Orlando

Thanks for not kicking a guy when he's down or anything, Clodumbo.

 

So, uhh, hate to threadjack the threadjack, but ...

Why is Elling "down"? What happened?

 

Helps to read the guy. Which, judging by your inane and uninformed post, you obviously haven't done. I've read Elling since he worked here in SoCal in the early 1990s. He was good then and he's damn good now.

And Ace is right. Having some class here would be a good thing. The guy just lost his job.

 

But it rarely works that way. Nowadays the centerpiece is unlikely to be breaking news. The news gets shoved into a corner. This is the tail wagging the dog.

Because they are useless to our mission of attracting readers, but we overemphasize them because, in absence of increased sales, which we seem to find impossible to accomplish, awards have become our tangible measure of success because we know how to win them. When APSE broke it down to four circulation brackets, I knew things were only going to get worse. In the largest bracket, roughly 50 percent of the papers will win a section award. This is becoming like the Special Olympics, a medal for everyone! Maybe if we ceased this annual exercise in patting ourselves on the back, we could focus on attracting readers.

My comments were in response to Editude's claim that Orlando has been fixated on awards. I don't know if that's true in Orlando, but it is true a lot of places.

In a previous job I was the Sunday SE and I made some big changes. A key figure in APSE, a guy I've known for 25 years now, told me that these changes would hurt us in the contest. As it turned out, we still made Top 20, but my response to him was, "I do not care about the contest. We are in a competitive situation here, and I care about having a section that is more useful to readers than the other paper's is."

 

That always depends on how someone lost it.

If he was downsized, mea culpa.

 

Birdscribe is right. Elling is a stud.
(I say this not knowing what recently transpired.)

 

Oh, and Frank...
You won't have to worry about that anymore. Your breaking news has been on the web for 12 hours before it's shoved into the bottom righthand corner.

 

That's what I keep hearing. However, despite newspapers' attempts to make it not about breaking news, circulation keeps going down, faster and faster. Maybe someday we'll learn that the people who keep touting this change couldn't have been more wrong, that they have amputated the right arm in an attempt to cure a hangnail, that we have done irreparable harm to the product in an attempt to fix it, and the only thing these self-promoting geniuses have done is hasten our obsolescence.

 

I would love to know what this thread is about.

 

Well, if we're going down. I'm going down swinging.
I'm trying to give heavy doses of news and enterprise.

 

Well, that is fine. That's what you said McKenzie did. However, what I am seeing in general in sports sections is Death by Planning. We are driven by content that could run two weeks from now or five weeks ago, rather than what's fresh. You said McKenzie was willing to scrap a centerpiece layout in favor of breaking news. That's great, but I do not see that very often elsewhere. I see us becoming stagnant, soft, irrelevant.

I have to say The New York Times has it right. They are willing to react to sporting events that night, play the fuck out of a great game and give it live graphics, instead of pushing it aside with the idea that everyone who cares already read about it online. As opposed to putting out a monthly every day. Couple that with pretty good writing and you have a vitality that many others lack.