Pride In The Name of News

If you care about getting the news in a timely fashion, there is no reason to read a newspaper.

Spot news, it seems, is disappearing from the pages and moving to the screens.

A recent New York Times newsroom memo from Bill Keller announced that the Internet will be key to 2008 political coverage:

For this Presidential election cycle we are organizing our coverage in a new (for us) way: for the first time, a central political desk will supervise coverage for the newspaper and the web. This new desk will include not only newspaper editors, but also people with experience in web production, database reporting and software development. Newspaper and online journalism will get equal emphasis — we are well past the day when we can think of ourselves as a newspaper with a Web site on the side — for an audience that now expects its political news to arrive in full multimedia, interactive glory.

The goal is to develop a seamless operation that can feed our blog and home page with breaking news all day long, produce innovative and value-added multimedia and database reports -- and then deliver the smartest, freshest possible stories to our newsprint readers the next morning.

Basically, Keller and Co. have reorganized the way instant-news is produced at The Times. He's placed equality between the paper and the website, and as far as political stories go, he values the benefit of clickable electoral maps, live-voting feeds and comparison charts that aren't truncated to fit a peice of paper.

As I've mentioned before, this change at The Times is indicative of a new way to do the news: Internet first, paper second. And it's more profitable than critics think.

Web journalism has finally found its reporters. And it seems they're more inclined than ever to be versed in web production, multimedia and traditional reporting savvy.

The future is clearer than we think: spot news will reside online, and adventurous, well-rounded journalists will helm the ship.

Conversely, expect to see a change in the very basic format of writing a news story: half-reported stories will rarely make it to the page, and analysis will become a critical component of a basic news story - the real reason people will keep reading a publication.

The "news" in "newspaper" is now a relative term: it's news to anyone who hasn't read the website.

Will newspapers save the big, muckraking stories for the printed page? Maybe, if they think no one else has the story. But if a newspaper smells competition, don't expect to see any "exclusives" on the printed page.

For newspapers who pride themselves on getting a story first (and being cited as so), posting it online with a timestamp is the new proof of bleeding-edge legitimacy.

After all, aren't newspapers sick of citing blogs as the first sources for stories?

Why More Journalism Isn't Better For Journalism

"What we have here is....failure to communicate." Captain, Cool Hand Luke

Options, options, everywhere.

My blog RSS aggregator is getting embarassingly cluttered with new blogs I like - but many of them overlap to the point that I would consider dropping a few and keeping only the more comprehensive ones.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have an awful lot of new blogs, too...some covering each other.

Meanwhile, I've only got two eyeballs and 24 hours in a day. I can safely say I read more news than the average reader, but there's a limit to how much I can digest.

I can't read them all...so why do I read what I read?

That's the question newspaper publishers need to ask their readers - and themselves - when they hand down job cuts from above.

"If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money," said advertising professor Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri's journalism school.

It seems to me that, when the ranks of newsrooms are thinning, the editorial options are exploding. How can papers afford new blogs, new online video, new podcasts, etc. - things that do not directly replace elements from the traditional newspaper - when they have less staff than ever before?

Have they installed beds in the newsroom yet?

And does it matter? Is anyone even reading the new stuff? (Or paying for it, advertisers?)

A recent column by a friend of mine highlighted his newspaper's lack of an ombudsman. Given the paper's limited financial state, it's understandable. However, the paper struggles with quality because it doesn't have the cash to hire enough people. Everyone's outstretched and doing the job of two staffers - and the paper is often a veritable mess of typos and poor editorial choice the next day. Yet they've recently expanded their online presence quite a bit - and I know for a fact that there's no "online editor" at the paper.

In the long-term, how can this be a solution for a newsroom? How can a publisher or an owner expect the employed journalist to write, edit, record, or shoot even more?

Isn't it better to have five pages of solid, thorough writing than 15 of cliche-ridden copy?

When is the point where we remember what a publication's goal really is - inform instead of meet the deadline? I know deadlines are important and readers trust that a paper will be out at the same time each day - but I'm starting to lose trust in the quality of writing crammed in.

It's the same reason why I cut this blog back to twice-a-week posts from daily posts.

On one of the financial blogs I subscribe to, I read once that a better solution to earning wealth isn't cutting costs so much as raising revenue. That is, while it's important to track expenses, there's a boundary of quality of life that we shouldn't breach. If you keep cutting corners, you won't have any paper left.

Publishers should take heed. Some of my favorite newspapers are losing their cachet, and I really don't think it's because journalists are less talented. They're just outstretched.

And the jury's still out on whether all that extra work is bringing in more profit.