Quality journalism online
I know that The New York Times, like the rich, is different from you and me, but today's column by its public editor, Byron Calame, surprised me by how different.
I continue to believe that Web users will also value the accuracy, fairness and completeness of the traditional Times coverage of breaking news. Maintaining the standards of a traditional Times story on the Web will help preserve the paper's brand -- as a credible provider of breaking news in the online world.
As top editors ponder how best to deliver the full range of Times articles to the Web 24 hours a day, it seems clear to me that the reporters nailing down important breaking news stories on their beat will continue to need some time to report and think. Expecting them to quickly crank out and keep updating a bare-bones version for the Web could mean that final article of traditional Times quality will be less that it could have been.
In the theory, and often in practice, the continuous news desk give a beat reporter time to prepare a more complete Times article. The stories from the continuous news reporters appear on the Web site until the articles prepared for the next morning's print paper are made available for online use.
Unlike the Times, we aren't large enough an operation to maintain two separate reporting staffs. But no matter. We've operated under the premise that print reporters must be online reporters, too. Online journalism is the future (and present), and journalists need to understand how to work fluidly in both a digital and print world.
Readers should get the best breaking news report they can as soon as they can. It may be that the "traditional Times coverage" is worth waiting for -- a schedule dictated by print deadlines, rather than reader interests. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it. The world moves at a different, faster pace. Readers will get the information they need wherever they can find it.
Our experience is that online news readers are sophisticated. They well understand that news stories are often produced linearly -- we update with new information as soon and as often as we can. That doesn't prevent reporters from thinking and reporting...it often energizes and informs the efforts.
Comments (2)
To report abuse of the comment feature on this site, please use the feedback form at the bottom of any page.
Calame's column is horse pucky of the highest order. I've worked in traditional newsrooms and I'm currently working in and on the most untraditional of local newsrooms. Although we aren't launching our news product for about another week, we've started our workflow, and I can tell you that the more a reporter cranks through fast web stories, the broader his knowledge is about what's happening in town. And I already see people connecting dots that folks in a file-a-couple-times-per-week environment never could.
Now I'll concede, you have to have someone who can devote the time needed when you see those dots connect, but the more a reporter files, the better they'll become.
Side note, and this may be market specific, but I think not. We're posting a lot of school news and business news verbatim from press releases. When we see something that begs further question, we send someone after it. But as I compare those stories to Our Local Daily, in the few cases that they actually overlap with us, I see that they have nothing that wasn't in the release. They just rewrote it, taking out information rather than adding.
Which model makes more sense?
Posted on November 19, 2006 11:56 AM
Yep. I didn't want to crack too hard on the priority that the Times clearly gives to its print product; we have some of the same issues. But to suggest that that is the way it oughta be seems crazy -- or at least ignorant of the ways of the world -- to me.
Posted on November 19, 2006 2:00 PM