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Newsroom Evolution Means PR Practices Must Adapt to Reach Editors and Remain
Effective
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By Ronald Rosenberg
Online journalism is forcing change in news-gathering practices,
especially for ink-stained reporters and editors who grew up in the world
of printed newspapers and trade magazines.
 These changes -- and how PR practitioners can better
understand and adapt to this changing environment -- were outlined last month in a panel discussion headlined "What's Next for Journalism." Kaspersky Lab was a sponsor of the PRSA Boston program.
Journalists
from six different organizations presented a generally optimistic outlook on
the evolution of news-gathering, while acknowledging the media industry's ongoing
triple-threat: budget cuts, smaller staffs and fewer stories covered.
Those
newsroom modifications include:
- Sharing
stories and resources with other news organizations.
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Using
Twitter as an alert tool -- like a police scanner.
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Writing
shorter pieces coupled with rich Web content (video, sound and graphics).
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Drafting
more articles per day, compared to three stories per week at a paper.
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Forging
more dynamic relationships with readers -- who are quick to comment.
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Developing editorial
packages with premium content that replace aging editorial calendars.
But
if techniques are changing, what's stayed the same is basic journalism.
"The demand for journalism has never been greater, as people are
engaged in news in a variety of ways through the Internet, which
is excellent," Lou Ureneck, chair of Boston University's journalism
department assured the audience. Ureneck, who also writes "From
the Ground Up," a blog for the New
York Times, cautions that the country has lost a lot of journalistic
capacity. Fewer reporters and editors results in fewer stories,
"investigations that are never covered and scandals that are not
discovered."
With fewer full-time staffers, online publications (that emerged
both as the public embraced the Web as a primary source of news
and as more print publications folded) increasingly rely on their
readers as news and information sources who will send tweets to
alert reporters and provide instant feedback.
 David
Beard, editor of Boston.com,
cited how a series of tweets from citizen journalists enabled Martha
Coakley's concession speech to make the front page of the Boston
Globe's prime Web presence.
"We are in a new era and we know we can't do everything by ourselves,"
said Beard. Boston.com has also partnered with Sports
Illustrated to share content and cross-brand along with others,
including WBZ-Radio for
weather.
Going a step further are corporate-owned online media outlets, which
provide specific industry news and features for a limited audience,
like trade publications, but are written and edited by a staff independent
of the company.
Dennis Fisher, who covered the corporate security industry for PC
Week (later, eWeek),
approached Kaspersky Lab America about his idea for Threatpost.com,
a security news Web site that the company agreed to finance with
no outside ads. As the site's editor, he stressed the company has
never meddled or questioned his news judgment.
"I've had less influence and pressure from the owners of this site
than at any other time in the 15 years that I've been a journalist,"
said Fisher.
Panel members also cited how their growing online audience is quick
to react to news and feature stories compared to a handful of letters
to the editor in traditional newspaper and magazine readers.
"Now, when I post a story, I can have 12 people on Twitter immediately
saying, "Hey, you got this wrong," or "This is a good point you
made," or "You forgot about this and should talk to this guy," said
Fisher. "It not only informs our coverage, but I think it makes
it much better and stronger."
At the opposite end of structured newsgathering Web sites are independent
reporters like Steven Garfield who can provide live broadcasts with
a camera, a cell phone and a laptop that enables his tuned-in viewers
to participate in an event. This trailblazing capability, he added,
enables citizen journalists to use their smartphones to record video
and upload footage of breaking events to YouTube
or CNN
and see it run on TV news programs.
One issue that continues to concern online publications is story
length and the need to keep it short -- 600 to 800 words -- but
with audio and video clips to make the reader's experience meaningful.
"Space is not the problem, but the reader's attention is," noted
Andrew Meldrum, a Senior Editor and Regional Editor for Africa with
GlobalPost.com
and who spent 27 years in Africa as a correspondent for The
Economist and The Guardian.
Maintaining readers' attention has led to a different mix of stories,
Meldrum said. In the past, stories from Africa were primarily gloom
and doom, while now GlobalPost
stories also feature lighter pieces, brighter stories and cultural
stories -- a change he characterized as enthusiastically welcomed
by the correspondents.
Even with shorter stories, moving more of them through a newsroom
production pipeline creates another issue: catching fewer mistakes,
as fewer editors are checking the copy. Although errors can be quickly
corrected, often the underlying problem is a lack of a second reading.
 At
the Christian
Science Monitor, science reporter Peter Spotts (far left) recalled
how two to three editors would review a reporter's article for the
print edition before it ceased publication last year. In the transformed
weekday online news outlet, stories generally are edited by a single
editor.
Today's online editors, he added, "now have to shovel many more
stories through the pipeline ... and they are often not getting
the second reads."
All the journalists on the panel acknowledged that the quick pace
of online journalism and the resulting newsroom adaptations are
just the beginning of a major cultural change where page views replace
circulation as measurements of success.
"In a way this is an exciting time for us to think outside of traditional
print journalism," said Spotts.
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