News-Record.com

Editors from The Washington Post and Baltimore Sun said today that they have agreed to begin sharing certain stories, photos and other news content.

This idea would have been heresy a year ago. Heck, it might be heresy now.

But markets change, people change and traditions that have no value to readers must change, too.

We have used stories and photos from other newspapers for years, as they were filtered through the Associated Press. Last year, we began working with McClatchy and have used stories directly reprinted a day later from our "competitors," including the High Point Enterprise, the Winston-Salem Journal, the Reidsville Review, the News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer. Included the name of the paper right in the byline, too. We decided we could serve readers better if we put aside the need to create everything here.

I haven't heard from many readers -- I can think of only one -- who has raised a question about it.

Do you care if we entered into explicitly coverage agreements to share same-day content with newspapers around here? Do you even notice the bylines?

On Monday, we published photos and information about the 10 most wanted fugitives in Guilford County.

Wednesday, Greensboro police announced two on the list are in now in custody and a third is in jail down east.

A direct result? Yes, according to a sergeant with the police department.

Pretty cool.

In some comments and blog posts, people have expressed surprise that we would give credit in print to Ben Holder and the Rhino for publishing the city memos in question.

If you buy the idea that bloggers can be investigative journalists -- and I do -- then it's natural that a blogger could obtain confidential documents. In the old days, said blogger might have taken his find to the newspaper. Now the blogger can publish them himself.

Because the actual existence of one of the documents became a major part of the story, its publication by anyone else makes it newsworthy. In the short term at least, the publication of the two memos became a bigger story than the actual content of the memos, thanks to the city's response. It would have been a journalistic mistake to leave Ben and the Rhino out of the story.

The tone of the comments suggests that we should be embarrassed that Ben got them and we didn't. Sure we would have liked to have had them -- that's why we asked for them. But in this business you learn quickly that stuff happens, and you move on pretty quickly. Consider what we did in print the equivalent of a link online.

In the new world of digital media, scoops don't last long and sometimes scarcely exist in people's minds. We report a scoop today, put it online and send it to AP tonight. AP puts it out on the wire at midnight. TV picks it up and broadcasts it beginning at 5 a.m. before most of our papers with the scoop have even hit a driveway. Who had it first? Doesn't mean that we don't try to get them, just that they don't mean what they used to.

Interesting discussion on tomorrow's Benazir Bhutto cover story in Parade magazine. Parade interviewed the Pakistani leader and printed the issue before she was assassinated Dec. 27 (obviously, duh). The quickest they could get it into print is this Sunday.

Parade is touting it: In light of the tragic news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, we have released Parade's January 6 cover story on Bhutto to the media. Parade is proud to publish one of the last person-to-person interviews with the former Pakistani Prime Minister, directly from Pakistan, where PARADE Contributing Editor Gail Sheehy followed Bhutto on the campaign trail earlier this last month.

At the Editor's Desk, Andy Bechtel says: Parade magazine, that Sunday staple of hundreds of U.S. newspapers, isn't known for its timeliness. ...Parade issued a statement to editors of newspapers that include the magazine in Sunday editions, arguing that the interview with Bhutto is even more relevant now.

Perhaps, but the motivation behind sticking with the out-of-date cover story probably has more to do with the fact that 32 million copies of Parade had already gone out the door.

I would add that Parade isn't known for its news content; you can't when you have a publishing schedule weeks in advance of distribution. This might teach them to stick to celebrity cover stories, which is why people read it.