With Newspaper Web Sites Continually Adding New Reporting Features And With Universities Turning Out The New Multi-Taskers Here’s A Back To Basics Reminder From The Washington Post Editor: ‘It Doesn’t Matter How Webbie You Are, If You Can’t Report, It Doesn’t Matter.’

Philip M. Stone October 10, 2007

Washington played host to a couple of big national journalism conventions last week and some of what got said deserves a wider audience. Like Leonard Downie, editor of the Washington Post, reminding everyone that for all the new technology that journalists must master the focus still needs to be on the basic – how to report.

US President Harry S Truman sharing a laugh with the White House press corps in 1948. Things have changed since then.

“It doesn’t matter how Webbie you are, if you can’t report, it doesn’t matter,” Downie told the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).

He readily admits there is a multi-tasking culture at The Post – reporters contribute video, breaking news stories and blogs to the online site and they also make themselves available to radio and television to discuss their stories as part of the branding exercise  --  it’s all part of what is expected of journalists these days and universities need to adapt to such changes within their curriculums, but none of that counts if the absolute basic is not there in a journalist’s education – how to write; how to report.

And Carl Bernstein, of Woodward and Bernstein Watergate fame,  advised journalists that speed of reporting necessary in today’s web world and reporting well don’t always go hand-in-hand. “The two driving forces in journalism today are lots of speed and impatience. Good reporting is the opposite. It’s a slow and patient job,” he explained. And Bob Woodward gave this reporting tip, “If you let people talk and you listen to them, the stories will go places you never would have expected.”

USA Today editor Ken Paulsen in his presentation turned to the public’s perception of how well journalists do their job, and that perception, he said, is frankly not very positive these days. He said journalists need to become more pro-active in teaching their readership just how they do their job, and to re-emphasize to the public just how important a free press really is in their lives.

“When we do our job the right way.., we fulfill our promise to the first generation of Americans that believed a key to democracy is a free and independent press. We have to do a better job of explaining to the American people what we do …that we are on their side,” he told the conference.

Over at the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) Conference, the emphasis was more on new ideas to lure readers to newspaper web sites.

Jennifer Carroll, vice president of new media for Gannett’s newspapers, says that creating online databases within a newspaper’s web site ensures visitors return time and again. She gave as examples creating databases that users can use to search public records from various government agencies and she said there was no question that such databases drive users to newspaper web sites.

“They’re not coming just to look at headlines and leave. They’re coming to search and learn through you in ways that nobody else can do,” she said.

James Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, says his site has some 80 blogs – the idea being to build communities of readers online – and he says the religious blogs and sports blogs in particular have proved popular.

“We’re in a battle every day for traffic. People are very, very sporadic on how they use the Web and the sites they go to,” he said.

 In recognition of how print journalism industry is changing the APME created a new award – Innovator of the year – and the winner was the Gannett-owned News-Press of Fort Myers, Florida, for how it has transformed its web site.

And the executive editor of that paper reminded the conference of a word that must fast become part of everyone’s journalism vocabulary – Mojo. It stands for mobile journalists who are equipped to go out on a story armed with video cameras, digital audio recorders and laptops. They need to file their material as quickly as possible while on the road – the more times a site can be updated the more times readers come back.

The newspaper has also gone deeply into the hyper-local, or neighborhood level of web site, encouraging readers to be neighborhood reporters (the fire department rescuing a cat stuck in a tree next to the fire station would be a good hyper-local read – how many journalists want to write such stories these days?)  Like other Gannett newspapers, it is actively pushing what it calls Crowdsourcing which lets readers know what stories are being worked on and invites readers to contribute information and story ideas. Apparently the public has taken to such participation and Gannett newspapers generally say they have gained very good information for stories that they would never have gotten otherwise, and also some great story ideas, too. 

But it was left to APME President Karen Magnuson, editor of the Gannett-owned Democrat-Chronicle in Rochester, New York, to take aim at the elephant in the room – how to manage producing a quality editorial product when newsroom budgets are being continually cut.

“There’s no getting around the budget cuts, but it’s time to stop the bleeding in our nation’s newsrooms,” she told her fellow editors. “We must work harder to avoid more newsroom cuts.” Of course such cuts usually are not instigated at editor level, they come from above,  but she encouraged editors to have a “renewed sense of purpose” in ensuring their newspapers continue to produce quality journalism.

And she also stood up for the bloggers who are usually given short-shrift by editors. She said it was high time for editors to listen to blog critics and not be so scornful. “We’re listening more closely to our critics, including bloggers. Let’s learn from them,” she said.

The most thrilling session had to be when the Society of Professional Journalists brought onto the same panel Woodward and Bernstein with their Watergate editor, Ben Bradlee. Their Watergate coverage changed the face of American journalism and their somewhat adoring standing-room only audience often showed their appreciation. 

In “All The President’s Men”, their famous book, later made into a movie, on how they covered Watergate, Woodward moved a potted plant on his balcony to signal “Deep Throat” that he wanted to talk, so it seemed only a fitting end to the panel discussion that the SPJ gave the two reporters each a new potted plant.

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