I recently received a complaint from Walker Lundy, former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, that included concerns about our online coverage of a story. He was very interested in this local story, regularly checking charlotte.com, but "could find only a bare bones story."
"I found much better info on a TV news web site, which is pretty amazing given their resources and yours. The last time I checked was 11 p.m. and still there was no complete story."
He's right. We need to do a better job of moving quickly online when news hits. It's not just about posting stories to add to a daily count; it needs to be about being first and beating our competitors.
Otherwise, readers will start turning to our competitors -- TV news and their Web sites -- more frequently.
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4 comments:
I can think of only a very few reasons why we wouldn't want to put every story online as soon as (and, in some cases, before) it's filed.
Granted, a big part of the problem is that the Charlotte.com home page isn't really set up to handle a stream of breaking news stories. There's only space for the top 10 or so breaking stories on the home page.
And, like with the Nifong story, which we knew would be big all day -- why don't we have links to past coverage? graphics? video clips? audio?
Some of these stories we know in advance are going to break throughout the day. We need to be the site that provides the updates. As much as I may look for big national/international stories and celeb stories (together, these make up the top 8 spots or so on the home page), I wouldn't think there's much reason for most readers to.
Play up local. Keep it fresh. Keep it interactive. Keep it multimedial(?)
Off topic:
LOVE the label cloud, whoever did it. A visual way to see what we're talking about.
The list was getting unwieldy. One thought on content: Now that we have a "taxonomy" (right word?) of categories, we ought to try often to keep new posts within those labels, or at least that's my goal when posting. Of course, adding a new label like "McClatchy" that should exist is necessary; we should just think carefully and look at existing labels before creating new ones.
Awesome blog, y'all.
Off topic:
LOVE the label cloud, whoever did it. A visual way to see what we're talking about.
The list was getting unwieldy. One thought on content: Now that we have a "taxonomy" (right word?) of categories, we ought to try often to keep new posts within those labels, or at least that's my goal when posting. Of course, adding a new label like "McClatchy" that should exist is necessary; we should just think carefully and look at existing labels before creating new ones.
Awesome blog, y'all.
The Nifong story didn't crack the top 10 from Tuesday, that's probably why there wasn't a lot of effort put into getting those archive things together. As we look at where to put resources, it very much becomes a put your resources where your hits are kind of equation.
I do, however, agree with you that we should do more to pull out our archived coverage on stories. I think sometimes that just becomes someone saying, "hey, remember that video/slideshow/audio we had with the whozit story? we should pull it out for this."
And yahoo for the clouds!
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