Media: Philly newspaper decides speed up its demise
The Philadelphia Inquirer has issued orders that no news articles be placed on the newspaper’s Website until AFTER the story appears in print. This includes “signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts.” Some breaking news might make it to their site, but that’s it. Sounds sort of like the way PJStar.com used to be. Now, many routine stories, features, columns and editorials appear hours before deadline and the day’s edition is sent to the printer.
Blogger/online news advocate Jeff Jarvis offered this advice to Inquirer staffers:
Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery.
To which I responded:
Jeff, you are missing the big picture. This is actually GOOD news for the future of online journalism. Print journalism is dead. The body just hasn’t stopped moving. By tossing all their news onto the Web for free, newspapers are freezing out online start-ups that would probably need to charge a small subscription fee to survive. Much smaller, in fact, than the cost of home delivery.
In other words, by offering for free what their would-be competitors would have to offer for a fee, newspapers’ free Web sites are an anti-competitive act.
By insisting that their news must appear on paper first, the Inquirer is actually opening the door for an online start up. I’m sure that there are forward-thinking entrepreneurs who are thinking that Philly is now a target rich environment.
The best thing that could happen for the news gathering industry would be for a newspaper like the Inquirer to vanish off the face of the earth and be replaced with an online-only norg (love that term, BTW). It would scare the rest into evolving, at last.
Jarvis makes a ton of good points in this post and in the one referenced in the quote.
Seriously, people. Delivering news by newspaper during the digital age is sorta like traveling cross country by covered wagon right after construction of the Interstate Highway System.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:23 am
I can see why they’ve decided not to publish enterprise, investigative, trends and reviews pieces until they’re published in print.
Some of these are the bread and butter of a journalist’s life. You don’t want to get scooped on the big investigative story by the TV, radio or bloggers if your print edition doesn’t come out until the next morning or afternoon. As a journalist, I would be livid if my newspaper published a big investigative piece I had spent days (if not weeks or months) working on online before the print edition and then TV or radio picked it up. They stole MY story, and now, when the print edition comes out in the morning, it’ll look as if I was just riding on the coattails of the non-print media, when it’s really the other way around.
I know that was the philosophy at the PJS about a year ago. They’d publish features and breaking news, but anything enterprise or investigative, especially of a sensitive nature, would not be posted until after the print edition came out.
As journalists, we’re all very protective of our work. It’d be like and academic picking up someone else’s book two weeks before theirs is supposed to be published and seeing their ideas (original ones, of course) splattered across the page. Crushing.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Read this next paragraph very carefully: You MUST overcome this irrational believe that your scoop or enterprise story is somehow ruined if your competitor reads it on the Web and repeats it before it it printed on paper. It’s published when it’s published on the Web. Getting it to the news consumer earlier on the Web adds to it’s value, not subtracts from it. The Web is simply a different way of delivering the news, that’s all. Keep thinking that news is all about the printing press, and someone smarter than you and your bosses will come along and eat your lunch.
The number of people who get their news from paper is dwindling and dying off. The number of people who get their news online is increasing. This rend will continue. It won’t reverse.
Evolve or become extinct. There’s a kid in journalism school more than happy to take your place, and he understands what I’m talking about.
August 8th, 2008 at 11:12 am
FYI, I’ve only actually been in this business for about a year, so I’m still a kid and very well understand the online model.
However, there is still something to be said about the newsprint medium. I’m not idealistic enough to believe it’s a cure-all for news delivery. In fact, I tend to actually get more of my news online than I do in print.
That being said, not everyone is the same way. Many people who still read the newspaper, especially those in my circulation area, either don’t have access to the Internet or aren’t savvy enough to navigate it well. Most don’t check news Web sites more than once a day, much the same as reading a newspaper.
To them, seeing a story I’ve “published” online at 3 p.m. (which they didn’t see) broadcast on the evening news at 5 p.m. in print at 8 a.m. the next morning says, “TV news won because I saw it there first.”