Tampa drops a really big shoe...

I think newspapers are abdicating their experience and credibility edge in producing in-depth coverage because they now are requiring their people to writer more, faster, sooner. The rush to throw something online, and then to blog about that news and do a podcast about that news and maybe do some stand-up video about that news, with the final "in-depth" story coming at the tail end of the process in whatever time is left in the shift (and energy left in the staffer) is almost back-asswards from what newspapers should be doing.

Where is the quality in-depth stuff going to come from? From the folks who don't devote so much time and energy to chasing down every scrap of instant news and don't desperately try to package it in every possible form at the speed of light. I don't know about you, but anything "in-depth" that I try to write, I do a much better job if I can clear a few hours or -- occasionally -- a couple of days, without having an editor beating me over the head to post something, give us some audio, blah blah blah.

Had newspapers embraced all this technology 10 years ago, when they weren't panicking and shedding staffers, there might be enough manpower to do it ALL. But not they want to do it all with a thinned staff, and the results rarely are pretty.

 

Nailed it right there... They're trying to play catch-up and they're about 7-8 years too late...

 

*shining up the resume*

 

No argument. But you have to at least consider this . . .

Had writers been asked to blog and podcast and do other online things in 1999, there would have been complaint after complaint about "they are asking us to do more and more work, for the same money, and the paper is doing fine and making tons of money!"

Would the bosses have been given atta-boys for all this forward thinking?

Not on this site, where airlines are routinely ripped for getting 99.999993% of their passengers from point A to point B safely.

 

I think you're right on -- people want the news, as fast as possible, but they don't want to waste their time reading more than 20 inches about it. How many times have you had the following conversion -- "Hey, did you read about so-and-so?" "Yeah, I heard about it, but I didn't really read everything."

Maybe I'm just high ...

 

Journal Register's still making nineteen cents on the dollar on general operations . . . if they'd limited themselves to scummy operational tactics, they'd still be afloat . . . it was their overreach into steeply-declining markets which has destroyed them.

 

Fair point. But it boggles the mind that editors could notice the huge popularity of sites like ESPN.com and Sportsline and not think. "How could we do this?"

I worked at a paper where a blog was brought up by a younger staffer in about 1999. He was laughed out of the room. He was the same "idiot" who asked why game stories couldn't be posted on the web site as soon as they were filed.

 

Failure of imagination.

Cited as the cause of the Apollo 1 fire . . . 9/11 . . . and newspapers having to play catch-up in 2008.

And for all its faults, failure of imagination has never been an issue with ESPN.

 

Hell, at least your paper does that. Our web site puts AP copy up there, but they don't post my stuff until after the paper goes to bed. So on a weekend, we'll have AP's story on Saturday, then my story (ON THE SAME TOPIC) posted at like 1 a.m. so it shows up under Sunday, looking like I got scooped on my own paper's Web site.

Thanks!

 

Too true on ESPN... It's not a coincidence that most of the best people who used to be in newspapers are all working for the WWL.

 

But smart bosses would have shifted workloads so that the new duties didn't just add obligations for same old pay. Much easier to shift workloads back then, before the industry's bloodlettings and shrinkage.

Could have touted it as innovation and ways to build out stories via Internet, audio, video, rather than demanding it now -- in shrill and frantic tones -- from overworked staffers who remain.

Had someone told me, skip your off-day story today -- we'll have a backup guy do it -- and give us some audio on Team X instead and post a blog entry on our site, that would go over a lot better than requiring me to do everything at once without backup or any faith that my donated work hours now will save us.

 

It goes beyond that. Take the NFL Draft. In the middle of the screen are the talking heads that get all the criticism.

But at the bottom of the screen is a rolling update of picks . . . on the side of the screen are team-by-team updates . . . elsewhere are updates of "best players still on board", "best QBs still on board", and so on.

Yes, it can be mind-numbing if you sit there and watch it for 4 hours.

But it's possible to turn it on midway through and be completely updated in about 5 minutes.

Easy to say in hindsight. But since no bosses did that, does that mean there are (were) no smart bosses? Only a few prescient peasants who got laughed at for promoting such ideas?

Think of it this way: What if you missed your Boston-to-San Francisco flight on 9/11 because the government decided that morning to ground all flights. Something about hearing some chatter that made them nervous.

Would you have given the government an atta-boy for its forward thinking? Hardly.

You would have been royally pissed. "%$@#&% government! I had this vacation planned for months. And now I can't go because someone in Washington is all paranoid about something."

It's human nature.

So if the newspaper bosses were guilty of anything, it's being human. And given the newspaper world's conservative culture --- where simple things like a redesign caused their readers outrage --- it's completely understandable they were late to the party on forward thinking. And there is no guarantee that any of those things would have made one bit of difference.

People could still get their news elsewhere for free. And putting blogs and videos on your site in 2000 would have been no guarantee that John Q. Public would still pay 50 cents for your newsprint version in 2008.