Philadelphia Inquirer won’t apply Web-first policy to features
While most newspapers, looking to offset large print advertising revenue decreases, are trying to leverage the Web to the utmost, at least one is bucking the trend by emphasizing its print edition.
Philadelphia Inquirer managing editor Mike Leary told staffers on August 7, in a memo reprinted on Romanesko, that the newspaper would hold off posting investigative, enterprise, trend stories, features, and reviews to Philly.com until they appear on paper. Leary emphasized that the newspaper – which shares Philly.com with the Philadelphia Daily News – will still emphasize breaking news online.
Reaction from the Web skewed to negative. Jeff Jarvis said: “This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore.”
On the pro-Inquirer side, Howard Owens advocated using the Web to create a distinct product. “With proper focus and strategy, there is reason for a good-sized, well-run newspaper operation to repurpose its print product for online,” he said. “All of those resources should allow the online operation to feed off, but not be a duplicate of, the print operations. It should allow a newspaper operation to avoid the soul-sucking, readership-killing, repurposing of print content online and the aggressive pursuit of Web-centric content practices.”
[...] the second case i see for displaying when the article appeared in print is to give the online article credibility. in a case where ideas are being teased out online and the printed form represents the culmination of the “winnning” ideas strung together as a complete thought, this makes perfect sense. this is what some book authors and bloggers do; they throw ideas out in public, get a community reaction, mull them over, and refine them over time. for someone reading old posts, it might be useful to know that the idea they were reading was incorporated into a book or article published on x date. but clearly the times is not doing this either, as the online text is an exact match of the printed article. moreover, the times has blogs where presumably this floating ideas exercise takes place. (coincidentally, the philadelphia inquirer has recently frowned on this practice.) [...]