Trouble with online news

You may have been hearing a lot lately about some of the failed models for online newspaper offspring after print editions have been shut down.

It's actually quite humorous to me that some journalists don't understand why the print model failed in the first place. You can take the InDenver Times - who recently failed to gather enough support from investors - with one of the reasons being they had a staff size that was far too big.

One of the biggest mistakes any new online operation could make, is to try and run it the same way print newspapers have been run for the past 50 years. The main problem there: bloated newsrooms. I don't care if you have a city of 1 million or a city of 8 million - you don't need 30 people in an online newsroom, unless you plan on trying to cover the entire state or province and possibly even the surrounding ones.

If you want to survive in the online world, you need to be lean and mean. You need one reporter per beat: Crime, City Hall (or state or provincial governments), Education, Health, Entertainment and then maybe two editors to assign and edit. That's seven newsies.

Let's hire two photographers - but they need their own equipment and they MUST carry video cameras as well.

On the technical side, you could easily have two or three people working on the web; two to post material instantly (or teach the reporters to do it, once the piece has been vetted by an editor), and one to work on developing the content on the site (optimization, feeds, photo players, twitter blasts, YouTube links, unique content, etc.).

Now we're at 11 or 12 people.

Whether we like it or not, we should probably have some people there to generate whatever income they can scrounge up - but do it solely on a commission basis. Let's say 4 people.

Add in an accountant (which can be outsourced, along with legal) and an office administrator.

I can do it with 16 people. And - I can probably do it better than the team with 30. Too many cooks spoil the broth.

I can see why the InDenver Times was rejected by investors. You can't try to run a newsroom today like you did 10 years ago. You have to demand more and better from reporters. For too long, far too many reporters got fat on the spoils of an easy beat, only producing a story a day, maybe every two days. Those days are over.

You need reporters who can think past their competition, pound out two or three quality stories a day, and still have time to cultivate sources and relationships.

If you want online newsrooms to work any better than their print counterpart, you need people who are going to work harder, longer, and have more of a vested interest in the overall success rather than their own. They need to forget about 'days gone by' and think about 'the days ahead' and being better journalists.

Online may very well be the way to save journalism (I don't think it is), but you can't do it by running newsrooms the same way print news has been done.

We've seen how that works out - and it isn't pretty.

FdS