Print Media Needs Equipment to Survive

Print Media Needs Equipment to Survive
By: Kate Parham
Edited By: Rebekah Baldwin

In a world of tweets and blogs, there’s not much room left for traditional print media—or rather, there’s not much money left for traditional print media.

Newspapers and magazines around the country have had to let a significant number of employees go, if not cease publication altogether. Be it the death of the Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News or the folding of Domino Magazine, Country Home and Portfolio, print media everywhere is hurting.

In fact, in a recent 2009 Pew survey, newspaper earnings reportedly fell 10 percent in 2007, primarily because of advertising losses. And according to a Magazine Publishers of America study, more than 250 major magazine titles lost on average 7.4 percent in ad revenue through the second quarter of 2008 compared to the same period last year.

Many publications are creating an online presence to help their survival. But in order to do so, newsrooms must be properly outfitted to move online.

Reporters are not just required to have a pen and pad anymore. In fact, many reporters need digital and video cameras, recorders, smart phones and laptops. However, not all publications can afford to have all of this.

According to Kristen Heptinstall, Web site coordinator at NBC 13 in Birmingham, Ala., her company is not as equipped as she would like it to be.

“We’re not where we want to be with personnel, after two rounds of layoffs, or with technology,” Heptinstall said. “Something I’m pushing for now is to get all reporters Blackberries through the company. You can post to our website through a mobile phone much more efficiently than everything having to be physically taken back to the station to be put up.”

Kathryn Ho, general manager of Modern Luxury Digital, has had similar experience. “My division has been fairly well-equipped with the proper technology, although it’s never the top of the line stuff,” Ho said. “We’re equipped to handle it if the site goes down at 3 am, but we mainly use a lot of open source software and freeware products and when that’s not possible we make the right business case to ask for the mandated funds.”

Gary Baum, senior editor at Angeleno Magazine, who works in the editorial department at Modern Luxury, isn’t so sure. “Once the new website, which has an at-this-point-typical mix of blog posts, repurposed magazine stories, and photo galleries, goes ‘live’ in November, so we should have a much better idea of the challenges of day-to-day, or rather minute-by-minute, content production online,” said Baum.
“Most of the reporters [at The Atlanta Journal Constitution] are amply equipped to be a digital reporter,” said Bert Roughton, managing editor. “You need a laptop and a camera of some kind and the AJC provides it. You could set up a bureau in the Starbucks.”

Roughton likens today’s reporters to his years of working as a foreign correspondent. “We’re using the same techniques to cover Cobb County that I was using to cover Kosovo,” Roughton said.


Efficiency seems to be a common denominator when it comes to technology-heavy newsrooms.

“I think that we view technology, generally speaking, as ways to reduce our costs because of its efficiency, which ultimately allows you to cut costs quite a bit,” Roughton said. “I think we’re pretty aggressive in looking for new technologies. It’s a matter of efficiency and technology advances tend to pay for themselves.”

However, it’s important that upper-level management feels the same way about technology, which not everyone does. According to the 2008 Pew Study, 48 percent of editors said they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards.

To meet these new media challenges, some newsrooms have completely reorganized to simultaneously improve both the website and the paper. Roughton said that the AJC has created an entirely new content management system.

“We’ve also had a series of management teams who embrace change and are constantly looking for structural rebirth,” Roughton said. “Our newsroom has been really aggressive about not fighting the Internet and keeping it fresh.”

Keeping it fresh is of utmost importance, and also of serious conflict with old school journalists. Heptinstall said that part of what is tough to get newsrooms to understand is that online content doesn’t have to be perfect.

“Newsrooms are used to having this final product wrapped up in a bow. But that’s not how online content works,” Heptinstall said. “It has to be more continuous.”

Heptinstall said that many reporters are still in the mindset of ‘you put in your story for the day and then you go home’.

“That’s just not how it works now. We’ve got to meet in the middle,” Heptinstall said. “It’s getting the broadcasters to slow down and the newsrooms to speed up.”

Part of the problem is understanding the new deadlines that come with online media. According to a 2008 Pew Study, fresh content must be up for periods when traffic spikes. These times include 6-7 a.m. (as people wake up), 8:30-9 a.m. (as they get to work), around 11:30 a.m. (before they go to lunch) and around 2 p.m. (when they return from lunch), according to the study.

“We began thinking we’d just put everything online, but actually you have news cycles on the Internet that you need to adhere to,” Roughton said. “You can’t wait to start writing until 2 pm, you need to start writing right now.”