Oldspapers

I hear more and more people grumbling that some newspaper stories seem so...out of date. As more of us read the news online in real time, it seems odd to find the same stories in the printed paper the next day, as if the coverage was a day late. I find myself reading printed papers and thinking, "sheesh, I knew about that two days ago." Even the latest editions run several hours behind the news when they finally land on readers' doorsteps, and if a story happens overnight but doesn't appear until the following day's paper, it can be more than 24 hours old before it appears in print. No wonder papers seem out of date.

This wasn't an issue before the Web, before cable news, when newspapers were the primary source of news and information; news didn't really happen until you read it in print. No more. We know what's going on in the world shortly after it happens, with sound, video and multiple versions. By comparison, newspaper coverage of the same story often seems to be stale.

There's no easy solution to this, but newspaper editors and reporters need to be aware of it and shape their coverage accordingly: fewer "for the record" stories and more context, explanation and analysis. Move the story forward from what everybody already knows. Sports sections have been doing this for years; because of TV, most readers know the score of the previous night's games, so sports stories have become more analytical. This practice needs to spread into the rest of the newspaper. If the paper isn't absolutely the first place readers are seeing a story, make sure that what they're seeing looks fresh and new. Otherwise, you're yesterday's news.

Comments

[Ryan]

The easy solution is running a second-day story instead of a breaking news story. Seems simple enough. Run the analysis/developments as your lede, with a little fact-box up high to document what we already know.

The "olds" effect is magnified, unfortunately, when a small local paper runs a day-old international wire story on A1. Let's call this the "Pinochet in Poughkeepsie" problem.

[John Robinson]

So right, Mark. The challenge that we have is that many of our, shall we say, "traditional" readers, want the paper the way it's always been. Even if they saw it on broadcast news, they still want it front and center in the paper.

It takes a thick skin and a leap of faith to make the shift to look forward rather than backward in your news coverage. It's doable, though. We're trying.

[Mark Potts]

Thanks, John. You guys are doing such great work in Greensboro. One might argue that the audience that's most important is not current readers as much as it is the people who don't get the paper because they find it irrelevant. Growth--or a reversal of the current decline in circulation--will come from them. Somewhere, there's a balance between the two.

[Brian Cubbison]

In Syracuse, The Post-Standard posts breaking news online throughout the day. We've recently created the position of early-morning online reporter. We have a large stable of staff bloggers, and we're doing video. I've urged editors of the print newspaper* to think of what we now call the day-and-a-half lede.

But lately I've been asking people who think about the future of newspapers: Does it make sense for the print edition to try to win back from the Web the readers who already like the Web? Or should the message be: If you like getting the news from the Web, you'll love getting our news from the Web? Should then the paper be as traditional as possible for people who want their news in the traditional way?

* a retronym, like broadcast television or natural grass.