CoPress

Many newspapers are now transitioning to a Web-first workflow; among other things, this means that weekly papers can break stories online long before they’re printed in the newspaper. At The Maine Campus, we’ve faced problems deciding how to handle new developments in such stories — whether older versions of the story get a write-through or we create a new post for the development, and whether we should write a separate version of the story for our print edition.

An example of a situation when The Maine Campus had to adapt to appeal to both Web and print audiences.

One factor is whether you view your paper as a daily news organization with a print newspaper once or twice a week, or as a weekly newspaper with a Web-first workflow. At The Campus, we’re fairly new to Web-first reporting, so we’ve made a decision to continue to tailor our print edition to our print readers. Sometimes this means taking the latest story we’ve posted to the Web and adding additional context grafs from earlier stories so readers who haven’t been following the story online aren’t lost. As we get more used to writing for the Web first, I expect we’ll get used to treating every day like a new issue of the paper, even if we don’t have a print edition coming out that day, and we’ll expect readers to check our Web site every day for new stories and updates.

Other papers have already embraced the latter. The Washington Square News, the student newspaper at New York University, bills itself as a daily even though it only publishes four days a week in print. On Fridays it publishes online and expects readers to stay tuned to the Web site one day a week, at least.

The WSN doesn’t publish any of Friday’s stories in Monday’s paper unless new information breaks, making it one of the most Web-reliant college papers out there. Only once in the year or so since WSN moved to Web-only on Friday has the paper put out a special issue — when members of a radical student group called Take Back NYU barricaded themselves inside one of the student centers for more than 24 hours.

Here are a few basic things to consider when deciding how to handle articles that are published on the Web long before print:

1. If there is any change in the news — any sort of breaking detail — it should probably get its own post. Not only will Google News not re-index the article after it’s been initially published but this also enables readers to easily identify when there have been major developments.
2. Be sure you know your audience. Use Google Analytics to find out who’s visiting your site, when and what they read.
3. If you go Web-first, be sure to stress to both your Web and print readers that you post articles online every day. Truly Web-first newspapers should have a steady stream of readers on their Web sites, not a giant spike of traffic the day the newspaper comes out. Convince your readers the Web site is more than just a carbon copy of your paper edition.

If you can build up your online readership by building up expectations of what will be offered, as WSN has done by cutting out a day of the print edition, papers can effectively use their Web sites as extensions of their print editions. Smaller papers will have to build a bridge between their print and online audience before readers will come to expect multiple updates online.

The most important thing is to make sure you don’t leave your readers confused. A final idea is to refer to your Web site in print with something like, “For more information on such and such, visit mainecampus.com.”

Lauren Rabaino published a constructive blog post a couple days ago on how the Mustang Daily is adjusting to a web-first workflow. From the looks of it, they’re asking and answering a number of questions that other news organizations will behaving further along the line:

Who copy edits when? Does the section editor look at the article first or last? Can an article be posted to the Web without the section editor’s approval? These are the questions we’ve asked ourselves these past few days. Section editors (news, arts, sports) have a huge problem with articles being posted to the Web without their approval. Gradually, we’re figuring it out.

Related to this, several of us had a conference call this morning to discuss ways in which the WordPress admin could be enhanced for editorial workflow (and address many of the technical issues organizations like the Mustang Daily are facing). For instance, I think it would be useful if editors could receive an email when a post is ready for their reading, as well as different types of statuses if, for instance, the editor needed to send the post back to the reporter for a rewrite.