The Washington Post plans to beef up the amount of original content on its Web site to help it extend its reach into national and international markets and compete with The New York Times. The Post will hire two additional staffers to be rewrite specialists on the papers new “Continuous News desk,” a group of about five charged with feeding original content to washingtonpost.com, Washington’s City Paper reports. “This is the way journalism is going,” says Bob McCartney, the paper’s assistant managing editor for Continuous News. “You can’t imagine having a serious quality newspaper anymore without having a strong, effective Web site.”
McCartney and Managing Editor Steve Coll have been telling the staff that one of the first priorities is to “increase the flow of early, original Washington Post files for publication on the Web site during as much of that peak viewing time as possible” so that the Post can own the story of the day on the Web, according to Ombudsman Michael Getler.
Reporters, not surprisingly, have been uttering the same complaints reporters at other converging newspapers have: that they’ll have to do more work — filing multiple versions of stories each day for the Web and the paper, maybe even appear on TV — for no extra pay. “We’re calling it the Continuous Work Department,” one staffer told the City Paper.
Coll and McCartney say that “intensifying our commitment to the Web also helps produce a better newspaper each day,” Getler reports. “When reporters write a short version of their story early in the day, it helps get a head start in picking a lead and structuring the story. Holes in the reporting are identified earlier.” They say Iraq war coverage showed how early stories posted on the Web site allowed reporters and editors to “move more quickly to the second-generation story. Coverage was more forward-looking in the next day’s paper.”
Still, Getler says he still has reservations about how the more aggressive Web approach will affect the the quality and depth of the next day’s paper — reservations that he first expressed in a Dec. 2000 column and that many journalists at other papers share as well. “Would the need to write early stories for the Web, for example, reduce the time reporters spent researching, interviewing and thinking about the stories for the paper? Would the attention of reporters and editors — and rewards from management — become focused on immediate rather than more in-depth stories? Would early stories done in this fashion be that much better than those a wire service could provide?” How these questions are answered will be key to how successful this strategy is, at the Post and elsewhere.
