Blog: Rod Boyce: The editor's desk
The rhythm of news
Published Tuesday, September 30, 2008
I’m apparently an old-timer. I started in this business on a manual typewriter. Granted, the newspaper I worked at in Southern California wasn’t one for blazing speed in keeping up with newsroom technology, but it was a manual typewriter nonetheless. With carbon paper. In an adobe building whose photo lab was once an old Western jail cell.
I bring this up because we old-timers have had to train ourselves to think about the Web version of the newspaper each day as we go about our news-gathering at the Daily News-Miner. I’m getting fairly good at it, I think, but “good” is relative. It’s not good enough for the News-Miner’s online department. We need to be sending our news items to the Web folks here as soon as we get them so they can decide what to put up on the Web and when to put it up.
The Web site — newsminer.com — has one deadline. The deadline is now. It is always now.
And that takes some getting used to, especially for those of us who have been in this business for a while.
In the old days, as recently as last year, a day at the News-Miner would consist of reporting on stories, writing those stories, editing those stories, putting those stories on the page at the end of the day, sending the pages to the pressroom, and getting the papers to your homes the next morning. That would be the daily rhythm, a rhythm belonging to daily newspapers since their inception.
But now at the News-Miner we have the enhanced Web site and a separate Web department, with its own rules and problems and demands.
Now we need to be thinking about “now” more often. It’s a challenge for some of us sometimes, as I’ve said, but there’s no denying that “now” is here to stay and that journalists—older ones as well as the new generation—need to remember that when they pull out their notepads or sit at a computer to edit a story. The Web is always hungry.
I think your getting there on the NOW thing, but your readers also want ALL the facts, and BOTH sides of the story.
You bring back memories, and one I miss is the sweet smell of mimeograph ink in the morning, along with the swish swish of the copy drum kicking out damp pages.
One of the issues of "NOW" journalism that concerns me is the tendency of some journalists to lapse into long-term memory loss when reporting. The article printed in the paper's "World" section on Monday, October 20, 2008: "Chinese factories close as financial crisis hits Asia" by William Foreman, Associated Press Writer, is a perfect example.
Mr. Foreman is describing how 3,631 Chinese toy exporters went out of business in 2008. "The causes: higher production costs, wage increases for workers and the rising value of the yuan." "Economic upheaval in the U.S. is already changing and shrinking China's vast manufacturing hub..." and he quotes a Chinese worker as saying, "This financial crisis in America is going to kill us."
But wait! Can Mr. Foreman think back to this same time last year when American toy companys took a bath on Chinese toys that were manufactured with toxic paints and plastics? How many toys were recalled last year just before Christmas? How many American parents put the toys labeled "made in China" back on the shelf out of concern for their children's safety? Could this also be a factor in the downturn in American toy company orders from China? Did Mr. Foreman actually talk to the American firms - or is he just reporting the perspective of the Chinese firms who can't remember back to 2007?
This article leaves out an historical perspective and leads us to believe that the economic upheaval in the US is the only factor responsible for the downfall of thousands of Chinese firms. Hence the perpetuation of a myth that seeks to convince us that success in manufacturing is not linked in anyway to the quality of the widgets produced, that American consumers will only buy "cheap" and that Chinese toy manufacturers bear no responsibility for the consumer perception that their products may be harmful to children.
Okay, did journalists who worked with carbon paper and mimegraph machines do a better job at stepping back from issues? Was reporting more balanced in the past when things just took longer to prepare? Probably not. But the shear magnitude of the bad journalism today is overwhelming - there is just so much more of it everywhere - online, broadcast and in print. Is the pressure of "Now" reporting compromising the quality of what is reported? And will the consumers' perception of media coverage change and impact the media like toys from China? And who will we blame for that?
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