WSJ Journalists Give 130 Percent for the Team!

Richard Edelman, the PR guy who blogs about PR on his company’s website, wrote recently that he’d visited the Wall Street Journal offices and met with Gordon Crovitz, the publisher who just stepped down with the arrival of Rupert Murdoch’s People.

Edelman also talked with newsroom staff:

“I learned from my discussions with beat reporters at the Journal that 70% of the time is spent on reporting, about 30% on writing, 10% on recording video and 20% on blogging.”

Newsroom union leaders: Aux barricades! The WSJ rank and file is being forced to do 30 percent more work than humanly possible, thanks to the digital revolution!

Edelman explains that the numbers don’t add up to 100 because “there is some overlap, between content creation and dissemination.” I have no idea what that means.

From where I sit, blogging is writing, capturing video is reporting and for that matter parsing government data into an Excel sheet that the Flash team turns into a graphic that the producer writes captions for to explain to web users is journalism.

The digital revolution has provided new tools and new names, and news ways to think, communicate and improve the world. But it hasn’t provided a 31-hour day.

Unless Rupert has more changes in mind for the Journal than he’s let on.

Kypost.com: Dead meat or baby phoenix?

When people talk about the print-to-digital transformation, they usually do not use the phrase as literally as it applies to the Kentucky Post/Kypost.com situation. The last ink-and-pulp edition rolled off the presses on New Year’s Eve morning, and in its place former readers will find kypost.com.

To call the staff “skeletal” would be an insult to the strong and complex undergirdings of the human body. According to the AP (in a story accessed through Yahoo News), Kypost.com has a managing editor and one reporter. Plus freelancers, wire copy and news content from sister TV station WCPO. The work of a team of “citizen journalists” will also be featured. [No illegal alien journalists allowed, I guess].

As the author of a blog entry titled, “First Thing We Do, Is Kill All the Newspapers,” I am in no position to mourn the passing of a daily newspaper (though I hope its staff members find jobs. Idea: Learn CSS, XHTML, Ajax and Flash and you’ll double your newspaper salary overnight).

But I do wish that the overlords at E.W. Scripps and Co., who prudently pulled the plug after a joint publishing agreement with Gannett was not renewed, would invest in a few real journalist positions–at least (say) two reporters and one editor for each of the three counties the site intends to cover.

I’d like to believe that it’s possible to structure a legitimate, even occasionally powerful, local news operation around a Web-only product, funded entirely by advertising and some shadowy forms of monetization that lurk in the corners of the digital realm.  But testing the commercial viability of digital-only journalism with a team as puny as the one kypost.com puts on the field isn’t fair.

Assuming the effort disintegrates into trivia or simply closes down in a year or so, the news retrogrades and midcentury sentimentalists will point to the episode as disproof-of-concept for digital-only journalism. They’ll be wrong. It will disprove only that a sadly underfunded digital-only news effort can’t make it in today’s media environment.

I will be rooting for the kypost.com’s staff of two. I’d love to see them do some important work, engage the community, make some civic-minded trouble and generate enough revenue to add a few staffers. I’d love to see them draw an appreciative and energized audience. I hope they can pay their mortgages.

But just in case, I hope they have time to pick up some CSS, XHTML, Ajax and Flash along the way.

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