Last week, I wrote about some changes we are making at The Columbian to present our digital news first, and then later publish it in the paper. The reason, in part, is to help meet the needs of our growing digital audience, which now outnumbers our print circulation.
Toward the bottom of the column I wrote that “Once we make the change, I think everyone will be happy. But next week is going to be challenging, as we shift deadlines and change the ways news budgets are kept.”
Yikes! I wish I hadn’t been so right. It’s been a really tough few days in the newsroom, so I want to take a moment to thank everyone on the team for their flexibility, patience and tact. Everyone is working hard to implement this new plan, but there have been some frayed tempers and missed lunches. And, sorry boss, we are likely to spend every penny of the overtime budget this month.
Here’s where we are at: We had to change the way we plan stories, starting with the reporters. Instead of them telling their editors which stories will be ready for which paper, they are being asked to predict when each story will be filed and ready for editing. That’s tougher, because things happen — sources don’t return a call, a computer crashes, a photo assignment falls through.
Local News Editor Jessica Prokop takes the lead on planning, and is trying to figure out what is available when for online and what will be available for print. Our goal is to make planning less a part of her job, because she is an excellent reporter. Making it worse for her, our content management software, which is optimized for print newspapers, was an obstacle, not an aid.
Just deciding when to meet was difficult. None of our meeting times still worked, so we moved those around. We moved the afternoon news meeting to the morning and the morning news meeting to the afternoon. These are attended by different editors and have different purposes, so they aren’t interchangeable. We revised every meeting’s agenda.
Finally, we had to reinvent the workflow so that stories go to copy editors before they go to page designers, except in some circumstances, which we also changed.
Yeah, it was one of those kinds of weeks. So if you saw some irregularities, some little things we could have done better, that’s why. Thank you for your patience. We’ll get there, but it may be a few more days.
Welcome, Henry
One bright spot in our hectic week was the arrival of Henry Brannan, our new Murrow News Fellow. I wrote about Henry a few weeks ago; he is a Portland native who had been working covering rural health care issues in Virginia’s impoverished Shenandoah Valley. On Tuesday, we met with our counterparts at The Daily News in Longview, which joined us in our successful application to hire Henry. The program is funded by the Washington Legislature and administered by Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow School of Communications. (Murrow, a noted 20th century broadcast journalist, was a Washington State grad.)
Henry will spend the next two years writing about the Columbia River and how it defines and supports the Pacific Northwest with water, electricity, habitat, fisheries, economic opportunity and more. He’s already working on a couple of stories, and you should see them online and in print soon.
We also found out this week that the Murrow program will be opening a news office in Olympia, to be staffed by a permanent editor and a reporter or two, including at least one Murrow Fellow. When that’s up and running, we’ll probably use some of those stories, too.
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