newspapers – Page 4

Pointing to the future of newspapers?

Jeff Jarvis’ offers some interesting ideas on the potential nexus between blog-like online publications and traditional newspapers on his BuzzMachine blog. The gist of his argument can be summed up with his opening line:

Try this on as a new rule for newspapers: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.

It is, as I said, an interesting idea, one worth considering, though I’m not sure how useful it will be for community weeklies like the Post and Press that focus on the most local of issues.

For bigger dailes — especially for papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post — this may be an approach that can allow them to provide real, useful and important news without ignoring the fluff and celebrity stuff that seems to be of interest to many out there. It is a way of targeting resources toward their best use.

“(I)n the age of the link,” Jarvis writes, the old ways are inefficient and self-defeating.

You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage.

This changes the dynamic of editorial decisions. Instead of saying, “we should have that” (and replicating what is already out there) you say, “what do we do best?” That is, “what is our unique value?” It means that when you sit down to see a story that others have worked on, you should ask, “can we do it better?” If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.

We make this decision nearly everyday, picking and choosing what to cover, how much space and time to devote and how to play it. No newspaper can cover everything or devote the kind of resources we would like to the stories we do cover. And our resources are shrinking at a lightning pace.

So we have to rethink the “architecture of news” by finding new ways to cover things. Is the Jarvis model the right one? Perhaps, though there maybe other approaches. It is, however, something that is very much worth thinking about.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
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Remove the cloak

I saw this on Glen Greenwald’s blog on Salon and had to link to it because it pretty much sums up my own feelings on anonymous sources. It is from a Frontline interview with Dana Priest of The Washington Post, excerpted in E&P.

Q. In Washington, people have lots of off-the-record or confidential conversations all the time on all kinds of things, not just secret prisons.

Right. I think the press is guilty of allowing sources to ask for anonymity in far too many places.

Q. To getting spun, you mean, by the sources?Even if the information is not spun, but they just don’t want their names attached to it. You have spokesmen who are paid by U.S. taxpayers to be the spokesmen for their agencies, and they won’t put their name on simple statements.

That’s in part because we’re not calling them on it enough, and I think that we should.Papers and networks are not good at working together, but I would absolutely support an effort by us collectively to say, if you’re a spokesman, you have to have your name on the record. We need to crack down on the use of anonymous sources when it’s not absolutely necessary.And now you’re going to ask me when is it actually necessary. It is all a judgment call, but it has gotten overused, absolutely.

Q. Out of control?

It’s gotten out of control. USA Today stopped using them, and they were successful. They got people to be on the record with things that they initially said they wanted to be on background and not quoted. So I think we should do a better job trying to get people to be on the record.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here.

Front-page news

I find myself hooked on a Web page offered by the Newseum — “the interactive museum of news” — that offers a look at hundreds of front pages from around the world.

The feature, called “Today’s Front Pages,” is a great resource for someone like me who is a page design junkie. As a newspaper editor responsible for designing and laying out front pages for the Post and Press, the chance to see what hundreds of other editors are doing is priceless.

I have my own sense of what works up front — large lead photo, for instance, a mix of headline fonts, a vertical layout and lots of “entry points” (teases and logos, small inset photos, etc.). Seeing others, however, can be instructive.

The Fresno Bee (left), for instance, offers a vertical page and a gripping photo of a distraught woman that accompanies a story about a fire. It also offers a small headshot at the bottom left that draws the reader to an otherwise nondescript government story. A very attractive page.

The Decatur Daily of Tennessee (top) scores (pun intended) with a winning layout that features a lot of horizontal art that is set off with a long vertical column down the right. What I like best, however, is the soccer photo that accompanies the lead story, which helps offset the lead truck shot.

The Herald Times (above right), though, has what I think is a key element — a photo of a face that covers a huge amount of front-page real estate. It also uses a long column on the right to elongate the page and a headshot to anchor the bottom story on the page.

The Newseum site is, for me, the equivalent of a comic-book message board or an Apple tech site — a place to do research, to get a sense of trends and a way to measure what I do against the industry.

South Brunswick Post , The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Sad news: Molly Ivins has died

Molly Ivins was a rarity among political columnists — a real humanist who saw through the purely partisan manner in which most of the political world worked, a writer of uncommon clarity and a razor-sharp wit.

I first read Ivins when her collection of sharp-tongued columns — “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” — was issued. It was the first of her six books, which also included two books about the current occupant of the White House — books that, had we been a smarter nation, should have stood as a warning to those who might have thought electing the man from Texas made sense.

Her take on liberalism — true liberalism — stands as a guidepost for me:

To Ivins, “liberal” wasn’t an insult term. “Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there’s nothing you can do about being born liberal — fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed,” she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, “You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You.”

She said this last year about the Iraq war — a statement that really is about democracy itself:

“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war,” Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. “We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!'”

Her death today is a blow to all of us who care about the state of the world. Rest in peace. (Here is a tribute from her syndication service.)

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick