Philly Ink has new sports editor

Usually, if there aren't any comments, nobody is visiting. And for the longest time at my shop, we were simply told that management didn't know how to check the hits. Liars.

 

Found out today I have to do some voice-over stuff on a game I'm covering Saturday. Good thing: no on-camera, just voice-overs. Bad thing: The only thing worse than looking at me is having to hear me.

 

Can someone with hard evidence tell me whether this multimedia stuff is bringing in enough new advertising revenue to make it worthwhile?

Thanks.

 

I'm with you, wick. Until I see numbers, I think bosses are just throwing stuff at the wall, wondering what will stick. They're just guessing, and they're pushing around people scared for their jobs in order to to get it done. If a podcast was the key to saving this business, I'd be all over it. But just demanding blogs, audio and video work on top of new 24/7 deadline responsibilities is childish on bosses' parts. (Not even addressing the amateur quality of so much of the multimedia work.)

 

Measuring the number of comments to a blog post is possibly the most overrated way to gauge reader interest ever devised. Most blogs have a small percentage of their readers commenting over and over in what's basically a big circle jerk.

 

I have no problem with a 24/7 news cycle.

I do have a problem with stretching resources thin to do this.

Want multimedia? Fine: Hire someone who knows what the heck they're doing, someone who's trained in it.

 

Management response: Fine. You're fired.

 

Most talk radio stations are smart enough to know that you don't measure a show's audience by the number of callers it gets. Most listeners never call a talk show.

Please, let's hope that newspaper people can be as smart as talk radio folks.

 

I never said I wouldn't comply with multimedia requests. I just said that it would be more productive for all of us in the long run if they either a.) gave us a lot of training to make sure we don't sound unpolished and b.) they hired people who had some professional background in multimedia.

 

Well, you don't actually expect someone in the newspaper business to make a smart decision about the Web and/or the future of the paper?

 

See, that's my thing. Show me that this is accomplishing something. Cause right now, none of it seems to be working. Instead, it's throwing more and more money away.
A buddy of mine told me people weren't getting raises at his shop, but they were able to spend several hundred dollars on a new multimedia project that already seems to be failing.
And i'm not saying don't try new things. But research your new projects and have skilled people handling them instead of putting up a bunch of shit on the web that looks like it was done in Wayne or Garth's basement.