Comments on: Same old content doesn’t cut it for online readers

By: Michael Green

Michael Green — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:51:53 +0000

There’s a slight disconnect in your logic here: You want us to place outbound links in a story in an effort to keep readers on our site. That’s not a great payday for the time and effort it takes for print journalists to hyperlink their copy. In fact, there’s no payday at all, just a variation on the theme that print journalists just don’t get it.

And you know what? We don’t get it, at least not yet, nor do we necessarily see the need to do so. All the tools that Web folks think are indispensable to creating a dynamic presence online are just that: tools. And the toolbox is getting so cluttered these days many journalists are suffering from overload. Should I brush up on my HTML? Go Digg-ing for Delicious links? Liveblog? Podcast? Database? The Webophiles’ stock answer: All of the above, even though most working journalists have limited understanding of what those tools are, much less how to use them. That’s not the most helpful approach I’ve seen advocated.

By: JohnofScribbleSheet

JohnofScribbleSheet — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:15:10 +0000

As always, an interesting read. But what Mindy says is true, with cutbacks, how do papers move forward. Is it simply a question of more work on less pay?

By: Meghan Murphy

Meghan Murphy — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:07:42 +0000

I agree with all of you. Not enough staff and not enough creative thinking about the web. I started off my career as a “predator” for Britannica.com – it was my job to plug in all those links and think of creative ways to display stories and to make their usefulness go beyond 24 hours.

The other issue worth thinking about is how the web affects print content. I feel that our editors look at our website hits and say “The public wants crime briefs and weather and Orange County Chopper stories.” But who is that public? And do they really represent what our print readers want?

By: Marc Matteo

Marc Matteo — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:04:51 +0000

I agree 100% that newspapers often (always?) fail to what I call “webify” stories on the web, that is to add things like links, maps, photos, microformats and/or whatever else you can think of to make the story work in the online medium.

And I agree 100% that they need to.

But… who’s gonna do it? It’s a lot of work to do that kind of thing and while some of it can be automated a lot of it cannot. Computers don’t read.

I want to see my paper do this kind of stuff but in this brave new world, niceties like “links” fall pretty early on in the triage that is our workday.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:24:09 +0000

You know the answer to this, Yoni — “We publish x stories every day, our staff has been cut to the bone, we don’t have time to ‘dress up’ the stories …”

What’s key to your analysis is that SOME stories have legs, and because of that — because this drunk mothers driving story is not a one-day wonder — it would be well worth it to “dress up” the online story and then — another novel idea — PROMOTE it for more than just one day.

The change in mind-set that needs to happen is one that encourages the journalist to stop thinking of every story as a one-off, a thing with only 24 hours of life.