On the corner of Young and Record streets in downtown Dallas sits a building with inscriptions on the front of it that partly read, “Build the news upon the rock of truth.” From a distance, it resembles what could have been written on the tombstone of a once-thriving newspaper that had been around for 175 years. Only that in this case, The Dallas Morning News is poised to spring into the future, looking ahead and not in its rear-view mirror.

Pretty soon this Southwestern Giant will have a new home downtown in a space for its digital leap.  ”Business is a very fluid thing. Whatever the business, it is going to change and the pace is quickening.” Robert W. Bradford and J. Peter Duncan with Brian Tracey, Strategic Simplified Planning. (2000)

The Dallas Morning News (TDMN) owes its longevity to its ability to obliterate competition as evident in the buying out of its main competitor, The Dallas Times Herald in 1991. However, as Harvard University professor Clayton Christensen made it clear many years ago in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, “disruptive innovation” has sent shockwaves through all businesses.

Managing Editor of TDMN, Robyn Tomlin acknowledges this fact. “We still have competition. It’s a different competition for people’s attention not only local but Netflix or Notify. We’ve moved to a digital subscription model. They read free, and we ask for a subscription. We compete for people’s time and extension to their loyalty, to be willing to pay for work that we do,” she said.

The paper had gone through an extended period of print but is now targeting a digital audience. The thinking is different. Presentation of its services is different as are the places it gets its money from. The business has a host of marketing companies such as data analytics, social media and search engines. It has a business that sells T-shirts and pens.

In its quest to diversify, it strives to create an ecosystem of marketing services with a whole host of different ways to go beyond print and digital. It helps people plan their events and buys advertising in a whole different market.

‘We used to be where we will print and then put what’s in print on the web. Now, everything is digital first before it goes into print. Sometimes, some news never goes into print, because they don’t fit that audience,” said Tomlin.

And that’s a challenge she understands as it is not easy to get people to change. The Morning News has reorganized its entire staff, placing half in different roles. A tremendous amount of training had been undertaken. Last year its staff took about 50 courses ranging from how to take videos to very complex exercises such as coding, data analytics, to social media skills.

The staff is also trained to use Facebook live in news situations to attract digital natives. In the end, the audience has grown. Some modernization has been employed. Reporters flag and do reviews within articles. If there is a conversation that’s going on, journalists will jump in and add more information. Increasingly, the comments happen on social sites. This paper now has an audience development team 24/7.

Its business model is digital, supported by advertising and subscription but the model for advertising is shaky, so it now seeks loyal readers that realize the value of its work. Though advertising remains part of its daily business, it is supplemental, not dominant and for Tomlin, that’s the challenge.

Digitally, it has 12 million subscribers, 40% of which are in Texas and the remaining 60%, all over the world. The latter does not have the affinity for Dallas because they may just care for that one article which is why the paper focuses more on the locals.

What are the threats? “They are huge,” states Tomlin, because the disruption is constantly changing the model. As soon as the paper thinks they are there, changes present themselves. The decline in print is faster than the other things they are doing so as the revenue from print is plummeting, that from digital is not going up fast enough for now, to make up the shortfall.

The newsroom had 600 reporters. Now, it is 250 and compared to others in Texas, that’s pretty damn good! The paper does not plan to make this number any lower so as not to compromise its quality of production.

Another threat is the rapid decline in its circulation, which has not been commensurate with the paper’s ability to adapt to the changes at this point but it hopes to get on an even keel shortly. It is counting on the fact that people need information to navigate their lives and to do so, they prefer to have a place where they can have credible information.

“No one else in Texas will be able to do what we are doing at the scale we are doing it. We still have the ability to sell the story in Texas,” said Tomlin.

Plans are afoot to reach new audiences – younger audiences and diverse populations. To this end, the paper runs Spanish Al Dia. There is a team that publishes this twice a week.

Today, the newsroom is about one-tenth of its budget for a paper that has an expenditure of $25 million a year. So there is a lot of digital business but most of them will not make $2 million a year and to sustain this kind of operation that costs money, someone has to pay in money.

Which is why it costs $10 a month for the digital subscription that is discounted to $100 a year and $300 a year for print because it costs more to print and distribute it.

Regarding content, TDMN publishes 200 stories a day digitally, a shift news organizations have been struggling with.

The paper brings in close to $260 million yearly, a profit lower than what used to obtain. Where and how it gets its revenue is certainly changing, but the news industry is far from dying.

Stories are told like never before, with videos, motion graphic and so on, whereas before, it was all words and photos. Breaking news happen, and within seconds, it’s out.

Referencing the tragic event that saw the killing of five of Dallas’ finest, “on July 7, we had three reporters literally running towards bullets. We were sending out text alerts and tweets. We can now tell stories so much faster, and that lights me on fire every morning coming to work with an incredible group of people,” said Tomlin, a Texas native- former vice president of digital and communications at Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.