OK, folks, what would you think of ...
One of the larger newspaper/media companies in America coming up with this bright idea:
Everybody in the editorial office now, including copy editors, who of
course aren't out reporting stories, is
supposed to create a "personal" office FB account and Twitter account. This from
a company that paywalls nothing at any of its daily papers, including multiple seven-day dailies.
It started paywalling one this spring.
Then some alleged hardcopy subscribers bitched about having to remember a password, so they dropped the paywall.
First, I suspect the paper didn't even check to see if these were hardcopy subscribers. Second, anybody knows you can reset a password. Third, after this, the paper (now becoming corporate-wide) signed up for Facebook logins to comment on stories, allegedly to make it easier to moderate offensive comment. Which you can do even better by restricting comment to paying subscribers with a paywall!
Yet another example of how the newspaper industry continues to shoot itself in the foot.
Anyway, back to this latest directive. Beyond the copy editors not reporting stories issue, my political and religious views are 180 degrees to the third dimension diametrically opposite the place I currently happen to be. So, readers aren't going to want to read Tweets from the real me anyway.
And, speaking of "political angles," somebody at the office here created a stupid, hokey, WWI-knockoff poster about "Facebook and Twitter: It's everybody's job." Yep, 50-something regular readers will be "hooked," sure, while 20-something "leeches" will keep on leeching. That's great strategy there.
Meanwhile, via a press association website, I saw Russell Viers touted as another "guru" for how to "fix" newspapers. He's no more a guru than Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, et al. First, he says he was dead set against paywalls in the past. Then, he claims that the current NYT one - you know, the one with the Canadian hack invented for it even before it officially debuted in the U.S. - was "working." No, really.
With "gurus" like him, Rosen, et al, on the finance/business side, and being listened to, judging by posts on his blog, again, newspapers keep shooting themselves in the foot. One reader talked about "giving it away" as long as he had ads, clueless to the fact that many people use ad-blocking extensions.
UPDATE, Oct. 27: OK, the latest on this "brightness." The whippersnapper online editor at this paper, in his belief that Facebook = salvation, last Saturday, when we are shorthanded on the copy desk anyway, suggested that, if we had time, we live blog the World Series on the company's main Facebook page, complete with poll. And, he's doing it again tonight with Game 6.
Hey, "dude." People do that already. They work at Yahoo Sports and ESPN, where serious national baseball fans will go to keep up with things like that.
UPDATE, Nov. 2: Not too long after the first update on this blog, the online editor asks me (and our news editor) if we would put some sort of picture/logo (not necessarily our mugs) on our FB and Twitter corporate pages.
And I obliged -- with one version of the Green Party logo. For some reason, I was asked to take that off.
Otherwise, the whole thing seems like an attempt to reach Gen Y types who are generally plugged in, but generally ... DON'T READ NEWSPAPERS! Among other things that they've
learned all too well from the tail end of Gen X.
UPDATE, Dec. 20: Oh, and add to this a news editor and assistant news editor who spell
"south-southwest" as "south, southwest." Among other things.
