I've been chatting with several people who have left newspapers for other kinds of media work and offer their observations to those who, voluntarily or not, are departing newspapers for something else. For most newspaper editors and reporters, switching to an online news operation is a relatively easy step but it's not seamless.
Rather than interpret their words, I'm going to let the interviewees speak for themselves, with occasional explanations or notes.
First up: Mark Mooney, former national editor of the New York Daily News, currently working for a broadcast TV dot-com operation.
I found that traditional skills are at a premium--(dot-coms) are populated by young people and TV people: they need an adult, they need rewrite skills--it's a new concept of taking four or five blogs where a reader has to assemble a story, to have one person put together a cohesive story. They also need people who can do breaking news.
A dot-com is more immediate--your readership peaks at lunchtime. you have to get it done and up quickly. It's a wire service skill, and then you keep growing the story.
It works as a wire service because the readership peaks over lunch time and (you) have to work quickly. There s the speed of it--quicker than newspapers but those skills become valuable here.
Things you have to adjust to--photos are less important; video is what you always have to think about because that's what's more important here.
(There's a certain) chagrin about what is read--it's a lesson to newspapers, too.
The amount of production is probably the biggest adjustment you have to make. You have to refine things.
You have to learn all the tactics for your stories to get wide distribution. To SEO (search engine optimization) your story probably is 20 to 30 minutes more work so that the aggregators will bite. If you don't do it, your story doesn't get out there.
It's harder for a dot-com to have a comprehensive news report. They don't try to be a comprehensive report but papers aren't being comprehensive, either.
Dot-coms do the major stories of the day and then the other interesting stories.
A recovering editor sent me the following link and then his thoughts on what's going on in the news biz:
Eric Alterman in the Nation
And his thoughts:
It got me thinking. It mentions Lee Abrams, quotes Molly Ivins ("for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.") and wraps up with something that has been nagging at me:
"... young people do not appear to want to pick up a newspaper, even for free. They often leave them lying around, even at journalism schools, where they are distributed gratis."
I am convinced it's a mistake for newspapers to chase readers who don't want to read (although many insist on doing it), and I'm also convinced it's a mistake to give away all of a newspaper's content on the Web in pursuit of non-readers and a vague dream that the Internet -- the future, we're assured -- in an of itself is the solution to the the industry's problems.
The current newspaper business model is a failure and has helped to accelerate the collapse of the industry. It obliterates the old newspaper model -- readers pay for the paper, they pay a premium for home delivery, and advertisers pay through the nose to get into reader's hands and, better yet, their homes -- but does not replace it with a business model to support the journalism people have come to expect, seriously damaging the "content engine" that's supposed to drive success on the Web.
Newspapers should use the Web strategically, of course, as the Wall Street Journal has.
A paper could post a news briefing each day based on the day's edition, enhancing it with some web-only features, news updates, even breaking news when appropriate. But giving away all of the newspaper's content for free to non-subscribers is dumb and doesn't work. Giving it for free to aggregators is even dumber.
Advertisers do not pay newspaper Web sites the same rates they pay to run in the paper. Why? Because people read newspapers and shop newspapers and no one has come up with anything that does it as well or better.
Just look at the success of the current newspaper/Web model so far -- newspapers shrink, staffs shrink, quality suffers, profits plummet.
Yes, the world is changing and the model that worked so well for so long must change. The Web is a fact of life and newspapers have to find a better way to make it part of what they do -- newspaper have to evolve. But rather than evolve, they've embraced the current model as if it's all there is. One newspaper has stopped printing and moved exclusively to the Web -- I wish them luck. Jumping from the newspaper as we knew it to the read-everything-online- free-for-nothing model has failed and it must be modified.
Well, that's my opinion, and....the rest of those knuckleheads take go jump in a lake.
And, on the outsourcing front, I'd completely overlooked Roy Peter Clark's column on the matter. The short version: It takes a lifetime of knowledge to be a good copy editor, no matter where you are. You can't just transplant the work to another country and expect someone in another culture to catch up, ever.
David Lee is looking to start a discussion on the future of copy editing and online issues over at Wired Journalists
The Los Angeles Times is pushing onto the web big time. Among many other changes, Deputy Managing Editor Melissa McCoy has staffed up a morning copy desk.
We hope to have interviews soon with people making the move from print to web and chats with those who are figuring out a way to preserve print projects.
