Web staffers: stop taking the print edition
A (long) while back I spouted off in a comment on a post about newspaper staffing on JI:
In the same vein that there are requirements w/in newsrooms to subscribe to the paper, I’d like to see the “online desk” staffers barred from taking the print edition.
Why? Because it clouds online news judgement. When online staffers are still happily existing in a 24-hour news cycle of monologue presentation, they fail a lot of times to expand their thinking to a web-based, constant news stream, dialog model that will, it seems pretty clear to me, define the future of news online.
In short, they become liabilities.
I recognize the value both financially and functionally of a print product, I truly do. I don’t think such a restriction should be permanent by any means. It’s just that since many newspapers are not hiring “web natives” for their web positions — and therefor crippling themselves — a “print ban” on online staffers seems like a good way to whiplash them into starting to think like web natives.
Sort of a “total immersion” type of approach.
It was an off-the-cuff comment made shortly after arguing some academic point or other with a friend who, while a talented and dedicated print journalist, wasn’t much of a web user, and so didn’t see my point at all (of course my delivery could not have been at fault ;)).
Now that I’ve had the time to think more about it… I like it even more.
Debra:
I’d be even more radical and suggest rolling the ban through the newsroom, a few folks at a time. That way, maybe reporters and editors would understand why the A1 centerpiece story is buried way the heck down in the stack on the Web site — because you can count its age in dog years in the Web world, folks!
I am a little wounded, though, at the notion of non-Web natives crippling online operations. Sniff, sniff, sniff! A few of us have actually been on the Web since Al Gore invented it.
20 August 2008, 10:53 pmMarc:
Unlike my friend Mr Thornton I don’t necessarily think that “web-native” means “web-first” or “web-only”. There are a lot of “web-natives” who were print people long before they first saw a web site.
That they are leaving newspapers in droves after spending years being ignored, trivialized and finally passed-over for management of their very own web operations, well… that’s another story, now inn’t it.
20 August 2008, 11:04 pmDebra:
Touche on that one!
20 August 2008, 11:17 pm