on our digital platforms is good, and that we don’t have flat stories that just sort of tell you that something happened.

I tell people a lot: As journalists, we should never just say that something happened. I mean, there are some instances, like with some breaking news, but we know the community, we know the history of things, so that when something happens, our story shouldn’t be, ‘hey, that thing happened.’ It should be telling readers why it happened, or how it happened the way it did, or, really, most importantly, what this means to you — what the impact is going to be on you the reader because that’s what’s going to make them read it, and understand it and care about it.

If we just say it happened, then it’s ‘oh yeah, big deal.’ But if we say ‘it happened, and your taxes are going up, or your taxes are going down, or there’s more traffic or less development,’ that’s how you can connect with readers. It’s by always trying to put something extra in every story. And for the most part, at Asbury, we do that, but I think we can raise our bottom a little bit more even.

And photos and headlines are a big part of what we do. You can have a great story that really tells all the behind-the-scenes skullduggery that happened, that’s good. But if the headline doesn’t tease that that’s what the story is about, you might not click on it. And you may not even read a story, you would have been really interested in reading.

So, it takes a lot of trial and error and trying different things with headlines and stories, and it’s not at all a one-person show. That means the reporter and the editor and some producers, and some planners, all weighing in. They all have good skills and see things in different ways and understand what SEO terms people search for, and that’s important. And the photographer’s capturing really illuminating images that pull you in. It’s always sort of been this way, even when we were just a print product and no online, that the headline and the photos are what capture your attention. And then you read the story.

To me, it’s a proposition for readers: We don’t want them to click on something they thought they were going to be interested in and be disappointed. That’s the idea behind raising a bottom, and our standard for what we publish… and I think there’s a psychological boost just knowing that everything on the site you’re on is pretty good.

CE: You’ve been at Delaware online for about 20 years, half of that time as the director. Can you tell us more about what this new transition has been like for you?

PF: Well, it hasn’t been a culture change, but I’ve had to do — and I’m going to continue to do for a long time — a lot of learning about the people, their politics, and what they like. In Delaware, there were certain kinds of stories and topics that I knew our readers would almost always react positively to. And in New Jersey, there are those topics too but they’re not the same. (laughs) You know, we have some built-in stuff, like Bruce Springsteen and that helps a little.

But just having Bruce Springsteen as being a local person and a lot of local interests — we still can’t mail it in, and we don’t at all. Chris Jordan and the features editors do a great job of thinking about the kinds of stuff we’re going to do, and not just riding the wave. We want to create the wave.

But I’m learning about the towns, about the staffers. There are 50-some journalists at Asbury Park, and I think I’ve had a one-on-one session, with all but a couple. And I think that’s really important. I’m a pretty accessible editor and I like to know what’s going on.

In times when everybody’s in the newsroom, several times a day, I just like to go out and walk around and talk to people and hear what they’re working on and hear what’s up. And that’s just the way I am, but also I think and hope it shows that I am an open book. I don’t want there to be a lot of secrets when we initiate new programs or for initiatives to be redundant.

I also recognize that journalists are inquisitive, and you’re pretty dumb as an editor if you think you can hide something from your reporters! If they want to find something out, they’re gonna find it out, right? And I don’t even want that atmosphere in my newsroom. I want people to, if they don’t understand something, just ask their editor or come ask me. I think there’s a really important aspect to keeping people informed, and they know that they’re a part of it.

And when we have initiatives, I welcome feedback and pushback from editors, and I want to hear questions from reporters because it means everybody is taking it seriously. They’re listening to it, and they’re analyzing it. And, they’ve been here much longer than me. I think new editors are known for discovering things for the first time that everybody else at the paper is like, ‘oh my gosh, we’ve written this story a thousand times!’

But on the flip side, if you’re at a newspaper for a long time, in your head, you feel like you’ve done that story pretty recently, and you don’t need to do it again. But sometimes, if three or four years go by enough of your readership has turned over, and there are a lot of people who may not have seen it. We have a really high priority of starting to bring in new readers. and sometimes that’s the kind of story that somebody didn’t see the last time.

CE: That’s a good point and it speaks to the necessary adaptability of newsrooms in being responsive to audience needs as well. In terms of investigative stories, could you talk about one or two stories that you spearheaded, and that meant a lot to you personally?

PF: The prison story was in February 2017. It was a riot [at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center]. The prisoners took control of the guards, they killed a guard.

