Washington Post editor Marty Baron on the future

"Like us on Facebook!

Follow us on Twitter!"

More money and free advertising for Facebook and Twitter. Nothing for the newspaper. Yawn.

 

47 engineers is an interesting budgetary proposition for a newspaper not backed by Amazon.

 

Fixed for when Gannett and any number of other chains gets hold of this philosophy.

 

Let's be honest, the newsroom of the future, won't be a newsroom. People will be working from home. Reporters will be independent contractors. There won't be a need for a 10 a.m. or 3 p.m. meeting. Reporters will get marching orders in their e-mail inboxes in the morning. Editors will keep track of what their reporters are working on. You'll send a story into an editor and they'll post it to the site. Designated reporters will be "on-call" for breaking news.

 

Interesting post. Without an actual print product, I'd think the only people working outside of the independent contract reporters would be maybe two sports "editors" - one for the day shift one for the graveyard to post stuff and 'edit' - and several sales people to go with the publisher type who reports to the home office. I can't really see the "newspaper of the future" being much more of a 'must read' than any fan website, in terms of sports. I don't think there will be enough bodies and quality writers on hand to make the newspaper of the future's website anything special. The independent contractor writers will probably be writing for several different publications as it will be a glorified freelance gig.

 

Remember the old days, when the writers had to come into the office to write and file?
Part of the fun of a newsroom disappeared when the writers weren't around on a daily basis.

 

I agree with you, but... when was that?

I'm not all that young, and I don't recall seeing our pro beat writers when I was young. In fact, those of us who were stuck in the office regularly had more respect for the one "big time" guy who actually stopped by and said Hi to us when he had an occasional face-to-face meeting with the SE.

Most of the guys would file remotely and call in for questions. I'm pretty sure that's how most pro/college beat writers still work. With so much consolidation forcing many unrelated papers to be produced in one place, I'm curious whether even on-site desks still have camaraderie.

 

Mid-'90s. Electronic filing took over after that, and for good reason: Writers could avoid 95 percent of the office bullshit by working remote. But a lot of the daily camaraderie went out the door, too.

 

We're a small afternoon paper and at the beginning of this year, our deadlines got moved up two hours so that I have to be off the floor by 8 a.m. We have the capability to work remotely, and we'd done some with it before the switch. Once the deadlines were moved up, though, it almost became a necessity. The option was to get up around 4 a.m. to start working (I live an hour from the office) or stay up almost that late to get the pages done the night before. Either way was unpalatable.

So, I started paginating and writing about 90 percent of my stuff from home. I'm able to do phone interviews, set up assignments and keep in touch with sources from my cell phone. I can check in with the office with a call, text or e-mail. We have an online time clock now, so I can clock in and out from a laptop or my phone. Between all of that, covering games and being out on other assignments it seems the only time I'm at the office is for meetings, weekend desk shifts and the occasional check-in. I recently went about 10 days between trips to the office. I think I've worked one morning desk shift in the office in 2015. Except for weekends, I probably spend less than 10 hours a week in the office now.
We had one Friday night where I was working from home and so was the ME. The press room guys were freaking out because no one else was in the building all night.
It's weird. When I do go back to my desk at the office I feel like a kid returning to his still-made bedroom on a trip home from college. There's a lot of "Hey, who's that?" jokes from the publisher. But I get the job done, so it hasn't been an issue at all. Once I figured out a routine after a few weeks and adjusted, it's been great for me. I don't have to make a long commute and can spend some more time at home. Haven't crunched the numbers, but it's probably saving a ton on gas, too.
So the technology is already there to do this. As others have said, it's probably not much different than what a lot of pro and college beat writers do. No reason to think it won't be commonplace in the future.

The downside, like Riptide said, is that the office camaraderie is missing. With no one but the cat to talk to during the day, I feel like I'm living in my own head sometimes. If someone got fired or quit and no one said anything to me, it might be a month before I realized it. We have some new hires coming in to help with sports, and I'll have to make it a point to put in some office time to train them and get to know them instead of it coming about organically.
I think there was also some resentment, at first, by some folks. Nothing explicit, just the usual "He's never here, what does he do!?" attitude, even though I'm putting in close to 50 hours a week. I assume that's subsided, but it might still be laying just under the surface.

 

Working at home could be feasible if your shop has employees that can effectively and succinctly communicate via email. Mine does not.

 

This'll be the next wave of hope as papers work all angles to promote themselves.