How to be a corporate kissass

This Managing Editor at a JRC paper seems to be doing a good job at it with her advice for reporters to embrace all things digital.

http://metrotimes.com/columns/how-to-kill-journalism-1.1198823?cache=03D163D03D163Dp:/he3D03Dn63Freporti3D19.11145issed-1.1176/%3FparentPage%3D2.1252%3FparentPage%3D2.1244%3FparentPage%3D2.1188

 

To be honest, the writer of this article lost me by calling the managing editor a "widow." What's that got to do with anything.

And I think some of her ideas were good. But shooting video of a protest before a meeting, then editing it and uploading it during the meeting doesn't leave much room for actually covering the meeting.

And I am not sure I know what "crowdsourcing" is.

 

I would hope the editor isn't so naive as to why her reporters aren't doing all that.

She puts in 60 hours a week. She expects her reporters to do the same. Very well. Let's see her head explode when they put 20 hours of OT on their timesheet.

 

"Crowdsourcing" is a Gannett term. It's where you solicit readers' and the riff-raffs' opinions on a topic, then use them in a story, or how you ask the questions for a story.

It can have its place. But corporate usually takes it to ridiculous extremes.

 

The ideas are great in an ideal world when you're not writing 10-15 stories per week. Any story that would need crowdsourcing needs time to research and write. Some ideas, such as posting agendas are easy to implement.

Asking a reporter to be on Facebook during a meeting isn't always feasible. Who is going to pay for the mobile broadband plan if the meeting room doesn't have Wi-Fi? Does the paper give reporters a laptop because every reporter would need one and not be a system where you check them out as needed.

For the next-day live chat, do you get to write one less story that day?

 

Corporate takes things to extremes? No!

 

Yes, this is exactly what we ran into with the idea of giving real-time updates from high school events. Most schools in our area don't have wifi spots that readily available, so the only real way to do it is via cell phones and such.

 

Same problem here in Rhode Island. I've been to probably 20, 30 fields and high schools in the state to cover games in the past year, and none of them had a public wireless available. The only exception was the state championship games - At one venue they were available (but slow), and the other they were private (but thankfully I had a key because I covered college hoops there).

If you have a decent cell phone, you can manage to get tweets and FB updates out there via Hootsuite quite easily. However, I doubt many newspaper companies out there are willing to pick up the expense or give you a cell phone to use for that purpose. If newspapers want reporters to do all this extra work, they have to be prepared to either 1) provided them with BlackBerries / iPhones or 2) pick up the mobile bill for the reporter each month.

 

Agreed with the sentiments.

Most of the sporting events (with the exception of possibly playoff games, even then its not guaranteed) you can forget about wi-fi if you are in BFE.

We've talked about live updates from events, but I, for one, cannot afford a $100+ cell phone bill a month when I'm getting paid diddly shit.

My laptop recently went to hell (that's what I get for buying Dell) and I can't even afford to replace it right now.

If they want to provide a cell phone or pay my phone bill, I'll twitter/tweet/facebook to their hearts content. As most of you already know, that will never happen.

 

We have a Web team that does a lot of that stuff for us (or at the very least is very eager to help when asked).

I'm as big a social media dork as there is, but this editor seems to have lost touch with reality.

I also agree that the widow reference was unnecessary.

 

1. Not a big Jack Lessenberry fan after that column. Poor attitude.

2. I'd like to see that managing editor cover one meeting. There's no way she could accomplish 60% of what she expects based on that memo.

 

Not a big fan before it, either...