I’m currently working on a project that pulls together the news resources of three very different newsrooms. All in the name of total 2008 election coverage. This all sounds great, and it’ll out alright, but until we get to the point of having a soft-launch I’m not going to be happy!
Among everything else that I have going on right now, this one is a serious time drain. Getting three separate newsrooms to agree on anything you’d think would be the hard part…. oh no…. our current problem is that no one is willing to voice an opinion, what happened last time we tried to do this is that no one said anything until the project launched, then they all had their opinions and didn’t like what they saw.
Here’s what we’re working with:
-A newspaper who has internal strife and management issues. They are worried about their print product, and their web product. They’ve declared themselves a ‘web first’ newsroom, do they know what that even means? My Magic 8-ball says “signs point to no”. There are serious cultural issues at work here, none of which will be fixed by the time we have to launch our election site. (did I mention this small-town newspaper has over 200 reporters, mostly college students working for free?)
-A radio station that is a very solid news organization and an NPR affiliate, of the newsrooms, these people are the most willing to try. They may not have a ton of staff like the newspaper or TV station, but they have heart. I’m not so much worried about this newsroom, they know how to crank out content.
-A TV station with management who doesn’t support the online product. Now this is the newsroom I’m most familiar with, and also the 2nd most worrisome of the organizations involved. They have no money, essentially one paid staffer who’s in charge of new-media operations, and they’re not willing to expend any more resources on the election coverage. In just those three sentences, there are at least 5 deadly mistakes being made. This is what I’ve been trying to brainstorm on ways to fix, I’ll be blogging in the coming days (hopefully) more about this newsroom and the challenges they face.
So essentially, I’ve got three newsrooms, who honestly don’t know how to treat the web right, all trying to develop a web exclusive huge conglomerate of convergence journalism goodness.
Think on that for a while, because I’ve got to go to work!
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