It was a 30-some-hour standoff. It was pretty crazy, and we had weeks of coverage right away. It was a pretty big story for a couple of years, about prisoner rights. For years afterward, prisoners had their limited rights further restricted as far as exercise time and meals and their ability to access educational programs and things like that, because they just didnt’ have enough guards. But at some point, editor Mike Feeley and I — and Brittany Horn (now the current editor at Delaware Online/The News Journal) was one of the editors involved too — and we had a pretty large team of reporters that dug things up. And one of the reporters, Xerxes Wilson, spearheaded this project.

There were some lawsuits that came out of that riot, and when it got to trial, the discovery portion of the lawsuits gave us access to a ton of information, and photos, and even a video of things that really let you see inside the prison that day.

I think it was Xerxes’ idea to do something bigger. And we as editors just made his idea 50 times bigger. And I think that the key to making any story better, is talking it through when you first propose it, as you’re reporting it.

We wanted to do a big take on what it was like a couple of hours leading up to the riot, during the riot, and a couple of hours after. But we got that idea because we got access to these discovery documents for the trial… The key to being able to do that on big stories is doing it on every story.

What happens with a lot of newspapers is they’ll have investigative teams, and there’s sort of the unspoken sentiment that they are the investigative reporters and, to me, everybody should be an investigative reporter. Now, an investigation doesn’t mean a six-month project with 80 stories and 4000 photos, and FOIA stuff.

Being an investigative reporter means that you know what’s going on. Say you’re covering a school board. And you know what’s going on in that in that school district, and the board proposes something and you stand up — maybe not literally — and say, ‘Wait a second, that’s not what you said last time.’ Or ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ That’s being an investigative reporter: it’s knowing everything you should know about your beat or the story, and being able to push back and say, ‘That doesn’t smell right to me,’ and ask questions about it.

And if you’re a newer reporter, you start that way, and then you grow, and then your ideas and your pushing back and your investigations get bigger. [So] when the township says they’re happy they just bought a new fire truck for their fire department, and it’s going to cost $250,000. Well, as an investigative reporter, your first question is, ‘How the heck did you guys afford a $250,000 fire truck? I know what the budget looks like. Where did that money come from? Are you paying it at once? Does it mean the library or the hospital is going to get less money?’ So that’s how you do those stories. You don’t just say, ‘oh, so who picked out what shade of red it’s going to be?’ (laughs)

And sometimes we get accused of being negative in our quest to push back and ask probing questions. Well, if we ask these probing questions, and it all checks out, then you’re going to have a good story. But the public pays us to keep an eye on you guys.

Newspapers are watchdogs, and it’s not just some people. Like sports guys are watchdogs: if they see something happen in the game, and they don’t think it’s right, they’ll go up and ask the coach or the reps afterward. So that’s what all reporters need in their head, whether they’re doing six-month investigations, or they’re running out to the scene somewhere. That’s what our job is and that’s how you create a culture of strong watchdog investigations — really good stuff because it’s the culture in the room. We want all our stories to have that element and that’s what made the Wilmington newsroom a success in getting loyal readers and subscribers: it’s this idea of fast watchdog… We made it like page two of our playbook.

By fast watchdog I mean, something happens and instead of spending two weeks FOIA-ing documents or two months digging in. Instead, since we know a lot about this, we can turn this around in a couple of days or a week and have a really strong fast watchdog story about this while people are thinking about it. And readers have shown us that’s what they want to see. They want to see that when there’s a big breaking news event, we have watchdog stories that come right on the heels of that.

CE: In terms of fast watchdog investigations. Can you talk about the strength, and the positioning of local news outlets to tell these kinds of stories and be of service to readers in the community?

PF: It depends. I think the definition of a local newspaper may vary from person to person. I would agree that Asbury Park Press is a local newspaper. It’s a big local newspaper. It has a big area with almost 2 million people in its market. There are smaller daily papers that have less to cover, that are local papers. But I think that’s where the New York Times and Washington Posts and some of the really bigger papers — their mission isn’t to be a local paper.

Yes, the New York Times covers New York City really well and Washington Post covers D.C. really well, but they don’t cover, you know, Newark, New Jersey or Philadelphia or other places really well. But if there’s a big story, they’ll send really talented people in to do the story. Usually though, the way they find out about that story is that the local paper has already done it, and maybe has been doing it for a year. And it gets on somebody’s radar somewhere else. So the importance of that is that the local papers usually publish that story way before, and in a timeframe where it can help readership more.

