You can’t win an online race without (good) horses

Hey Pat – Great post. I find it interesting that the assumption many people made about my post was that I was talking about reporters and/or editors. But as you know there are lots of different types of web employees. I’m not trying to upset Mindy, but I don’t think the future of this industry can be left just in the hands of j-school students, web equipped or not. I think if you look at the operations (including those you mentioned) that are excelling online, they have assembled teams that include folks who don’t have journalism backgrounds, but rather are talented at what they do. The point I was making, which I think is very similar to yours, is that news organizations need to hire the best they can afford, be those reporters, editors, developers or any the other types of employees one would expect to find at an online business.

Nice post Pat. You’ve summed up a lot of my frustrations as well. I’d like to also toss in the “one web person to fix them all” positions. Those newspaper/web people that are hired to do video, teach online to aging newsrooms, repurpose content, on and on an on. Many newsrooms that are trying to improve their web presence are trying to do more with less. That extends from the newsroom to the web. But this doesn’t quite work for the web. Fewer reporters mean a beat won’t be covered as well as it could be. Giving more responsibilities to fewer web people will lead to an inferior product. I like McAdams’ suggestions. Newsroooms need to integrate with online. If all the monkey work is divided up so each person in the newsroom is doing small online tasks everyday, talented web people will have a chance to make a news org shine online.

Excellent post, Pat. Thanks for reiterating my comment on Ryan’s blog.

@Yoni: I agree, this talent issue goes beyond hiring j-school graduates. It’s like Adrian Holovaty says when someone in the audience asks him to suggest ways to train existing staff to do what HE (Adrian) does. First a look of pity crosses Adrian’s face. Then he says, “Hire a programmer.” And the audience member says, yeah, yeah, I know, but really, how can my existing journalists learn this stuff? And Adrian repeats: “Hire a programmer.” And the journalists all get angry. But Adrian is right.

It’s stupid to try to train a total non-programmer from scratch when you could hire some 22-year-old who already knows more than that poor journalist will know four years from now.

I am very disgusted by the work practices Pat highlights here so well. You wonder why newspapers are declining in every way? Well, I think a HUGE reason is the idiocy that’s clear in this management decision to waste two, three, maybe even more full-time salaries on compensating for a f****d-up computer system in the newsroom.

Even though you pay these poor monkeys slave wages, it still adds up. For how many years have you been shelling out $20K, $40K, even $60K a year — plus benefits — instead of changing your lousy, unworkable computer system? And meanwhile, your Web site is totally embarrassing! It’s incredibly ugly, it’s slow, it’s hard to use, and no one can find stuff on it.

I hear journalists whine about The New York Times and all its resources — but look at how the Times has invested time and again in its Web site, improving it in so many ways, year after year. I’m not saying the Times is perfect, but instead of complaining that the Times has more money than your newspaper has, you ought to be following their lead — on a scale that works for your newsroom. Change your damned page layouts! Make the stuff load faster! Quit wasting good salaries (and good people) on work that a machine can do!

On the topic of Monkey Work:

I highly recommend training section editors and copy editors to use your online CMS to post to your news site, so that whoever normally reads and approves a story for print carries that job over to the Web.

In the case of home-brewed systems that aren’t necessarily the most user-friendly pieces of software, fall back to your print publishing system and figure out how to publish to the Web from there. Many print systems can play this game, and if you can’t get any help from the company that sold it to you or from developers at “corporate,” find a developer outside the news business who can get the job done. Hire them with a short contract to set it up, document the process, and train your editors.

You will need to invest time or money to solve this problem, but it shouldn’t take too much of either.

Why do newspapers still have print publishing systems that integrate so poorly with web CMSes?

Well, my company spent something in the neighborhood of 6 to 10 million dollars on a print publishing system in 1999. The entire research into its web capabilities at the time was, “can this export to the web?” to which the vendor said “Yes.” Sold.

I vented about my experiences with this beast here: Why it’s so hard to get print stories online

You can’t just throw out a $10 million dollar “investment”.

This is another symptom of a larger issue facing newspapers, that they’ve been fat dumb and happy for so long they forgot what it means to be competitive. That their “technology people” did not see the importance of the web even in 1999 shows a huge failing that newspapers are paying for today.

Today, many of the newspapers I deal with first hand are in exactly the state you describe in your post: repurposing print content for the web yet rarely “webifying” it, underpaying savvy web staffers to do trained monkey work or “retraining” print types with little to no web experience. The excuse is always the same, “we have to do more with less” but what they don’t get is they’re just doing less.

One thing that isn’t addressed specifically so far is about how many newspapers’ Web sites are managed chainwide. There’s still a lot you can do and should do in that environment, but many newsrooms will never know Django from Drupal. Most newspapers at least have moved or are moving from the overnight dump to blogging breaking news throughout the day. Actually, most are doing both, with the overnight dump treated like a legacy system that is being superseded by the blogging approach. It sounds like some newspapers are stuck, though.

Yoni – I agree that every paper needs some dedicated Web people, especially Web developers. How many journalists really know Web development that well? A smart newspaper would be trying to hire the best from MIT, Illinois, Stanford, etc to help make their Web operations shine. That will never happen.

Mindy – I’m not sure why newspapers are so loathe to hire dedicated programmers. My paper won’t get me one for the editorial staff, and it would be a big help if I could build features with someone whose only job was to program. My work just wants me to learn more programming, which is not the easiest endeavor. I’ve at least been doing Web design for a long time, and took some comp sci classes back in the day, but I may never be at the level of someone with a comp sci degree.

Journalists cannot whine about the Times or Post, because those papers are using their resources better. Yes, they have more, but they are much more judicious with how they spend money and with their hiring decisions. The Times used to have a pretty poor Web product, but they kept plugging away, redoing the design, adding new features, new content, etc and now they have one of the best operations around. Why? Because they at least tried and made and honest effort. How many newspapers can honestly say they have made an honest effort when it comes to their Web products?

Shawn – You just described my job. I do everything from putting print content online (a massive waste of my time, talents and salary) to changing the interface of stripes.com to building stand-alone Web sites to training other employees in new media — and I also write and capture audio from time to time. It’s a shame that I have to waste hours everyday doing mindless tasks, but it is what it is. And frankly it harms Stripes the most.

Ryan – That’s how I believe things should be, and I know many papers have copy editors or another editing position posting stories online. Plus, those copy editors can write original Web headlines and blurbs if need be. Why have Web people read over the stories again just so they can write new headlines and make blurbs? My paper’s new print publishing system and CMS are launching around March of this year. The print system is supposed to automatically push the print story (and photos and other related content) into a que on the Web site. From there an Web editor can select where the story goes on the Web site.

Marc – I totally hear you. My paper is finally getting a new print publishing system after about 10 years. They are incredibly expensive, which is why it took so long. Luckily, this print system integrates well with a CMS vendor. I think you bring up a good point about competition. Newspapers enjoyed a monopoly status for years and they really don’t understand how to run lean or be competitive. Newspapers aren’t facing as big of a challenge as a lot of publishers and top editors would have us believe, but most just didn’t have the right managers and tech employees in place to make any sort of change.

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