Indiana Editors Pull Up Drawbridge and Chuck Messages In Bottles. Remind Me Why This Is Important.
Proof positive that most newspaper publishers and editors are stuck in the old way of delivering news. You probably read the same story on E & P online that I did. Hoosier newspapers were in the “run the presses and deliver the paper” mode.
Editors and circulation officials, who contend the rain-soaked area is in its worst natural disaster ever, say delivery problems have mounted due to roads closing and opening without warning…
One newspaper who normally doesn’t publish a Sunday edition, was forced to do web updates. I have the impression that if the newspaper had a Sunday edition, it would have been their emphasis - not keeping the online newspaper as current as possible.
Why is this? Why are newspaper editors and publisher in the mindset that delivering a print “disaster edition” is relevant or necessary. Even going up in pages and bragging about it. Like four more pages with twelve huge pictures is relevant.
Yes, it will win you awards at the state press association, maybe even a national award, maybe even a Pulitzer. But to what end? Getting accurate information to the public should be the end. The means should be the online newspaper.
My suggestion would be that when a wide-spread natural disaster hits, the whole print edition gets chucked immediately. Canceled.
Buy as many TV and radio spots as possible and go wall to wall with your newspaper’s URL.
If reporters are stranded, let them phone it in - with video.
We had one staffer, a reporter who had to be rescued by boat [on Saturday] and her vehicle floated down a river,” Syse recalled. “It washed up on dry land and she came back to work on Monday.”
What a great first person story. But it wouldn’t see the light of day in the print edition because there are only just so many such stories that will fit and the precious space won’t be used on an employee of the newspaper, unless the staffer died.
There is a certain thrill of moving a newspaper to Starbucks. Think of the stories for the kiddles of the Great Flood of 2008 and how the paper “got out” from Starbuck’s.
“We could not get into our offices on Saturday,” said Editor Scarlett Syse of the 17,000-circulation Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind. “So we sent someone in to collect laptops, Rolodexes, and digital cameras and set up in a Starbucks for a few hours.”
“No one around here has ever seen flooding like this. It is the 100-year storm you always hear about,” says Tim D. Smith, circulation director for The Herald-Times of Bloomington and the Reporter-Times of Martinsville. “We have had carriers wading up to their chests to deliver to racks, they are really troopers.”
You betcha, and customers would have to wade through the same water to buy a paper right?
Chuck the print edition.
Keep carriers out of harm’s way. Smith went on to say only 25% of the Martinsville subscribers got their paper. They have 60 youth carriers and he asked them to wait for HOURS to get a newspaper to deliver.
In Columbus the story was the same, short staff, very late delivery (some next day.)
And for what? Just to have ink on paper? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s old school. It’s typical of newspapers.
During a wide spread disaster throw everything you have at the web edition. Put the press guys on the phone - or send them out with their personal phones (with video) in their big pickups and ask them to shoot and send. Ask the graphics department to start surfing and researching and mapping and calling friends and family. Get ad staffers to grab their phones and laptops and start posting to a common blog. These editors that found themselves “short of staff” meant they were short of people who are on the newsroom payroll.
If they would have looked at an employee phone list, they might have found a great wealth of information from people just dying to help tell the story.
Instead, editors go into the tower, pull up drawbridge, and every 24 hours throw a message in a bottle into the water hoping somebody will find it and read it.