Tributes To Ingenuity
In 10 years working in online news, Squared has found again and again that it is often the newsroom veterans who "get" the medium much more clearly than the generation you'd think would -- the recent grads for whom online has been part of life since their formative years. For example, Squared regularly crows to senior management about Lou Toman, a decades-long photographer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel who on any given day for print, air and online is shooting stills and video and recording audio and phoning in notes from crime scenes and car crashes. Bing, bing, bing. Smooth and natural. Second-nature for these folks who worked for PM papers and wire services and just inately understand that news ins't a tide coming in and out leisurely and regularly twice a day -- it is the constant crashing and energy of waves.
Comes now Charlie Madigan of the Chicago Tribune, recently appointed to run the newsroom's 24-hour continuous news desk. Charlie, an engaging, fabulous writer whose year-long "Gleaner" blog posts have been a treat, has been a Tribune journalist since 1979, coming from United Press International. A Chicago Reader story calls his career "a tribute to his ingenuity." While Squared scoffs at a description of chicagotribune.com's front page as "listless" in the story, he finds Madigan's comments about the medium and the job ahead of him to be pretty much spot on.
"This means turning a small part of the Tribune into a very aggressive newswriting and gathering operation," he says. "For the most part, it's not going to affect how people do their jobs as journalists here. The diligence and expertise remain where the Tribune's value is, and that you can't get in the way of. But it will speed up immensely the idea of how quickly you have to get the news out. That hierarchy process -- where you make a decision late in the afternoon and evening about what's going on in the paper -- this does away with it. You make decisions immediately
People on the Internet are generally not going to be reading long stories about anything. You can link to longer stories, illustrate with other stories, whatever you need to do. But the writing has to be severely compressed -- as you wrote for the radio wire -- and have personality but be informative at the same time. The idea behind this is very old-fashioned. The values behind this are very old-fashioned. What's new is that now it's on a computer."
Two points. 1) Ultimately, it needs to be more than a "small part" turned into that "aggressive newswriting and gathering operation." It needs to be everyone. 2). Charlie later in the story says revenue isn't his problem ("it's not in my pay grade to worry about that.") Sorry, Charlie. In this business, revenue is everyone's problem. A product that readers don't read and advertisers don't pay to be in fails online just as it does offline. Those creating the content need to make revenue their problem.
Welcome aboard.
Comments
well, first things first. i wish the reader article would have taken more note of the work the chicagotribune.com people have already done. i talked to them at length about that. i too stumbled over the "listless" description. they are honest, hard working and diligent. that was a pretty mean swipe. second, on revenue, i think you have to recognize that while revenue is everyone's problem, its not everyone's PRIMARY problem. i worry about the compromise of genuine news values that is inevitable when websites lean toward posting items aimed at gathering audience. "what people want" has always been a part of the news formula, but not as big a part as a much older obligation to inform them of the world all around them. my working assumption is that quality, honesty and diligence always win the day over the long term. i know that's an old fashioned value, but it's not one i can abandon. i guess what i was trying to say is that i am not equipped by experience or by nature to handle that level of problem. i can't even face my own income taxes without having anxiety attacks. but i know there are sharp people who can do that work a lot better than i can. i want to thank you for your kind words about the gleaner, which i love and which would never have come to life without the help of my good chicagotribune.com friends. i also want to note that there are layers and layers and layers of talent inside the tribune organization, strong enough to compete with the best anyplace. that's what we want to tap. finally, and this is damned wordy for someone who loves briefs, none of this is easy. we all know that. but it's a lot like a big horse race, and you are not going to win anything unless you put everything you have on the track and push it as hard as you can. charlie madigan.
Posted by: charlie madigan | September 9, 2005 02:25 PM