If we do a story, or a series of stories over a year or so, that are pretty good and do pretty well, when the New York Times comes in to write about it, they’re not writing about it for our readers, our readers have seen it. Now, our readers might look at it. But when we write a local investigation like that, we’re writing it to shine a light on and expose whatever malfeasance is going on. And to let our readers know, ‘Hey, this is going on. Next time elections come around, or the next time you have a chance to raise your voice about something, here’s some information you need to know.’

By the time the New York Times or the Post or somebody comes in, they’re not writing it to invoke change. They’re writing it as, ‘Wow, this is a crazy story, or this is a really cool story that happened.’ And I think a lot of times, they like to do that, sort of near the end. So they can tell the whole story — and they’re done really well. But the importance of doing it locally is we’re going to get to it sooner. We know what part readers are going to care most about and we have more local knowledge.

You hear a lot about the demise of local news, and how a lot of local newspapers are greatly reducing the resources they throw at stories. And some — a lot are even closing — and that’s bad. Because even at Asbury Park, we have I think it’s 84 towns to cover. And most of them, meaning in the high 90 percent all have governments all have police departments…thank God, New Jersey got rid of freeholders before I got here, because I really don’t understand that! (laughs) But that’s a lot of people to know! And if you don’t live there, and see how they work and understand the ramifications of what happens when they change things and do things — you can’t see those stories. And it’s hard for bigger national papers to be able to do that.

Why are newspapers struggling? Because in 1980 newspapers, TV news, and maybe the radio were the only place to get information. The Internet comes along, and now there’s a million ways to get information. Even though some of those sorts of information don’t have the same standards of getting facts right, and being clear about the line between opinion and your feelings versus what actually happened.

So that’s why I think it’s important that newspapers don’t just do what everybody else is doing. We’re smarter and better and that’s why we have to have this watchdog approach.

A lot of times news will break, and our strategy is, yes, as soon as we can, to be competitive, try to be the first one with the breaking news. But then way ahead of other places, in the same news cycle, come back with some watchdog element and that’s how you get loyal readers. You do that a couple of times, and people will just think, ‘Well, Asbury Park Press is not going to just tell me what everybody else is telling me the police said happened, they’re going to tell me the background and the context and what it’s going to mean to me.’ It’s showing readers that when we do the story everybody else does, and it’s in our market, we’re gonna do it better, because we know the players and our readers better.

CE: As the leader of a newsroom, you’re going to have to make some difficult choices and encounter challenges in helping to navigate the staff through those changes. Can you talk about making this career shift in the midst of all the downsizing that has been happening across Gannett newsrooms?

PF: There’s a lot of good things about being the editor. I love being able to have a bigger hand and direction in making the paper be even better than it is.

The part of me being as open and transparent about everything I can be is to me an important step, in letting the staff, whether it’s editors, reporters, photographers, podcast creators — letting them know that, ‘Look, I don’t want you to be in the dark, I don’t want you to be in a silo where I’m just gonna tell you what you need to do to do your job. I want you to hear everything and be able to digest it and analyze it.’ And a lot of that’s about transparency and creating trust, but it’s also because they’re smart people. Somebody might say, ‘Hey, what if we tried this?’ and it’d be something we didn’t think about.

The challenging side of being an editor? Yes, there’s definitely more things that are challenging than before I was an executive editor, but it’s the same approach. You have to be able to put things in perspective, to prioritize and really worry about the things that you should be worrying about.

Sometimes there’s tension over a difference of opinion with how we should pursue something, and I go back to this a lot: you have to make the conversation about the story, not about the people. And so, if there’s a difference of opinion between me and an editor, or an editor and a reporter, or all of us — having the conversation be about the story, taking personal pronouns out of it and using phrases like ‘it might improve the story if we did this…’ I think being able to take criticism, and give it positively and productively is how you get better, and how you get over things like that.

I have and always will have the back of all of the people in my newsroom. And people I know in the company. I always have their back. If don’t know what’s going on, I’ll always have their back because I know them. I trust them. I know how they work. I know they care about what they’re doing. And somebody’s got to prove to me on the outside, that I’m wrong. And very rarely have I been proven wrong in having somebody’s back.

CE: In terms of staffing cuts, what has been the impact at Asbury Park Press?

PF: It’s really hard for me to give you a smart answer on that. But what I will say is that before the early 2000s, when newsrooms all had tons of people — It was also back before we knew how much people were reading stories, and more precisely, how few people were reading them. So we would just cover everything — literally everything. And then as we gradually learn what people read and didn’t read, there’s a lot of areas of coverage that we could deprioritize.

