What to post online and what to hold for print

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Permalink Reply by Patrick Thornton on October 13, 2009 at 11:57pm

Online everyone is a competitor and no one is a competitor. As in, what you view as your competition has radically shifted. A kid on your block can now be your competition. In the same token, however, that kid can collaborate with you.

The Web is about being social and forming webs of connections. In that sense, just as anyone can be your competitor, anyone can also help you. If you embrace that collaborative spirit, you'll find that the Web offers many more opportunities for collaboration than it does for competition.

The only thing I'd hold for print are longer, more enterprise stories. Longer-form content doesn't do that well online anyway. Otherwise, I'd let everything go first online. It is the new first draft of history.

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Permalink Reply by Chip Oglesby on October 14, 2009 at 12:10am

Thanks for sharing this question. I think there a number of ways of approaching this.

1. First and foremost, your management will have to decide if they're going to be web first or print first. Once you decide, you cannot change your mind or fall back on your old ways, it has to be all or nothing.

2. TV stations and other media companies aren't really your competition. Anyone with a twitter account and a blog is now your competition. That could include anyone in your audience. There's a large fear in newsrooms that if they post a story online, they'll be scooped by a TV station, more than likely they are chasing the same story as you are and unless they're broadcasting live, they won't interrupt a program for a small breaking news story.

So that's your opportunity, to be the first to have and post the information. If done consistently over time, readers will start to remember that they can come to you first for news instead of TV stations that broadcast "You saw it here first!"

3. Option 3 is that you just don't post anything until you have the full story will all of your facts straight.

4. Writing a blog as a beat reporter can be very helpful for building your audience and growing your knowledge base.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Becker on October 14, 2009 at 3:57pm

1 & 2. I'd love to think of putting information online first and counting it as equal to what we print in paper, but this is small-city Montana. The Web isn't as important to as large a proportion of the population here as it might be in larger cities. As a result, it's hard to convince the senior editors that a story on the Web is worth as much as one on paper.

In other words, here, a story isn't really a story until its on newsprint.

4. I would love to get reporters writing blogs. Unfortunately, we're a big handicapped by our Web site and the restrictions the big bosses put on the third-party platforms we can use.

Thanks for the advice, though. I'm interested to read whether you think our near-rural setting affects your suggestions.

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Permalink Reply by Chip Oglesby on October 15, 2009 at 1:37am

Michael, I don't think your near-rural settings affect anything I said. I started at small weekly newspaper and the same rules would apply there. Just because your not in the big city doesn't mean you can't be web first.

Remember, decide what you're going to do and stick to it. Keep up the good work and let us know how it goes.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Cook on October 14, 2009 at 8:44am

We also post our breaking news on our social media sites -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn for us -- and then link these to the online story. That way everybody connected to you knows you had it first. Then you can also let those followers know when you've added new information or updated the story.

Plus, at the end of each breaking story we add something like: "Read more in-depth analysis of this topic in the next issue," reminding the readers why print journalism still relevant in an online world.

Keep us posted on how it goes.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Balcerak on October 14, 2009 at 1:38pm

The guys above me are right—your competition isn't really the TV news anymore. Besides that, they're going to get the story eventually anyway, right? (And still not credit you.)

Being "first," by the way, isn't really what it used to be. Even if you're following someone on a story, you can still win. Case in point: Sports Illustrated broke the story of Brett Favre signing with the Vikings on their Web site—but ESPN.com got most of the traffic because they posted SI's link. ESPN has built up their site as the site with everything (even stuff that isn't theirs) and their readers know that.

Make your site the Google of your community—a "one stop shop," it's often called—and after a while, it won't matter who has what first.

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Permalink Reply by Ramachandran on October 14, 2009 at 9:49pm

Way back in 2007, the Guardian came up with a somewhat detailed draft of its principles for posting news 24/7 on its website: you might want to check that out here.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Becker on October 15, 2009 at 10:20am

Thanks, I'm going to read them today.

