It was strangely flattering that several folks in the weird world of journalism reform were mad that I was away from the computer last week and couldn't rant about the great newspaper kerfluffle in this city, about whether certain kinds of news from the Philadelphia Inquirer gets published first on the World Wide Web or on the bark of dead trees. Wrote media guru Jeff Jarvis: "What a rotten time for Norgman Will Bunch to be on vacation and offline."
Maybe for him; frankly, I was quite happy to be 3,000 miles away from 400 North Broad Street last week. But now, the "Norgman" has returned, and so I guess I'll have to weigh in on this. First of all, David Carr of the New York Times did a good job summarizing the issue this morning:
There is a lesson there for rest of the media, most specifically The Philadelphia Inquirer, where the managing editor, Michael Leary, issued a memo last week suggesting that all of the paper’s good stuff — “signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features and reviews” — would not appear online until they first appear in print.
“For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment,” Mr. Leary informed the staff. “Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor.”
Even to the eye of this reporter — to use a hack newspaper term — The Inquirer seems to be making a mistake. If the future of our business is online, then why set up a firewall, delaying the best content to protect a legacy product? And more adept reporters are beginning to realize that the Web is not just a way to broadcast news, it is a great way to assemble it as well.
First of all, since there seems to be a lot of confusion around this point, I should remind people that I work for the Daily News and not the Inquirer, and while we may be owned by the same characters, the way that the organization is set up I have as much to do with what happens in their newsroom as with what happens at the Omaha World-Herald. That said, while in one sense I agree wholeheartedly with Jarvis and the harsher critics of the Inquirer, in another unfortunate sense I think the controversy is a tad overblown. Let me explain.
I believe the critics are 100 percent right in the sense that perception is reality, and the retro, 1990s vibe -- and its curmudgeonly undercurrent of hostility toward the Internet -- that Leary's memo set off is exactly the wrong message to be sending from anywhere in the Philadelphia Media Holdings empire. The newsroom needs to project a forward-looking image, and so the widespread perception of the Inquirer as backward-looking is a dangerous thing.
That said, my sense as a regular reader of the Inquirer and Philly.com is that the practical impact of this "new policy" is virtually nil. The sad truth is that there isn't a bold tradition of the Inquirer publishing stories first on the Web that's being eliminated here. If I were Mike Leary, here's what I'd do.
1) Admit that the first memo was a mistake and withdraw it, and thank all the bloggers and other who've commented on it for their positive ideas or suggestions.
2) Convene a newsroom summit on how the Inquirer can better use the Web to systematically enhance and promote stories, not on a false choice of giving them away or not giving them away.
In Carr's NYT article today, the "lesson" that he refers to is how blogging and online video clips of the spectacular Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing didn't undercut NBC's telecast by giving it away for free -- but enhanced it by teasing and exciting people to watch the whole thing in big-screen glory. The same could be true for the Inquirer and the Internet -- selected excepts and blogging or even YouTube style video clips could be used to promote and interest people in what's in tomorrow's print edition, which could then focus on longer-form journalism that works better in hard type.
I understand the passion of Internet enthusiasts who want to kill the newspaper altogether, but many of them are so caught up in their online world that that fail to realize something that seems so illogical to them -- the dead-tree version of the paper continues to bring in A LOT more revenue than the online version, and will continue to do so for the next few years. Thus, a strategy that at least for now continues to think about ways to keep an audience for the print edition but also makes the most of the Internet is one that would actually make sense. It will pay to keep good journalists working while we make this dificult transition. Leary's memo comes off as knee-jerk, but maybe there's still a way to make it a knee jerk in the right direction.
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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