Daily Archives: July 9, 2006

The two former Knight-Ridder papers in Philly are going to be redesigned — by an advertising professional.

On one hand that’s an interesting idea, and I’m certainly willing to see what somebody from supposedly outside the newsroom comes up with, but some newspaper designers, such as Alan Jacobson, aren’t afraid to push the bleeding edge.

Even so, the Philadelphia redesign deserves watching.

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My friend Matt Welch posted a lengthy, thoughtful contrarian view to journalistic consternation over Wendy McCaw’s management of the News-Press.

I think Matt makes good points about the mythical wall of separation between editorial and business (I’ve made the same points myself before), but I think he misses an essential rule of management: Don’t micromanage.

You can say whatever you want about McCaw’s right as an owner to set the editorial and business policies of the paper, but when you start dictating “blonde” instead of “blond,” you’ve crossed a line. And crossing that line puts you on the side of insulting professionals.

The editors who quit the News-Press may express their complaints in terms of journalistic purity, but the real issue is that they weren’t treated (if the reports are true) as professionals.

Effective executives hire the best people they can and then let them do their jobs. They don’t micromanage.

Of course, McCaw has the right to run her newspaper in any manner she likes. She can lose all of her money doing it, if that’s her desire, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a fair target for critics of her management style.

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Mindy McAdams quotes Chris Anderson on the impressive number of links to the New York Times in Technorati vs. all of the other links combined and then makes this observation:

What’s really cool about the whole concept of “the long tail” is that it matches what a lot of critics of news Web sites have long observed: All the attention and time lavished on the home page is kind of pointless, because the way you really attract traffic and page views is through search. And search requires you to lavish attention on the back end, the structure of stories and individual pieces of the site — the meat and potatoes, instead of merely the menu.

Sites that don’t have integrated search, haven’t optimized the entire site for search engines, don’t see every page as a gateway — they are kind of blowing it.

Also, archives should be free and registration should not be an impenetrable wall, but porous and flexible.

Of course, local is still important, but these changes enhance efforts to draw and retain local users, too.

UPDATE: Only just now did I actually read Chris’ original post. Every card
carrying member of the MSM who thinks “without us, blogs are nothing,” should
read the post. Anderson has that stats to prove
that if every MSM outlet shut down tomorrow, the blogosphere would go
on just fine. The political blogosphere, which I suspect is just
about the only blogs anybody in the MSM reads, might be hit hard, but the
blogosphere is huge — a very long tail, indeed.

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My favorite headline on Steve Greenberg’s cartoon for the Ventura County Star about the situation at the Santa Barbara News-Press: Every top editor quits this paper: No idea why; we guess people are just fussy.

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Jeff Jarvis says the Tribune closing two foreign bureaus is a good thing.

Local newspapers are shrinking and have to find efficiencies. But more important, they need to focus on their key value, and that is serving their local communities and put their resources there. … The news industry is wasting a tremendous share of its ever-sparser resources on bylines: They have their own movie critics, though there’s nothing local about movies; they send their golf writers to the latest televised tournaments, though it is covered better and quicker on TV; they send their own team to the political conventions along with 15,000 more, in full knowledge that nothing would happen there and that they likely would not report anything that wasn’t reported elsewhere.

Makes sense to me.

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