Web first or not?

The Chronicle newsroom is grappling with new issues. Until now, the paper’s Web site has been updated once a day — at night, after or during the process of laying out the print edition’s pages. Most days, the Web site didn’t change at all unless some really big news made it impossible not to update the site.

That’s not the way news works anymore. The once-a-day publishing model is not what people expect. People expect their news as it happens and not at the relatively leisurely pace of the nightly printing press run.

We recognize this, and so we’re trying to update the Chronicle’s Web page more often, as we get news throughout the day. However, there’s a problem. Many in the newsroom fear that publishing our news earlier in the day gives the local television station a copy of our playbook, and since the 5:30 news comes on a heck of a lot earlier than our morning newspaper, people worry that the TV station will get more credit and a bigger audience because of our ideas and our work.

We can wait to publish Web updates until 5 p.m., when the TV station is too close to airing its news to steal any of our stories, but most of the Web-reading public is done reading by that time of the day. And that’s only a few hours before we do the nightly update anyhow, so what’s the point?

At issue here is our sense of competition with other local media, the relative novelty of the Web medium and the newspaper’s own uncertainty about what it should do online. Nobody has the answers, so the best thing we can do is take things on a case-by-case basis. Inefficient, yes, but it’s the best we have for now.

Related posts:

1. Welcome
2. Video: Achieving a Web-first newsroom workflow