Now, I am not at all saying it’s been a good thing. But it forced us to figure out what people want to read the most. Now, how do we write it in a way to get more people to read it? So, it’s helped us in that journey to really frame stories, in general, better than I think we did before.

But definitely, at Asbury Park Press, like any newsroom, now one person might have a primary beat and a couple other things to keep track of, whereas fifteen years ago there might have been a person covering each of those. And going back to your question about the importance of local news, that’s where the pain has been. Because, while most media organizations have had some sort of layoffs or reductions in force, when you’re talking about smaller local papers, and this reduction of force — losing 10 people at the New York Times is not the same as losing 10 people at a small local paper. It’s a much bigger percentage, and it’s a bigger impact.

And there’s pain. I’m not ever going to say it was good. But as an editor, part of my job is not just giving up, but figuring out, ‘how do we stay relevant? What can we do?’ Yes, we’re much smaller. Yes, I wish I had more people in my newsroom. But ‘how can we be smart and prioritize the things we want to cover based on what readers want, and what we think they should read?’

CE: How has the public reacted to some of the newsroom and transitions and technological shifts?

PF: One of the big complaints we get all the time is this: We’ve made a major shift to focusing on our content digitally. And as part of that, we put more people on the digital side of things and less on the print side. So our deadlines for print are earlier, so our newspapers — like today’s newspaper isn’t going to have late sports from last night. It’s not going to have things that happened late in the day yesterday, because our deadlines earlier, the stories weren’t ready to be put in the paper. Now they’re online first thing this morning, and some of them were online last night.

Most of our print-only readers have been reading us for decades. They’re loyal to us. They’ve stuck with us. But the fact is, the way we do things has changed. And it’s up to them to decide.

So, what we say to them is, you can read a story in the print paper, and maybe there’s a photo or two with it. But if you read that story online, there’s probably going to be a photo gallery of a dozen photos or more. There might be a video … There might be a lot of legal documents or FOIA results or other information that we can’t just stick in the paper. And if we’re writing about a court case, we’ll put the court docs in there, if somebody wants to see it for themselves… none of that stuff, you can do in the paper. And that’s what makes what we offer digitally great.

I think we’re sort of in that transition now. And there’s a lot of people that are just not making the transition with us. You can get a digital only subscription, or you can get a digital subscription with seven day a week print delivery, or Sunday only… But we want everybody to get it digitally. This is how we’re growing. This is how we’re getting better and doing journalism these days.

The other thing we get a lot is “How come I have to pay for your story?” Like, if there’s a storm coming, or COVID stuff, we’ve made those free. But the other stuff that we do where we have somebody spend three months in a story, we used to just give it away for free online. And we’ve seen that’s not a winning way to grow … I think a lot of people feel even though they probably know it in their consciousness, some part of their subconsciousness thinks that newspapers get all their money from the government or something like that. And we’re obligated to do that stuff. I mean, we don’t want any money from the government, right? Because then people think our stories are slanted, because we’re getting money from the government!

CE: You talked about this a bit in your last response, but I want to hear more about your thoughts on the strengths and limitations of the subscription model.

PF: I don’t know if I would characterize it as limitations to the subscriber model, or the digital model. I think there’s a transition from people who just don’t want to get fully on board, for whatever reason. I know people — and it’s not just old people or anything like that — who just like reading the print newspaper, you know.

But being able to have our content online has opened up so many possibilities of what we can do with stories now. And people can really see what the story looks like. Because even with the best journalist doing the best reporting and writing and description, you’re still leaving it to the reader to imagine what they’re looking at. But if we can pull in court documents, and court exhibits, and video, and you can hear people’s voices and see them in their element, and you can show lots of pictures instead of one, people are there. We’re putting people there. And they get all the context they want.

There’s so much in our paper, and some other Gannett sites that the digital designers and page designers and producers have come up with, stuff I wouldn’t even have dreamed of 20 years ago, much less thought we could do it… The way we look at it is, our digital platforms, that’s where we break news. We don’t break news in the newspaper anymore. And getting it first so we can have a big advantage on it, that doesn’t exist anymore. So that’s a big change in the way a lot of things are done.

Cassandra Etienne is the assistant director for membership and programming at the Center for Cooperative Media. Contact her at etiennec@montclair.edu.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.