Accelerated News Cycle Creates New Roles
It seems that every day my lead could be, “Things are just changing so fast.” The latest comes from the Nieman Journalism Lab site at Harvard. Megan Garber reports that www.nymag.com, the website of New York Magazine, is now publishing new content every six minutes.
Okay, well, at least that’s only every six minutes during working hours. “It starts at that speed at 8:30 in the morning,” says the magazine’s famed editor, Adam Moss, “ending about 7.” They do slow down after that, though “we still publish 8 or 9 things overnight,” Moss adds. And “everything has a different size.”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this new “model” is that Moss now sees his job as editor as, primarily, “personnel.” Writes Garber: “[That means] hiring good people who are smart enough to create quality content, fast enough to keep the site’s frenetic pace, and accurate enough not to need editorial oversight for individual content contributions. Because one thing that helps with all this uber-productivity is the fact that ‘the editing process online is zero, pretty much,’ Moss says. “I’m not that comfortable with that, but that’s practical reality. It’s a speed business.”
Moss’s acknowledgment is just one reason why SIPA’s webinar tomorrow—Going Mobile for Publishers: Developing a Content-Delivery System for an Increasingly Portable World—should not be missed by anyone in this field. (It’s free for SIPA members, by the way.) If we’re all on our way to becoming constant content producers, then we better know how to get the mobile thing down.
Sticking with Moss, there’s a column called Media Diet on the Atlantic Wire where he talks about trying to process all the content that’s out there—and in our in-box. “Part of the problem that I, and all of the people you talk to [this is a regular feature for the Atlantic], have is we actually have jobs. So we do all of this reading because we like it but also for opportunistic reasons. At some point, you can just be swallowed up by it and that’s your daily minute-by-minute dilemma.”
Moss then goes on to say that after Twitter initially gave him a headache, he now relies on it. (Don’t forget to join SIPA’s Twitter Chat today at noon.) He recalls coming home from Chicago to New York and getting the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead. He picked up bits of information from televisions in the airport. “Then I’m in a cab and the New York Times homepage is virtually useless on my phone: It has almost nothing about bin Laden. Then I go, ‘Hmm… Isn’t this what Twitter’s for?’ So I start reading Twitter on my phone, which follows about 50 people that someone else at my office programmed for me. Some of the information was incorrect but it corrects itself and that’s how it works. I became a Twitter convert.”
He also addresses the challenges of working in a “print and Web singular environment. [It] takes a lot of pushing and shoving to get everyone to work ambidextrously.” Speaking about get news out first, he says, “If we wait to run it in the magazine we run the risk of being scooped.” But then does that put the magazine in a secondary position?
When I started at SIPA two years ago, the basic rule was to put the resources into the Hotline newsletter and then get the SIPAlert Daily articles out. But then I found out, as Moss says, that if you have something good, and the publication isn’t due out for another couple weeks, can you really hold it? The balance has certainly shifted a bit towards these daily articles now. David Meerman Scott spoke about planning in the real-time, not two months ahead. With nymag’s six-minute output, two weeks now seems like a long time in the news cycle.
“I don’t think you’re a journalist if your heart doesn’t race for news,” says Moss. Agreed. But six minutes? I better keep typing.
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Going Mobile for Publishers: Developing a Content-Delivery
System for an Increasingly Portable World
Thursday, October 20, 2011, 1 p.m.
PLACE: Your telephone and computer
SPEAKERS: Andy Swindler of Astek and
Joanne Valentino of The Medical Letter, Inc.
COST: FREE for SIPA members (Thanks to a grant from
the Specialized Information Publishers Foundation (SIPF).
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER or call 703.992.9339
Click here to find out more about SIPA membership!
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