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Web responsibilities

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by BrianGriffin, May 22, 2008.

  1. bob

    bob Member

    Good to know, because sometimes I feel like I'm writing for myself.
     
  2. Joe Williams

    Joe Williams Well-Known Member

    Maybe because they were asked, rather than told or ordered or threatened with demotion or termination if they didn't.
     
  3. SixToe

    SixToe Well-Known Member

    "Asked" bordered on "told," in all honesty, but did not come with any obvious repercussions.

    IMO being "told or ordered or threatened with demotion or termination" is a poor way to manage a staff. Newsrooms should not be daily drills at boot camp.

    Would you rather have someone ask you to do something and explain why it can be beneficial, or merely order you to do it and expect you to fall into subservient lockstep? I'd rather have the former and can respect that more than the latter.
     
  4. The funny thing, Joe, is that you can't threaten too much, because if you fire someone or your disenchanted reporter quits, the higher-ups aren't going to let you replace them.

    So the end result is you've got more work to do, and one less body.

    "Do more with less," they'll say again.
     
  5. Joe Williams

    Joe Williams Well-Known Member

    I'm all for the internets and the new technology and the wave of the future. I think an open mind about it from veteran people is a great thing, and certifiable skills in younger folks building their careers is smart and even essential.

    What I don't respect is bosses who unilaterially and significantly change the terms of employment and suddenly require more work and additional duties per shift -- often lengthening the shift, even if they don't recognize those added minutes or hours -- while squeezing as hard as they can on compensation, promotions and other benefits. That is childish, actually, by the people who are supposed to be our (ahem) leaders. You want unconditional obedience, get a dog. You want to kick somebody, get a cat. ;) But this still is supposed to be a business, not servitude. If we're working entirely to cling to a job, any job, than all we have left are sticks, no carrots.

    I also am unimpressed by managers who want to basically put out two products now -- paper and online -- but still cut staff as some short-term solution to a long-term problem. By virtue of workloads and skills needed, these news organizations should be adding people, not shedding them. It all is illogical and beneath the behavior of even a decent, intelligent boss.

    Finally, I do think the shift in focus to the Web is going to materially hurt the quality of writing for most of us. We're cranking wire copy now on 24/7 cycles, and the rare luxury of spending a day or even half a day crafting a story is all but gone. Quantity and quality, inversely related most of the time.
     
  6. Pete Incaviglia

    Pete Incaviglia Active Member

    BLOG!

    That's all I do in regards to the web. And I only do it during the season I report.
     
  7. TheHacker

    TheHacker Member

    We're not blogging at my place, and I want to get us started. The prevailing attitude among our management seems to be that blogs aren't that effective at generating traffic. And the brass seems to be against opening up our site to reader comments because they feel like it's only a few people who do all of the commenting.

    Any suggestions on how to counter those arguments? I think the blogs can be an effective way to use stuff we don't have space for in the paper (which is a lot of stuff these days). And it can keep both readers and reporters engaged in our coverage. You have to organize your thoughts if you're going to blog ... you decide what you're using in print and what's going online. In that sense, it can help the print product too, if anyone still cares about that.
     
  8. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    We're doing more every week, and I'm OK with it. I just want to make sure that we turn out a good product on that, as much as the print product.

    The push to begin getting live news up there in our "blog" began to come about six months ago. Now, if you're getting some breaking news at 10:30 a.m., it had better be online at 11 a.m. This was a bit of a difficult concept for some veterans who have come up thinking that you don't put your scoops up there for the local TV newsies to pirate for their 6 p.m. broadcast. But that's now secondary. The word is, "If we get it online first, we got the story first."

    We just began getting our online result-taking underway toward the final weeks of the basketball regular season. Our phoners take the game into prefilled templates on the Web site; the names of the team are already in there if it's a local team. As soon as the phone call is finished, the template is saved, and the boxscore is instantly available online.

    In a neat bit of IT work, the boxscores are also cleaned up for print use and strung together in order, by leagues, by girls/boys. Fifteen minutes before deadline, our agate editor just gets into the Web site, copies the string and pastes it down in Word. Ready for pagination.

    When we get this going for a full season, we should have a statistics page for every player in a 48-school area. Team pages, league and division leaders. It's something which is actually going to make our job easier.

    Our biggest problem now is that our Web site is not "officially" the newspaper's Web site. The personnel work three miles away, and we have no interaction with them. Our only way of getting things fixed are working through our middle man. If you have a system like that, you'd better be sure that the automated story-filing system picks up all the coding correctly. Right now, if we have a double-column lede on a story, it's totally missed when picked up for the Web. That sort of thing needs fixed.
     
  9. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    It sounds like your experience is exactly what I want to try to avoid...a situation where morale is lost because web obligations begin to overwhelm the traditional obligations.

    There are things you are doing that might prove to be a complete waste of time in the long haul. Like the insistence on video. I haven't seen anything that suggests to me that frequent video increases web hits.

    The papers that do it well seem to have a fair amount of staff devoted to the Web site and they keep what they ask of the rest of the staff relatively simple and pain free. I've seen enough to be able to say that with certainty. You seem to be in a "sell your soul to it" situation.
     
  10. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Interesting about the camera. I've been told by my SE that if I even pick up a camera (I do have a Canon 20D that I play with and my wife is fairly good with) he'd cut my hand off. He's drawn a line in the sand in fear that if we start toting cameras around on our own accord, the paper would take the next step by eliminating photographers and sending us all out with point-and-shoots.

    I can respect his taking the the stand. But it's awfully tempting to grab that Canon, borrow a good lens and head out to the ballpark one day...I feel like a kid at Toys R Us being told not to touch anything.
     
  11. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Have you ever been in a situation where the guy who should be fired knows this, so he uses that as leverage? It's a situation that's comical in retrospect but tests every ounce of your self control when it's happening...

    I could tell you about a guy who blows off assignments ("I forgot," or "you didn't tell me,") comes up with every excuse for being late, and basically gets away with murder because he knows if we axe him, we lose his position...

    I could tell you that story, but I would only get angry, so I won't. 8)
     
  12. Smallpotatoes

    Smallpotatoes Well-Known Member

    Last year, when our company began to make the push for more Web content, we were basically told we don't work for a newspaper anymore. We work for a Web site that puts out a newspaper once a week.
    I am now required to post at least one bylined story on the Web every day and one poll every month.
    We're encouraged to do video and I've done one.
    This is not the job I signed up for nine years ago.
     
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