What’s good enough?
How good is good enough? That’s a conversation/argument that’s going on in the newsroom lately as we post news at wenatcheeworld.com. And it’s a painful one in an institution like The Wenatchee World, which, like many news organizations, includes many people who are perfectionists. It’s a trait that helps make news outfits what they are, for better or worse.
The good thing — and the problem — is that news now gets posted on our Web site beginning early in the morning until late in the evening.
Odds are, if it’s posted late, it won’t have been edited by an editor.
Our procedure calls for a look by a second journalist, usually a reporter, before a report is published online. Our pals on the copy desk, who have saved our butts more times than I care to remember, want all stories to come through a copy editor before they are posted.
But how do you staff for that without pulling resources away from editing stories for the newspaper?
Have somebody on call then e-mail them the story to proof? It’s a problem you’re going to have to solve, because the website partially cures one problem I’ve had with the newspaper.
In “the old days”, papers used to have a number of editions. For that matter, so did The World, an Okanogan edition that was printed early, a Columbia Basin edition that was printed a little later, and a Home edition that was printed in the afternoon. Now there is one edition that seems to have a 10am dedline and hits the streets about noonish. By the time it hits my paperbox between 4 and 5pm, the latest story is at least 6 hour old.
In a town with no other major news source (KPQ appears to have cut their staff, given ther recent spotty reporting), there is no major outlet for news that happens later in the day. I look to your website to fill the hole. You’re doing a pretty good job of it, given your coverage of the recent fires. I hope we can get that quality of coverage 24/7.
You know The World’s deadlines pretty well, Doug. And publishing to the web first is a lot like the days of multiple editions, only we now have an unlimited number of editions. We just publish it when it’s ready to go. It’s a lot more useful for readers, I think, and it’s usually fun for those putting the reports together, too.
I’ve seen some pretty interesting sentence construction in the paper World, which leads me to believe that not everything gets to the copy editors. As an obsessive and compulsive proof-reader, I make corrections to articles and to web sites, as I believe that the quality of writing reflects on the quality of the product, or of the article being published.
But that’s just the way I am. Poor grammar certainly isn’t the concern of most readers that I know. And the internet is a whole new world still being created and explored. Isn’t it perhaps better to get a breaking news piece online at once, even though it may not be perfectly written, than to wait until someone can check it?
I do like the idea of the online copy editor. Newspapers will have to learn new ways, too, when it comes to putting the news online 24/7. Meanwhile, having just discovered the blogs, I am enjoying all of them and the associated comments.