This series of columns was sparked by the suggestion that we in the newspaper business need to set about restoring a relationship with news consumers that has become increasing frayed. It seems that consumer don’t trust newspapers any more than they trust any other big business or government, for that matter. It also seems that the Internet has led to a lot of muddled thinking on what news is. Does one person’s opinion or assertion in a blog have the same value and credibility as a news story?How do we decide what news is and who influences us?The questions are sweeping and defy answering in the confines of a few short columns. And there’s the boredom factor. I pontificate. You get bored. Nothing is accomplished. Keep it simple. Talk with you about what we do, why we do it and what will happen if we don’t do it, I was urged.I can’t do that without at least saying a little something about how we do things.I’ll get into that by telling you how I’ve caused a bit of an uproar in the newsroom in a discussion over our process for publishing stories on eastvalleytribune.com or scottsdaletribune.com.You see, stories that are printed in the newspaper are read several times by different people. They are read for accuracy. They are read for fairness. They are read for clarity. And once they go on the page, they are proofed for typos. The headlines are not written by the reporters. Headlines are written by copy editors in part because it’s a special skill and in part because it puts another set of eyes on a story. If a copy editor can’t figure out what the headline is, the reporter and the story’s originating editor failed to focus the story or make it clear.So one day I told my colleagues that we have to think more like live television when we post breaking news on the Internet. The priority should be getting the news posted on the Web for the sake of immediacy.That could mean in breaking news situations, the reporter would gather the news, quickly write an Internet version and post it directly to eastvalleytribune.com without sending it through a proofreader. After the story was posted, editors could go over it and repost the edited version.My colleagues were horrified. They didn’t tell me I was stupid because I’m the boss, but they thought it.I don’t know whether I’ll win this one or if I should win this one, because there is strong precedent and culture in newspaper newsrooms that stories go through several filters.You see, we don’t want to publish unfair stories or one-sided stories. We don’t want to publish stories with a slant or agenda. We don’t want to publish unclear stories or inaccurate ones. So we’ve developed newsroom checks. Sure inaccuracies occasionally get through as do stories that are unclear or occasionally unfair. You can chalk it up to the high number of stories that must be read each night under strict deadlines. You can chalk it up to lack of experience or skill levels of different people in those layers.But when you look at the number of stories and words that are processed each night, page after page of content, I think we do a darn good job of publishing credible news reports.You won’t find that amount of care put into a lot of stuff that circulates through email and on the web under the guise of news.My question for you is, does that matter? Next: Why we do what we do.

Posted in: Uncategorized |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.