Newspapers Have Lost Their Faith

Well, that stuff happened before, too. It's a product of short-sighted micromanagement that doesn't trust its own staff.

Thankfully, I've never worked for those type of bosses. (And the ones I did at least seemed to leave the sports department alone.)

 

Damn thing is, the people who pick up a newspaper -- those that are still around -- pick it up to read the stories. Design is nice, photos are great, but people buy newspapers because they want to read.

And they wanna read great content.

I love great design, and the outstanding photos, too. But we're losing our core audience when we sacrifice our news content to a buncha people in the committee room who just wanna dress up the display while sacrificing the people on the beat who can put the great stories in the newspaper.

Nobody in the glass offices gets this anymore. They're all talking about the Web site anyway, and yet you have to have the great stories there also.

Newspapers deliver incredible, in-depth news in a timely fashion. TV is your entertainment source -- TV news always sucks -- and Internet is somewhere in between. Old point, but newspapers should quit giving news away for free on the Internet and recapture what newsprint is all about.

 

come on. you had to have discussions about specific projects you were jumping into.

 

In my opinion, newspapers are suffering a serious leadership crisis. But it has been suffering for a long, long time. We didn't get to this apocalypse by collectively putting out a great product for the past 25 years.

 

We don't have these discussions at my place. I guess they're done with the big editors, but we get handed big projects on the night they have to go into print.

No lie.

Big take-out stories all the time, and we don't get any advance knowledge. Advance sections, too. Our baseball section came outta nowhere, and there it was on the night it went to print. Unbelievable. Hope the writers' facts and stats were correct, 'cause we really didn't have time to check anything.

 

Good point. You're only as good as your leaders, and remember that point when you're agonizing over whatever.

Unfortunately, many corporate leaders are not aware of that point.

 

phin, you know, i'm glad i've come to the conclusion that you're a solid guy because you and i agree on almost nothing.

counterpoint: i disagree. the horse and buggy aren't nearly extinct because buggy makers failed to create a better buggy. they simply were unable to compete with society's love of the car.

 

wow. that's all i have.

 

Well, it's disgusting as fuck. No one ever thinks to thank us anymore, either.

But we're a good desk. We crank out everything every night on deadline, and we even do it well.

Lotsa people I'd love to punch, though. Of course, most of them are gone by 7 p.m.

 

wasn't trying to make light of it, dog. just hard to fathom.

 

Projects? Hmm. Can't think of any -- unless you count our desk moving 48 miles to a sister office, and then moving back again in six months. We "discussed" that a lot, yes. ;D

The last special section I did? Got my budget at 2 p.m., got all my copy at 4 p.m., sent it to the plant at 10 p.m. Six (6) hours to edit and design a special fucking section. ... And sadly, my boss was the best one in the newsroom. Wasn't his fault that the section only got approved two days before and he had to turn around most of that copy in 48 hours.

 

i couldn't imagine not talking through projects with folks on staff.