AL.com "journalism"

They are measured by page views. They all have page view numbers they must meet. I'm not sure about post quotas to reach those page views. Quality certainly isn't a concern.

 

I think it's like 20-25 posts per week.

 

The UAB beat writer is abysmal. His stuff is rife with misspelled words, fragments from cut and paste/rewrite, and grammatical errors. Unbelievably bad.

The Birmingham News is my local paper, and it's no longer worth wrapping fish with. Between the staff cuts, the attitude that proofreading and editing are optional, and the corporate lack of attention to anything but pageviews, I get the vast majority of my news elsewhere.

Thank god for the internet.

 

Yeah, but do those page views have to come from a story they wrote or simply posted? Either way is pretty shitty (what's the difference between me being the first person to see an email and posting it verbatim and someone breaking a story by actually reporting if they both get 1 million page views? Or worse, what if I post an email first only for someone else to see another one, add one sentence and his byline to the top? Who has the most job security?)

 

Have the Advance locations been getting more page views since they made the switch to their current digital journalism model and have they increased their digital ad revenue substantially?

 

That's my biggest problem with it. Not everything we do is, or has to be, breaking the next Watergate scandal. But for God's sake, at least put some effort into the easy ones. Look at the stats page and see who they have coming back, who's relevant, where the position battles might be, etc. Include when the other Alabama schools start spring practice. Throw in a sentence about the season opener.
Boom. Spend 15-30 minutes, like you said, and you have your own story without even having to conduct a single actual interview or leaving your desk. It still might be a "meh" story, but at least you keep your professional integrity.

 

As bad as this is, it's SOP today for so-called 'featured columnists' to 'aggregate' someone else's original reporting, copy and paste two tweets, write a one-sentence lead, and call it a bylined story. VOMIT.

 

Where other than Bleacher Report (and I ask that honestly; not trying to sound like prick)?