Modern News Editing: Chapter 1

In reading the first chapter of Modern News Editing, I was struck with a few different thoughts. One involved the level of committment each news orgnization had to serving the interests and demands of their specific audience as well as the importance of keeping up with the convergence of technology. Secondly, my thoughts focused on the pressures of the newsroom.

News reporting and putting out a newspaper is more than just writing, editing, and compiling stories for print and web distribution. In fact, there is almost an art form (or at least, an awareness) that must go into selecting which stories to cover and which of those stories ends up where within the paper and/or their companion websites. And a major factor in deciding what is "news" depends on how it impacts their readers. With the News-Sentinel from Northern Californa, they selected their stories for the front page based on which ones were most appealing and informative to their readers. In one section, the assistant city editor, Jennifer Bonnett, reminded a reporter to "keep in mind why the new school is important to readers" (7).

In Mercury News's newsroom, they accomodate their readers' needs by acting on trends they find within their readership. Specifically, the track the vistors to their website and found that there is a spike in visitors after the stock market closes (1pm on the West coast). In finding this out, they developed new columns and bits of news for the website to give more news to their web readers. Another way that Mercury News focuses on its readers and giving them what they want came about when the television reporter fought to get the city hall story on the air "because of its importance to taxpayers in the city" (19). I thought it was great how reader impact was such a huge factor (instead of say . . . sensationalism) in deciding the importance of news. And, I thought it was in the best interest of both the paper and readers to really take action when they found something interesting in their website visitor statistics. Another really cool thing I liked about this organization was that some specially tagged stories will automatically post to their website. That is definately using technology to their advantage to save time and reach their audience in a timely manner. YAY!

SFGate.com is an online news source that also uses statistics to its advantage in reading readers. Each day the morning editor checks the each story's statistics to which story was viewed the most. This is crucial to finding out what sorts of stories your audience is interested in. Another thing that is interesting about this publication is that the centerpiece (main story) is flipped throughout the day, so that readers can be informed of breaking or important news as it happens throughout the day. They, the readers, can really use this web publication to stay abreast of what is happening.

Finally, one thing I thought about after reading this chapter is that I would rather be an editor than an actual reporter. While I have no doubt that I could write the stories, I think the situation would be too stressful. I would, however, not mind being a copy editor. I would still be working with the paper and would be a vital part of the team. And, I could get to read a variety of stories, which I am always up for. All in all, I wouldn't mind working with a newspaper in some capacity, just not as a reporter. Copy editing might be more my speed, and more my style.

So, this chapter taught me: Know your audience (and there are cool, statistical ways to do that) and, then in turn, use that knowledge to give them the best quality news possible in the format that best suits them (i.e. print or tv or online).