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Permalink Reply by Ole Helmhausen on October 14, 2009 at 10:16pm

As a german free lance journalist working out of Canada for german print and online media, I have the advantage of location: I am in the know earlier what is hot and what s not in North America. Do I talk about it in my blog? No way. Out there everyone´s a potential competitor. I speak out of experience. There´s nothing even remotely similar to the good old fashioned honor and honesty when it comes to a good story or a new, never read before story angle. Freelancers working the same fields and geographic areas are, since they are on noones payroll, competitors. Maybe less after a beer together, but nevertheless: silence is golden"

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Permalink Reply by Erik Gable on October 15, 2009 at 11:48am

One way to sell online-first, even if there's a chance it means the TV station will get the story before it hits print, is as a way of preserving your brand. Newspapers used to be at a severe disadvantage; if there was a breaking news story, TV or radio would always get it first, unless they were asleep at the switch. The Web levels the playing field. We can be "the people who get the story first" again.

Of course, that does mean that if the TV station is asleep at the switch, you run the risk of spoiling your chance to get the story first in the minds of non-Web users. But if the TV station is competent, they're probably getting most breaking news items first -- the situations where you'd tip them off would be relatively few and far between.

You could also, for breaking news stories, develop a little breakout box for print saying something like: "On the Web: We broke this news online at 5:12 a.m. Tuesday on bozemandailychronicle.com. Check bozemandailychronicle.com throughout the day for breaking news updates, then open your morning Daily Chronicle for in-depth coverage."

That way, even in the occasional situation where the TV station is unaware of the story so it hits Web first, then TV, then print, non-Web users will be aware that you were disseminating the story before they saw it on TV.

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Permalink Reply by Noah Bombard on October 15, 2009 at 10:08pm

I deal with this problem on a daily basis dealing with journalists who've never completely crawled out of the print paper bin. The idea of "holding" stories usually leaves me beating my head against my desk (there are very rare exceptions). If you love your story, set it free!

What if another news organization sees it and steals it? Of course they will. But you've already broken the story. You're already first, now your challenge is to continue to be better. Newspaper people can sometimes be very insecure about their work. Publish it online as you know it, be first, be proud, do it better than anyone else. Stop worrying about the guy at your NBC affiliate who's waiting to see what stories you've got online today and then have it on the 6 o'clock news. If the organization's biggest problem is that all the TV stations and other newspapers are watching you, well, is that really a problem? This is what your online readers expect of you. We are one of the few industries I know of that sabotage our own work. We try to do not quite so good of a job online so as not to compete with our print editions. When is not making something the best it can be ever a good thing?

Here's how we handled a scheduled smoke stack demolition in Lawrence this morning. Two giant stacks were scheduled to be imploded at 10 a.m. Of course, it's the kind of visual eye candy that brings every news outlet out. We were at the scene and had raw video of the event online by 11:15 a.m.: http://www.eagletribune.com/punews/local_story_288112847.html

We posted it on Facebook, sent out a tweet and by mid day it had more than 1,000 views.

We then continued editing video and had a finished video online by 4 p.m.: http://www.eagletribune.com/punews/local_story_288154251.html

There should have been a story up today, but there wasn't. I guess I'm somewhat OK with this given that we've blogged about it and covered the story via video.

Of course, this was a scheduled event so everyone was going to have it anyway. But if it wasn't, I still would have covered it that way. We've published midday stories that brought the TV crew trucks rolling into town a few hours later. But in the end, it's got to be about providing the best coverage and the most immediate coverage to YOUR readers. It can't be about worrying if someone else is going to piggyback off your work.

OK, it's entirely possible I'm a tad bit opinionated on this topic.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Yelvington on October 16, 2009 at 7:47am

Begin by recognizing that "holding" for print is not a journalism decision, but rather a business decision. The journalism imperative is to tell the truth to as many people as will listen. The business imperative is to make as much money as possible.

If journalists are going to make business decisions, they have a responsibility to make well-informed, well-reasoned and strategically smart business decisions.

Being well-informed begins by understanding where your money comes from today, where it's going to come from in the future, and how that picture is changing. How many journalists in such a discussion understand the financial picture? What is your revenue per page impression on the Web? is it for print? What is your daily/weekly/monthly reach/frequency for print and Web? How do those numbers break out by age cohort? What does that tell you about 2015 and 2020?

It could be that after equipping yourself with such information, you might chart out a product-differentiation strategy that would define certain types of news content that would go straight to the Web, and other types that would be held and planned for a print product and maybe never placed on the Web at all.

But if your conversation is not so well informed, and instead focuses on what a broadcast competitor might do, then you're going to be reactive and not strategic, and set yourself up to have your butt kicked by time and change.

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