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Las Vegas Review-Journal/Dan Wheldon

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Versatile, Oct 17, 2011.

  1. Turtle Wexler

    Turtle Wexler Member

    Wading back in to address the thread topic, after some off-board discussion of this situation:

    I agree this was a major fuck-up for the LVJR. However, the degree is lessened by the fact this was an inside page and not the front page. Front page would have been a nuclear fuck-up, this is merely a colossal fuck-up.

    That said, I'm not about to point fingers at a specific person or department. We simply don't know enough about their operations to say "it's the sports editor's fault" or "it's the web person's fault." There are a thousand reasons for what happened: maybe the editors decided to send every available body to the track, maybe technical assistance from corporate was needed to modify the aggregation parameters of the inside page, maybe they had to triage to hit the print deadline. Who knows.

    Those reasons aren't going to be excuses, simply explanations for why that happened. But the truth is we don't know the reasons. And having been in those trenches, I'm uncomfortable pointing the finger just yet. All we know is it's a failure of news operations.
     
  2. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    I really don't want to point fingers. You're right; we don't know anything about how the LVRJ is operating, and yes, it was not a colossal fuck-up. I may have framed the OP as being about the LVRJ, but the discussion I think is most worth-having now is whether it's still appropriate that newspapers are waiting until the next morning to get their websites in order. As I said before, only one of the four or five stories on the race/crash was posted when I took that screen capture, and clearly, no one had taken the time to consider the sports front.

    This approach seems inappropriate to me at this stage in the (no-longer increasingly) internet-first world, but it's also not unique. Yes, many/most papers that wait til the end of the night to post columns and sidebars would have updated the sports page and made sure, at least, that the breaking news story was the dominant story. You've got to make sure your website -- your whole website -- is up to date. If you can't, you risk this happening. You risk readers seeing that "Sam Schmidt will leave Las Vegas a winner regardless" six-plus hours after Sam Schmidt's driver dies.

    I always feel guilty pangs when I bring up specific examples of someone doing something poorly in a thread. I hope the boss of the person responsible for the LVRJ's website doesn't see this thread. But I'm also sick of all the excuse-making. We can make excuses until we're blue in the face. None of them matter to readers. And it's completely and totally foolish to say "Who would ever go to the sports page?" The page exists and it has a Las Vegas Review-Journal banner on it. It represents the newspaper and its brand and credibility. If the many miscellaneous, small errors on Grantland are worthy of criticism, then why are we always so quick to give a free pass to a newspaper, particularly one as large as the LVRJ.

    I don't mean to point fingers, but I also don't mean to write this off as "That's understaffing for ya." Someone earlier in this thread pointed to the fact that, in most online publishing systems, this whole problem could have been avoided by checking one or two extra boxes when the original story was posted and made dominant on the homepage. That seems likely to me. That person is human. That mistake was completely acceptable an hour or two after the crash and death. I'm sure someone at some website forgot to check that box when Osama bin Laden was killed. Then someone caught it. This is a 250K newspaper with, I would assume, at least a few dozen newsroom employees. This is one of the biggest sports happenings in Vegas since boxing was worthwhile. Something went wrong. I don't know what, but something went wrong.

    Or, maybe, hey, that's what happens when you lay off people, right?
     
  3. 1HPGrad

    1HPGrad Member

    Would love to know where some of you guys work. As I've said many times, I've been at three 250K circs and I can promise you none would have paid 2 seconds of attention to changing a feature preview with a 10-point headline listed on the right hand side of an inside web page.
    They would have pounded you with the news, updates, links, galleries, etc., etc. on the homepage, where the overwhelming majority of people go for breaking news.
    There's a reason the major circ sites put popular sports stories on the homepage. It's where the masses go. I've seen the metrics, and the numbers don't lie.
     
  4. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    Where do you see "a feature preview with a 10-point headline on the right hand side of an inside web page?"

    It was the LEAD STORY ON THE PAGE six hours after the driver mentioned in the story was killed.
     
  5. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    Oh, and FTR, I worked at ESPN.com. And if we had left our auto racing page static with a race preview eight hours after race time and six hours after Wheldon's death, we'd have been strung up by our intestines.

    So talk to me about your 250K papers where no one gives a shit about inside pages, and I'll tell you plenty of people do.
     
  6. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    ESPN would have had a story and a photo up within six minutes of Wheldon's death.
     
  7. Gator

    Gator Well-Known Member

    This thread is getting frustrating to read because the original topic keeps getting convoluted and it has morphed into a completely different discussion.

    To review: There was a story up immediately. That is not the issue. The main sports page didn't have additional stories, only a preview to the race.

    Discuss.
     
  8. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    1. They didn't pound us with anything; they had one story up that hadn't been updated in four and a half hours. They waited until the next morning to put up the newspaper stories and such.
    2. The preview feature story was the dominant image with a reasonably large headline, as IJAG just pointed out.
    3. I don't know why where I've worked matters, but I've worked at smaller papers than the LVRJ that wouldn't have accepted this, and I currently work at a bigger paper with enough staffing that this would never happen, but if it did, someone would be chewed out pretty thoroughly. And, just for the record, at those papers, I've had my share of website management responsibility. If I had left the sports page at any of the three papers I worked at looking like this after such a big local event, I would have been thoroughly chewed out, too.
     
  9. FileNotFound

    FileNotFound Well-Known Member

    Frankly, a decent CMS would have dealt with this. You should be able, in one place, to designate a story as the top story for the home page and any number of section fronts. I don't know what the LVRJ uses, but I have used systems that would have avoided this issue with one click.
     
  10. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    CMS, I think, is one of those terms which isn't universal. You might need to explain.
     
  11. reformedhack

    reformedhack Well-Known Member

    CMS = content management system.
     
  12. FileNotFound

    FileNotFound Well-Known Member

    Sorry. Content management system.

    A good content management system won't keep you from forgetting to check the checkbox to make the story the lead on your sports page, but it will at least present you with the option -- or, based on the originating desk, automatically assign the story to that section front.
     
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