Editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer have generated a lot of buzz around what sounds to me like a very sensible idea -- saving their best material for the printed edition. A memo from the editors (posted in Jim Romenesko's website) outlines the plan. Basically it puts breaking news and lots of "news you can use" to, say, plan weekends, online first, but reserves features, investigative pieces, etc. for the print edition.
It makes a lot of sense to me. Make the print edition different, emphasizing the print strong points. Remember how much stronger the photography of the emptied Lake Delton was in the Journal Sentinel than the much-smaller versions posted online? Let online play to its strengths, and print to its. And reserve material for print. A couple of years ago, the Journal Sentinel had a blogger named Vicki Ortiz. It started printing a blog report in the Weekend Cue section as a column. I thought at the time that splitting the columns -- which is what fleshed out blog items really are -- between the print and online would drive traffic to both platforms. I certainly would experiment with holding the print columns out for a couple of days before posting them. As someone who actually buys two copies of the printed Journal Sentinel each day, give me something for my money.
Among those commenting on the issues is BBC's Rory Cellen-Jones who pairs the Philadelphia move with some comment on NBC's Olympic coverage. I like his conclusions (often outside observers are much more precient than we Yanks), but also recommend reading the comments for some insights.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment