Reporters need a little freedom

Where’s Napoleon when you need him? I want that army of reporters brought under control.

And I want to let that horde of reporters have just a little freedom in their own little play pen that we should create for them.

But mostly, I just want them under control.

Give this article a little time to set itself up. There are two arguments here, and just reading the first one will be misleading overall. This article is all about controlling reporters. And this article is all about giving reporters freedom.

The value of
a heavy hand

I am a firm believer that when it comes to writing articles for the printed paper a newspaper needs a strong — even dictatorial — assigning desk. These are the editors who decide which stories to run and how long they should be. Many newspapers that I’ve worked at seem to fail to appreciate the value of a heavy hand here. Please don’t accommodate a reporter’s plea that a story deserves to be twice as long — unless they are truly convincing.

Newspapers need to keep reporters reined in and focused on delivering exactly the type of story that deserves to run in the newspaper each day. It’s the assigning desk editors who should make this call. They know how to prioritize the wave of news coming at them each day. And that doesn’t mean the reporter gets to decide how much of the story deserves to be in the newspaper.

This is harsh, but realities are harsh.

When it comes to the paper product, you can’t just let reporters write whatever length they deem best. You’ll get stories three times longer than will actually fit in the newspaper. Is there good information in that long story? Of course there is. But do you not run two reporters’ stories to fit in a long one from another one? No. Of course not.

Most days, each story deserves at least some place in the newspaper. And we as designers have to plan for that.

The proper way to surprise a designer

Designers deal with surprises all of the time. This is OK. As long as the reason for this is breaking news.

But in order to deal with the vagueries and surprises of breaking news, it is a good idea to keep your designers running smoothly with the items that editors can control: the vast quantity of fairly predictable stories that get sent over from the news desk.

Don’t surprise a designer late at night with a story that has gotten out of control because an editor failed to rein in a reporter.

As a designer, I want Napoleon on the assigning desk. When I see a budgeted length for a story, I want that story to fit that length. Don’t give me a story at 10 p.m. that’s twice as long. I’ll likely have to cut it in half and let the copy desk sort out the mess.

This is even more of an issue now than it used to be. We need a carefully crafted solution to our newshole limitations. We want to take advantage of shorter forms of telling stories. We want visual variety, in the lengths and ways we display stories. We need time and planning to put a well-designed page together.

We could all be happier, including reporters, if a story is not cut in half late at night on deadline. If the reporter truly believes that the assigned length is all they’ll get, they’ll carefully craft the story to fit. And that’s the answer. At least for the paper product.

So damn it, make those reporters believe it. And be the dictator that everybody will appreciate in the end. Do it for the page designers. Do it for the copy editors. Do it for the reporters, even if they hate you at 5 p.m.

Let reporters run their own beats

But reporters could do a much better job of covering their beats with some online freedom and a little less oversight.

Think of all those details that won’t fit in the story for the printed product. Think of those stories that don’t get approved, given their value compared to the rest of the news that day. There is a home for them. And even if editors don’t have the time to keep all of this less prioritized news organized, reporters could do it themselves and be more satisfied for doing it.

And the community would get more news when they need it, when they go looking for it online. Two weeks later when they realize it’s an issue and they missed the relevant day’s newspaper, they should be able to find a complete version online. That’s how you serve a community.

What I am talking about is giving reporters freedom to fully cover their beats: putting a trove of information online that doesn’t rise to the level of making the printed newspaper.

So what’s the problem with this idea? It’s the danger of reporters gone wild, who risk the newspaper’s reputation and accuracy on posting not carefully vetted stories. There’s also the lesser problem of bad spelling and atrocious grammar. Do you think all reporters know how to string a sentence together? You’d be surprised. They may be great reporters who need a little, er, assistance in cleaning up their stories.

It’s a design challenge

This is a design and editorial challenge. It comes down to designing an online news system for reporters that works but keeps a newspaper out of the danger zone of reporters running amok.

Giving reporters a little more control over their work is a double-edged sword. The boring answer for this is a carefully crafted system for allowing reporters to post content online. These aren’t the big stories. These are the little stories. So relax a little, let them control an area of the Web site, give it a streamlined approval process (with light editing if needed) before the content goes live.

There’s the added benefit that you could use this system to enhance the power of whichever little Napoleon is running your assigning desk.