Reinventing the Mercury News
David Johnson November 19th, 2007
Howard Kurtz delves into culture and prospects of the San Jose Mercury News. With half the staff of a few years ago and more cuts looming, the paper has been sold and resold and still has to find a direction that will meet the goal to slash the print edition further and shift two-thirds of the remaining staff to the Merc’s Web site, where only 10 percent work now. Kurtz notes that every paper in America is playing some version of this tune, but the effort in San Jose “may be the most ambitious — or the most desperate” of them all.
2 Comments Add your own
1. Jordan | November 19th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Is LR broke? If you click on About, it goes back to the front page and etc. with any other link.
2. Aaron | November 19th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
“The current goal is to slash the print edition further and shift two-thirds of the remaining staff to the Merc’s Web site, up from 10 percent now.”
…and yet they still have an “either/or” mentality. It’s not about working on the paper or the website. It’s not about producing video for TV or for online. It’s about producing content for every platform.
The number of people who work exclusively on one platform in any news operation today should be tiny, and limited to technical or non-content roles. If you’re generating content, there’s no reason for you to generate content on only one platform (or even primarily for one platform).
Until newsrooms reconfigure themselves and retrain journalists so they can all contribute equally effectively to all platforms, we’re doomed to waste our efforts duplicating content generation.
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