Interesting words from Armando Acuña, public editor at the Sacramento Bee (free registration required)
With little fanfare, The Bee has embarked on the road to its future – a digital, multi-media, interactive, around-the-clock news universe.
Everyone knows the final destination. It’s the place where newspapers aren’t on paper anymore but still provide readers with news and information, and make a profit, too.
No one’s been there, or knows what it looks like, or how long it takes to get there, and maps to it don’t exist. It’s waiting to be invented.
Yet every major newspaper company in America is scrambling down the same path on a quest for long-range survival and relevance. They are driven in part by declining circulation and the prospect of online competitors coming from all directions stealing away readers and advertisers.
Those words introduce a significant change at the Bee: the introduction of a continuous news desk and the first sounding of the inevitable death knell of production cycles tied to a print time.
What that means is that six people, from an assistant managing editor to a rotating photographer, will coordinate, report and update news at the paper’s Web site, sacbee.com, from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. the next day, Monday through Friday, with plans to have it working seven days a week in the future.
Already, the impact on the Web site has been dramatic. Once a straightforward, seldom changing, boring regurgitation of what was published in the morning’s paper, it is now publishing short, breaking stories throughout the day. Some live only a few hours online; others make it into the next day’s paper.
We’re a long way off from the end of the print production cycle, but it seems a smart move, given the resources that a newspaper newsroom has to throw at the world, the ease of “instant” publication and the growing demand for online information. Newspapers that want to connect with readers need to throw themselves at the ‘net with much more force than they so far have.
A six-person desk may seem small, but the drive behind it speaks volumes.
(Discovered via a post at Leonard Witt’s PJNet.org.)
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, DEADLINES, RETHINKING MEDIA
