Posted on 07/22/2008 7:33:52 PM PDT by narses
This Los Angeles conference has been both sobering and encouraging.
Sobering because the pace of change in our industry is faster and the nature of that change more extreme than any of us imagined. Hearing from specialists in electronic/digital media organizations other than newspapers has made it crystal clear that whatever we have done to this point is dangerously inadequate.
If we don't change more dramatically and faster, there will not be an industry to support the sort of value-driven journalism that is at the heart of our craft.
The encouraging news is that the tools we need to make the needed changes are readily available to us and that our ability to deliver quality news and information can only be enhanced...if we make the bold leaps.
And there is the rub. Are we willing to make the bold moves.
In the SR newsroom, we MUST understand and then embrace the notion that print is no longer our primary focus. As advanced as we are in the digital delivery of news (and this conference confirms for me that we are ahead of the industry curve, as innovative and progressive as any newsroom ), we are still too print focused.
We need to devote FEWER resources to print. Our editors ned to spend far less time worrying about print. And all of us need to be focusing on how to improve and expand the scope and quality of our digital news and information (and that includes radio).
This is a huge cultural leap. The push back will be extreme. Work schedules will have to change. Skills will have to be refined or re-taught or learned for the first time. Many of us will have to fundamentally question what we do, why we do it and how it must be done differently.
The editors who push this cultural change forward will not earn many friends in the newsroom. I think that understanding has been sobering for all of us.
My hope is that our journalists will understand that we must change our practices, while holding true to our news values.
That will be our only chance and only hope.
More:
In 1999-2000, the SR had 165 newsroom staff, 154 full-time. We now have 116 of which 108 are full-time.
The number of local news reporters has decreased by at least one third. Photographers, copy editors and line editors, too. So, of course, there is less news in the paper, less depth and less context.
How nice, they want to hold “true to their news values.”
Then you will perish as an entity in any form you currently can fathom.
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Smith and his sycophants are delusional. I am glad. They will destroy the paper that killed progress in Spokane.
You’re supposed to use the real title.
We can all enjoy a good round of shadenfreude when it comes to print journalism, but is anything really changing? The socialists in the print media will just end up in the digital media.
Commies really do take themselves way to seriously.
“...there will not be an industry to support the sort of value-driven journalism that is at the heart of our craft.”
LOL...that is the funniest line I’ve read in a while, particularly when the NYT just exhibited to the world how lousy their values are when they promoted Obama’s drivel and reject McCain’s rebuttal.
What will they do for revenue? Craigslist has ripped their soft underbelly out. Let them blog for a living, see what happens to their revenue. Pfffft..... Can you say BURN RATE BABY, BURN RATE?
They do, they do!
Delusional idiots can be funny. Sorta like drunken cats.
Ping to you.
Definitely taking the smart route....anyone betting on a reading, educated America is out of touch. It’s interesting to see the conservative papers laying off people and how they handle it as compared to the liberal ones...in some cases, the conservative ones are having a harder time transitioning to the video, sound-byte age...it seems conservatives are more interested in writing well-reasoned pieces—a product that has no market.
Back when I was a young pup, I had both a Review and Chronicle paper routes. At that time, Cowles Pub was considered a Republican backing newspaper.
How times have changed.
Our local paper, The Modesto Bee (McClatchey) announced in the past week that the Bee’s printing would be done up in Sacramento and then trucked down here.
I don’t know why they even bother.. 75% minimum of any given edition is dedicated to advertising. Full column news stories are reduced to 4-6” of copy.
...and folks wonder why I spend so much time reading the news on the computer?!?!
Around our house its proper title is the “Socialist-Fishwrap”
The Cowles family is still country club GOP. Their staff is hard left comsymp.
Fish desrve better. We haven’t tolerated that oily rag in our home in years.
Looks like I'll be devoting FEWER resources to a subscription to this sorry excuse for a birdcage liner. There's more ads than news, these days.
And what passes for news I've typically seen 3 or 4 days earlier on FreeRepublic!
I think the Cowles' would look good in it, myself. And their City Council cohorts in the Riverpark Square swindle.
Ah reporter wrap. Or maybe commie wrap. Oops, redundant.
This stuff makes blood shoot from my eyes. I've seen better sentence construction out of 6th-graders.
If we don't change more dramatically and faster,
So if we diagram (or parse) the adverbial modifiers of 'if we don't change', "more" modifies both "dramatically" and "faster" (so we change more dramatically and more faster). 'faster and more dramatically' resolves this.
the tools we need to make the needed changes
How about just "the tools needed to make the necessary (or 'vital', or 'crucial') changes"? Sounds like he's hoping for that change thing
all of us need to be focusing
How about a nice clean active voice here, instead of the passive? "all of us need to focus" is a less-abusive use of the infinitive.
Are we willing to make the bold moves.
Steve, you ignorant sl*t, who did you sleep with to get this job? The thingy (as it's known in editor-speak) used at the end of an interrogative sentence is located at the lower right corner of the keyboard, next to the 'shift' key; it requires that you operate the 'shift' key simultaneously with the 'slash' key.
Don't get me started on the dearth of hyphens for such combinations as "push-back", "crystal-clear", "print-focused".
It looks like basic English Composition should be among the "skills that have to be taught for the first time".
And 'sobering' is an interesting term, given the mental image most of us have of reporters and editors.
LOL, you nailed him. So to speak. Arrogant ignorant self important twit.
But there will always be a need for a reliable, centralized source for important, current political and cultural information. I can imagine something like "Wikipedia" emerging in the news world --something Google-sized, with a Yahoo! to keep it honest.
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