News as in new. This morning's big front page story was how much money area government officials make. Richmond magazine does this story every year, so I already know. Do the Times-Dispatch editors ever expose themselves at all to the other media in town? Do they know what's already been done? Did someone actually pitch this story idea at an editorial meeting and everyone else got excited, yes! That would be a really ground breaking way to demonstrate the power of a Freedom of Information act request!? Really? Is everyone in a bubble there? Or just a bubble of apathy? Let's do what's the easiest.
Style Weekly will routinely break a story online on Tuesday, with the print version hitting the streets on Wednesday, and then the T-D runs the story on Thursday with the little Breaking News box. This is news to who? You? The rest of us have already chewed it over, posted comments, tweeted about it, and moved on.
I would have been more interested in a story on how much money all the top editors and marketing people make at the Times-Dispatch, but I don't think you can get that information through a FOIA request. It would have been interesting to see the difference between the editors and executives who strategize (where are the visionaries?) in the background and those working on the front line.
Then I turned the page and scanned the little short national stories on page 2 and 3 and realized I had read them all yesterday. Where? On my Wii! While waiting for lunch to be ready, those of us playing Wii took a break and scanned the headlines on the Wii newsfeed. The stories that intrigued us, we clicked on and read the details. We have the same good taste in news as the T-D editors because they picked the exact same ones to run, except in less detail.
Next I saw a house ad (translation: an ad promoting the paper itself) for an upcoming series on the death of Tyler Binstead, the poor VCU student who was senselessly murdered in Byrd Park by hooligans. Uh, T-D, Richmond magazine already did that story, too. I read it while standing online at Ukrop's. All the same bases will be covered, the twin brother's pain, the girlfriend's horror, the doomed personal lives of the three losers who committed the crime, the sad families. How it went down, the arrests, the trial. Know it already.
Maybe it's news to radio and television, who use the morning paper as an assignment editor, repackaging the stories for their use until something happens during the day they can run out and cover. Until then, why get the newspaper when the morning radio and TV news readers will read it to me, and even my Wii will tell me the other headlines.
What's the solution? I think the daily paper's survival will require a tremendous amount of cutting back on manpower, as in everyone who doesn't directly contribute to creating the core product, and doing a smaller paper much better than they're doing a big paper now.
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It's not just the Times-Dispatch, it's all the local media. I came home at 10 tonight and there were no less than 25 police cars at the entrance to Forest Hill Park. That was at 10pm. Apparently the only thing any of the local stations could find to talk about at 11 was Rams basketball and rain. I still don't know what happened. Oh, but they're speculating on the Woodland Heights Yahoo group. It's no wonder the internet is killing the mainstream media.
I will pass along your site to many of use who still work here, if that's OK with you.
I will pass your site on to others who still work here.
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