Revolutionists and newspaper editors

Here is my comment to the debate on whether online should always be first. It started after a memo written by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editor leaked to the web.

In short: the memo says the editors should hold some stories before they apper in print. I reported the controversy about this memo here. 

Note that I am not the Inquirer’s reader and I cannot elaborate on the policy’s effect on this particular newspaper. I am going to focus rather on the general question.

I agree with Howard Owens that news online websites cannot and should not be exact copies of printed papers. I can support this view with my own experience as an editor at Gazeta Wyborcza, the best read Polish daily newspaper in both print and online. 

Our printed paper has around 6 million readers on an average week in a country of 38 million people. Our websites (including online edition of Gazeta) have 6.7 million real users on an average month in a market of roughly 15 million internet users.

I know it is a rare position for the newspaper publisher in the Western world. We compete in Poland with Google and portals similar to Yahoo rather than with other newspapers - the closest competitor from the printed world has 0,7 million real users on its website.

In general the main drivers for our traffic have been: 

• news (including breaking news, features, and user-submitted stories), 
• communities (message boards, photo sharing, blogs), 
• advertising (recruitment, real estate, public announcements, free lineage ads), 
• niche websites (targeted to different demographics and devoted to topics like sports, business, entertainment, parenting etc.).

Web-first, print-first

In the newsroom we also have a general policy of publishing stories online as quickly as they become available (written, edited and accepted by desk editors).

However, we hold some stories before they appear in print in order to secure the exclusivity and originality of the newspaper available at newsstands.

What do we usually hold?

• exclusive news stories (ie. that make the front page, investigative reports),
• main feature stories and opinion articles,
• contents of Gazeta’s weekly magazines (female, literary, opinion).

So one could say that we hold features that make readers buy this newspaper on every day despite a fierce competition in my country dominated by single-copy sales and where home delivery doesn’t exist in fact.

I can share a secret with you: holding these features for a day or two does not damage their readership online. They generate comparable traffic to the similar stories posted online before they appeared in print. Quality content always wins readers, even if it is “later” a little bit.

At the same time I have to admit that we often break this “print-first” exception to the general “online-first” rule, but it is planned, supervised and the results are traced.

We use our investigative reporting or great features to promote the copy sales by teasing them online. Sometimes we publish an excerpt, sometimes a “news story” about a feature story, a video (a traditional TV-style news report or an interview), or we even publish the whole article to support other stories in a supplement or a series. 

It works. We can sell tens of thousands of copies more on a particular day thanks to well-prepared editorial teasing on our website run a day before.

Re-invent story-telling and interactions

I personally believe it is not enough.

We - the newspaper editors - have to design our stories, or series, or campaigns in ways that suit the audiences of both media and use the best what those media can offer. This is what I understand - as Howard Owens put it - as “let print be print” and “let online be online”. 

You can find many examples for that on this website. Here are just two of them to prove my point:

• A month ago we were publishing in Gazeta a biography of legendary Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. 7-part series written by Gazeta’s best reporters was a clear circulation-driver for the printed newspaper. At the same time we were running a crowd-sourcing project on the website: we invited readers to collect their memories on Mr. Walesa in order to create another version of biography. Read more about this project here.
• How to combine the best features of a physical printed newspaper and online communication tools? Look how we encouraged readers to show their solidarity with Tibetans. We printed a flag as the cover of one of the paper’s supplement and invited readers to take photos of them with this flag and upload those photos on the website to create an unique gallery and online community. More details here.

Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing, David Carr and Roy Greenslade are probably right when they predict that the web is the future medium for journalism, but I am not sure it will work as they demand from the Inquirer: that the old-style stories from print will be moved to the web. I don’t also think that we need to be that kind of revolutionists who demolish all remains of the past right now. Who knows: maybe we will need the physical features of printed newspaper and its distribution network for some reasons we can’t imagine now?

I prefer to try to re-invent the way we tell stories and we interact with our readers… whatever medium they use.

By the way: this is the mission of this website too.

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