On your site or in your paper?

My one worry is a fundamental shift in journalism on websites, especially with blogs. No one edits my stuff nor anyone else in the section and it's on the site for the whole world to see. I proofread a few times and send a few prayers to the Gods, but who knows? To me the shift has gone substanially towards "Get it first" than "Get it right"

 

Absolutely right, unless we're talking about major, major stuff. Getting it online by 6 a.m. is a different story. For those of you big enough or lucky enough to have actual newsroom people working exclusively on the Web site, ask them sometime to show you the traffic pattern for your site. Fascinating stuff. Just about everyone's will look like a quarter-pipe between midnight and 9 a.m. (starts very low, accelerates quickly to a peak). Traffic probably plateaus between 8 and 10, then starts a slow slide between 10 and 5 p.m. (when all the bored 'Office Space' wonks out there go home). The good sites find a way to keep traffic steady between 10 and 5. That means updates, changes, fresh photos, reordering content and breaking news.

At our shop, we have a very collegial set of bloggers. If someone sees an error or typo, we get each other's backs. Plus, our blogmaster has the usernames and passwords to all the blogs and can make corrections if needed. If you are doing more than two or three blogs at your place, someone has to be tagged to organize and oversee the content. We have 13 currently, so it's a job keeping up with all of them. Fortunately, most of our blogs are done by excellent self-editors.

I hope that's not where we're headed. I know the temptation is there to throw something up as fast as you can because it's easy to fix if something is wrong, but we have to keep in mind that every word online is just like every word in the paper. We have to place the full weight of our credibility on every story, electronic or print.

 

OK.... wait till 6 a.m. then. I don't care.

Don't fuck the people carrying your freight.

 

One paper in these parts, a rather shitty 15k, puts its sports section online at midnight -- 10 to 12 hours before the paper comes out.

Everyone can read it. Sure, traffic bumps up a little from midnight onward. Is it worth it? The short-sighted powers-that-be thought so.

 

We use News Edit to write everything so whatever goes on the web, except blogs and photo gallery captions, is what you see in the paper. But even the blogs and captions are written in News Edit, spell-checked and ostensibly proofed just like any normal piece for the print edition.

 

That makes sense on its face, but I've never heard Word 1 about advertisers complaining to anybody about news going onto the Web ahead of the print product's production.

 

Perhaps, SF, but that doesn't mean they aren't.

 

The one, best way is agonizing over the appearance of the print product.

 

Same old tune, one which has reached a point of diminishing returns. Just doesn't mean anything anymore, DP. People just shake their heads and laugh.