Today’s thought: A totally different way of doing news
If I built a news organization from the ground up it would look nothing like the paper I work for or any of the papers you all work for.
That begs the question: Why do newspapers still look and operate like organizations founded decades or centuries ago?
Shouldn’t newspapers radically rethink what they do and how they do it, instead of continually making staff and budget cuts every few years, all the while hoping that by simply doing less of what they do — but the same as they have always done — it will somehow magically turn things around?
February 18th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Because that’s what worked for a long time. And that’s what continues to drive double-digit profits for many newspaper companies.
I think that layoffs and other quick fix actions help boost profit in the short-term, but probably don’t help in the long-term. But because many newspaper companies are publicly traded, they’re at the mercy of shareholders whose interests are on quarter results and not survival many years from now.
Most newspapers are radically different than they were in 1998. Perhaps they need to be more so?
February 18th, 2008 at 10:47 am
It’s like that old joke, where a guy in a car stops and asks an old chap for directions to his destination. The old fella ruminates for a while, and then declares: “Well, if I waz you, I wouldn’t start from ‘ere…”
And that’s how I often feel: if I wanted to build a network of blogs around many of our subject matters I wouldn’t start with journalists wedded to traditional ways of working.
The news biz hasn’t changed much for decades because it hasn’t needed to. It hit on a formula that worked, that was teachable and replicable. A mythology grew around it. People enjoyed and were comfortable with the basic processes at work, even if they were somewhat modified by the move to desktop publishing.