Regarding tension between the web and print sides, Anonymous@7:07 p.m. today says the demand for constant site news updates has reduced too many stories to little more than headlines: "Every little thing becomes a breaking news update, with no sense of proportion. A two-car crash can become a carousel item if the day is boring and the art is good. And there's zero accountability when it comes to policing those awful comments. But that's another story entirely."Join the debate, in the original post.
More lazy argument bait.
ReplyDelete7:46 pm: Lazy?! I bet I spent at least five entire minutes on that one.
ReplyDeleteAs an online producer, I can tell you breaking news is almost always a waste of time. PACKAGING is what produces 80 percent of the clips. I remain baffled why no one in the industry seems to understand this.
ReplyDeleteWould you rather have 20,000 page views for 20 stories a day or 150,000 page views for one exceptionally strong content package that draws links from other sites and blogs?
I can only conclude that no one way up in Gannett has faith in their editorial staff to regularly produce exceptional enterprise content. I also hear that kind of stuff sells newspapers, but I haven't worked in the print side for 15 years, so I'll just let y'all hash it out.
If your breaking news isn't producing big hits, it's because you're doing something wrong.
ReplyDeleteI'm at one of the larger properties, and our breaking news is the most consistently popular material at our site. We have two reporters devoted exclusively to cops and breaking news.
Not only does it average the top page views, but it also consistently attracts the most comments from readers, which is also part of the draw.
Sorry to say many of the comments are stupid, knee-jerk narcissism, but a lot of people between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. are peeking in for that.
In particular, before people leave for work and leave work for home, they often check our breaking news box to see if there are any road impediments.
If you want people to come back to your site you need to have a stream of constant updates. The big stories will take care of themselves when they happen. Without the small incremental changes you will bore your audience quickly on to another site.
ReplyDeleteOh please...the term "If it bleeds it leads" was coined long before Al Gore invented the Internet. And newspapers choose their A1 stories based on the news of the day -- sometimes the stories are good, other times they are dogs based on whatever news took place that day and the same is true with the 6 o'clock news on your local TV station. News is relative - always has been, always will be. You just see it more online because Web sites need to be constantly updated -- if it was a boring hour in town, then that's an hour of boring, insignificant-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things updates.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there's ever a boring, non-news-worthy hour in any city or town. Period. I do, however, think there are a bunch of boring updates posted.
ReplyDelete