A post-P-I, PostGlobe Misstep

April 28, 2009 By 2 Comments

The relationship between reporters and editors often is about as smooth and stable as a ride on Splash Mountain. A lot of reporters tend to regard editors as people who attend meetings, place casual utterances onto a budget and ask for stories never truly envisioned, or ruin the “voice” in a story, among other things. Editors generally are, through the eyes of many reporters, nuisances or do-nothings — or both.

Pieces still missing.

Pieces still missing.

Having occupied both seats (including both seats simultaneously as I do now), I understand why, given their release by Hearst and about a year’s pay in severance, several former reporters from the now-defunct print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) banded together and created their version of journalism Nirvana — a vision of news without the filter of editors imprisoned in ivory towers. It’s like cutting out middle management in, say, the Army, allowing the men and women on the ground to fight each battle without the interference of the generals. Who knows better than the soliders in the trenches, after all?

With my reporter’s hat on, I cry, “Woo Hoo!” But, my editor’s or consumer’s hat pulled tightly over my eyes, I whisper, “Disaster … “
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Seattlepi.com’s Ghost Town

March 18, 2009 By 3 Comments

200px-the-omega-man-posterThose eager for Hearst’s splashy debut of its great online experiment, seattlepi.com, are in for a big letdown. It’s Wednesday, March 18, the first day of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s digital age, and the Web site looks, well, like everyone who wasn’t staying packed up and left, and the few who were coming back are still hung over from the Monday-Tuesday wake. The content model appears to be: We’re making this up as we go along.

I was going to lean on my nearly three decades of experience as a sportswriter, columnist and editor, both print and online, to offer some insights on how seattlepi.com was going to approach sports. Clicking on the “Sports” section from the main navigation bar is like being transformed into Robert Neville, the Charlton Heston character in “The Omega Man” (or Will Smith in “I Am Legend,” for you more contemporary fans of post-apocalyptic movie fare). The place is a ghost town and you know there are digital mutants lurking about, but they have yet to reveal themselves.

The lead and only story on the Sports page is a remnant from the day before, ”Can the ‘Zags Go All the Way?”. Thank goodness, there are TV/radio listings, but, oops, they are from Monday, March 16, and Tuesday, March 17, as if sports on the airwaves died along with the P-I print edition.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Place and People I Hated to Love

March 17, 2009 By 2 Comments

For a good 12 out of my 17 years at The Seattle Times, I felt total hatred for our arch-enemies, the Post-Intelligencer. It was, I admit, my way of generating the competitive juices to engage in the daily dance of newspaper journalism and, I understand, it is not rare for the industry. I took that competitive hatred to new levels, however, generally refusing to socialize with my colleagues on the road, the way it was done in city after city across the country.

P-I's Go 2 Guy

P-I's Go 2 Guy

The five-year gap in my streak of “total hatred” for the opposition is the fault of Jim Moore, today one of my dearest friends and the “Go 2 Guy” columnist for the dearly departed P-I and now the renewed digital version, seattlepi.com. I fully intended to hate Jim, as I had his predecessors Kenneth Richardson, Carter Cromwell and Art Thiel. But anyone who has met him will agree that he is one of mankind’s thoroughly un-hatable members. He is the way he comes off in his column — an irreverent, say-first, think-later, life-loving carouser with a heart of gold and the quickest of any person I’ve ever met to explode with laughter and force you to do the same.

If Jim’s colleagues were people I loved to hate, he was the exception that I hated to love.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Seattle’s Past-Intelligencer

March 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If it walks like a duck, but barks like a dog, it’s a … what? Likewise, if it’s called SeattlePI.com, but staffed by only 20 or so people with the skill set to produce a portal with an attitude, isn’t it really just branding on the cheap?

And branding to what end?

The SeattleP.com

The SeattleP.com

Like a college athletic program that just committed a minor infraction, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, on death watch, self-reported plans for an online staff that would survive the printed version’s post-March 10 demise. As Chuck Taylor noted in his blog, Seattle Post-Times, the presumed SeattlePI.com staff would include 10 editor/producers, one Web developer, one social-media specialist, one columnist, one photographer, one general-assignment reporter and two business reporters. I’m assuming one or two more GA reporters would be added to the mix, as the Seattle P-I story quoted one Metro reporter as having turned down the provisional offer.

Reading between the lines, parent company Hearst offered either Guild (union) exempt personnel (editors and online producers) or younger reporters whom they believed would be so desperate to stay in journalism, they’d agree to slashed salaries, lower benefits, zero severance and zero vacation accrual. Many newspapers, including the P-I’s competitor, The Seattle Times, already have been making a move to cheaper, online and non-union staffing instead of training and shifting current staffers to now-generation, multimedia mode. Enlightened national publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post, of course, have spent considerable time and resources in both retraining and consolidating its print and digital newsrooms.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Journalism on the Brink (Part II)

March 3, 2009 By 6 Comments

It bears repeating that it is not journalism that’s necessarily on the brink. It’s the newspaper business model that isn’t just on the brink, but hurtling back through time to the penny press days.

Yes, the Web makes it way cheaper to present content. And, yes, there are fewer barriers to entry to both content providers and technology. But one plus the other does not equal profits, or even sustaining revenue.

A lot of the discussion at “Journalism on the Brink” at the University of Washington last week (see Part One) focused on how the Web was changing journalism. Seattle’s two daily newspapers, the Times and the soon-to-be-gone Post-Intelligencer, both were represented by non-traditional content providers who reflected the kind of wrong thinking that has doomed the U.S. newspaper industry into a certain shakedown, if not extinction. That is, that news on the Internet should be free, that newspapers need to be everything to everyone, and that aggregation and what I call “celebrity presentation” (folks such as the P-I’s Monica Guzman not reporting on anything, but snarking and Tweeting about what already exists on the Web).
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.