We had a newsroom meeting yesterday to discuss “phase 2 of our online first initiative.” I believe our newspaper staff has mastered writing for the Web, or most of us, anyway. I think most of our reporters now understand that reporting and posting stories to our Web site has become more urgent than before; we typically post within minutes of breaking news – even if it’s just a few lines. And I think most of our reporters now know that our Web site is both the present and future focus of our news organization, so that means posting stories as soon as we have them completed, then continuously updating them throughout the day until they’re ready for the print product.
Now I just hope that most of our journalists know to think of the Web site as our main product, not the paper.
That’s because we’re moving into phase two with a unique strategy. Basically we are operating for our online edition as if we’re an afternoon newspaper. I’ve never worked for an afternoon newspaper, but I know that it works something like this: reporters come in earlier than “usual” and finish stories that were started the day before, have an earlier deadline and then the story is delivered later that day. Okay, so we’re working similar to that. Here’s the plan:
In keeping with the afternoon newspaper mentality, our default deadlines have moved from 5 p.m. to 11 a.m. Of course the exceptions are breaking news and stories that are time-dependent, such as meetings or events, which will then be set a specific deadline. Editors for all of our reporting teams will have a noon deadline for copy and photos to be sent to the Universal Desk (our modern version of a copy desk). So basically a story that is scheduled to run in Wednesday’s print edition, for example, should be done by 11 a.m. Tuesday (as long as this isn’t a time-sensitive story or meeting story, for example). The reporter should have the bulk of the story done Monday and then will finish anything up on Tuesday morning before turning the story into her editor. That story should have a 15-minute turnaround to be placed on the Web. This allows for more stories to change out on our Web site earlier in the day.
Stories also will have set lengths – again the exception being breaking news and investigative pieces. For example, a brief will be limited to three inches, a short story will be set at 8 inches and the basic nuts-and-bolts story will be 12 inches. This reduces the amount of time the Universal Desk spends on page production – they will now be working from page templates.
Another change is in the newsroom budget meetings. We currently have a 10 a.m. meeting to discuss the day’s events and a 3:30 p.m. meeting to discuss what’s going into the print edition of the paper. Now the 10 a.m. meeting will become a 4 p.m. meeting the day before that will plan what stories reporters are working on the next day for that day’s online and the following day’s print version. The current 3:30 p.m. meeting now becomes a 9 a.m. meeting where final decisions will be made about play of stories and photos.
You might be thinking that this doesn’t sound too innovative and that it sounds like an antiquated approach. Well, if so, I don’t know if you’ve caught on to what we’re really up to. Research shows that most people look to our Web site in the morning for updated news stories. Most of the stories on our Web site in the morning are from the night before, as most reporters tend to follow the default 5 p.m. deadline for non-breaking news and regular daily stories. This plan aims to change out last night’s stories (which the reader sees already in the print edition) with something new for the reader in the morning and afternoon.
Some components of this approach actually are a little old-fashioned – such as the afternoon newspaper mentality – but what we’re really doing is applying these old-fashioned ways of thinking to our new ways of thinking (so I guess it’s not really old-fashioned afterall!). It’s the way I was trained in college, though. At the Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper – where I spent more hours than in class and in my social life, we wrote our stories to a specific length that was outlined in the budget that day and prepared using a template for the paper. We also held a pre-budget meeting the night before to go over what people were working on the next day, and then the 3:30 budget meeting (like most) was used to specifically say which stories go where in the print edition. Now, similar to that, we outline which stories are going to be the feature stories on our Web site throughout the day.
I know this new workflow is meant to create more stories for the Web site during the day when our readers are coming to our site – all while encouraging them to come back later – and to cut out unnecessary steps in the process of putting our stories online and then in print, but I also hope it will encourage our reporters and team leaders to think of our Web site as the primary product, and the newspaper itself secondary. During our meeting one reporter asked, “If we have an exclusive story that is investigative in nature, shouldn’t we save that story for online until it goes in the print edition. What if another news sources sees it on our Web site and reports it before it goes into print edition.” That’s the kind of question that was asked years ago when news organizations were transitioning to the Web. The answer is that we definitely will have scooped any other news organization with an exclusive story by putting it on our Web site – because that’s our primary product.
