Patriot-News doings
We had a much anticipated and dreaded staff meeting yesterday at The Patriot-News, the newspaper in Harrisburg, Pa., where I have worked as a reporter for 20 years. About half the rumors turned out to be true, and about half, thankfully, were not.
The meeting was led by executive editor David Newhouse, a man whom I've had differences with in the past. I was the last union president at the paper, and he and I have differing opinions about the value of certain types of reporting. I'll leave it at that. Newhouse is part of the family that owns The Patriot-News and many other newspapers around the country, including the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger. He handled the meeting pretty well, but seemed nervous at times.
Given the state of American newspaper journalism, and an unfortunate tendency at the Patriot-News to grasp at popular industry trends whether they make sense or not, I had feared the worst. The big rumor was that no story in the future would ever be longer than 10 inches (relatively short by newspaper standards) and many would be reduced to two or three-inch briefs. Not true, Newhouse said. At least not for everything.
He said the paper's own central Pennsylvania studies had shown that readers want quick summaries of the daily news, but also want more in-depth and investigative reporting of stories they won't find on television or the Internet. So some stories in the future, perhaps more than half, will be shorter, especially municipal meeting coverage. But the Patriot-News will encourage reporters to do longer ("20, 30, 40, 60 inches") stories on important topics that warrant the longer treatment. Perhaps not always as long as the multi-page extravaganza on the Harrisburg incinerator last year written by my colleagues John Luciew and Tom Dochat, but you get the idea. This is the kind of reporting I like to do, so I was naturally pleased.
I'm not sure what to make of Newhouse's comments about the Patriot-News Penn Live website on the Internet. The staff hates the website, which is so poorly organized that we have to give callers detailed instructions on how to find particular stories (if we can find them at all--stories frequently never appear). Everyone knows it's a lousy website, but no one seems able to do anything about it. Based on Newhouse's comments yesterday, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
The problem is that the Patriot-News doesn't control the Penn Live website. It provides news content, but has no control over the website itself, which is run by a different branch of Advance Publications, the Newhouse family company that owns the Patriot-News. It's a weird set-up, and it works poorly in practice because the newspaper and the website seem to have different goals and priorities. The disconnect is hurting the Patriot-News.
Newhouse seemed to be distancing himself from Penn Live yesterday. He pointed out how little advertising revenue is generated by even the biggest and best newspaper websites. That could change, and I think it will, but I agree with him that it won't be soon. So for the foreseeable future, the Patriot-News will throw its energy and talents into the paper-and-ink newspaper. I have to admit this left me uneasy, and I wondered if there were carriage makers a hundred years ago who told their skilled craftsmen that automobiles weren't going to be profitable for a long, long time. I've often mused that the Patriot-News printing plant built in Hampden Twp. a few years ago might be the last, best carriage factory of them all. We shall see what we shall see, as my German grandfather was fond of saying.
The other big news is that the Patriot-News will likely be moving out of its longtime headquarters (since the 1950s, I believe) at 812 Market Street in downtown Harrisburg. Our new home has yet to be determined, but sites in Susquehanna Twp. and Silver Spring Twp. are on the short list. The former is more likely, from all indications. I'm told that no suitable sites in the city of Harrisburg can be found, but one wonders if higher property taxes in the city are a factor as well. A suburban headquarters will pose a problem for covering stories at the Capitol Complex, where parking is almost non-existent during the workday. That's not a problem now, because we can walk from 812 Market. Newhouse said early 2009 seems to be the most likely time for the move.
Update: Monday, Jan. 28: In a memo to the editorial staff, David Newhouse says he didn't mean to sound as negative about the Internet as, well, he sounded at the staff meeting last Thursday. "Everyone can see that the Internet is our future," he said.