Just ask anyone who is or has been a reporter or editor on a newspaper and they will tell you that in a new era where there are many depressing stories about the newspaper industry, they never thought they’d see the day when they’d read a story like this — within the context that this is now happening in many parts of the country so it’s part of an emerging norm:
The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun announced on Tuesday that they would share some of their articles and pictures. The move adds two major players to the fast-growing roster of newspapers that are cooperating with their regional competitors to get more coverage out of their diminished news staffs.
The Sun and The Post have, in effect, divided up responsibility for much of the local and sports news in their region. In addition, they will be able to use each other’s national and international work for the first time.
In the last few months, papers around the country have struck several content-sharing agreements of varying degrees, including The Miami Herald, The Palm Beach Post and The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale; The Dallas Morning News and Star-Telegram of Fort Worth; and a group of eight major papers in Ohio.
Competition and sometimes heated rivalry has often been the life’s blood of “newspapering,” as staffs sought to outdo the “other” big paper in the regional or local neighborhood by out-reporting and out-writing it and, hopefully, by getting that big story first. Content sharing now removes some but not all of that factor. Additionally, it means the factors separating paper X from paper Z will now be reduced both in the regional markets and in terms of motivational and brand name factors such as newspaper awards.
The New York Times piece also has these details as well:
“This is something that, as recently as two years ago, you really wouldn’t have seen papers doing at all,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists that owns the St. Petersburg Times. “In the current climate where there’s such urgency to get savings to keep pace with the falling ad revenue, I think this is snowballing from one place to another.”
Under the new agreement, The Post and The Sun will share most local news coverage in Maryland, though not their exclusives.
“They will give us coverage of the Baltimore suburbs and Baltimore, and we will give them coverage of the Maryland suburbs of Washington,” said Robert J. McCartney, assistant managing editor for metropolitan news at The Post.
On news from remote areas like western Maryland or the Eastern Shore, the papers will confer to decide whether to have one of them cover the story for both. In sports, The Post will be responsible for covering the Redskins football team, the Nationals baseball team and the teams of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. The Sun will cover the Ravens football team, the Orioles baseball team and horse racing.
In some areas, they will not share their work, continuing to compete head-to-head, including coverage of Maryland state government and of University of Maryland sports.
And then there is the comment from a newspaper management type — a typical CYA statement, doing the kind of spin on a subject that reporters would deride in the newsroom if it came out of the mouth of a source on a story:
“This allows both newspapers to really use their resources to pursue stories that are unique to them, to play to their own strengths,” said J. Montgomery Cook, who will become the editor of The Sun next week. “Budgets are tight everywhere, and it helps us to put our resources where we can use them best, and avoid duplication.
No it doesn’t.
It means you will be less today than you were before.
Duplication was never a problem in the past — because the attitude was that even if you duplicated, you could build on the duplication and do a story the competition did better.
So, now let me get this straight:
Newspapers are reducing news “hole,” axing many features, laying off staff, downsizing their Sunday editions (the LA Times once great Sunday opinion section is now a sliver of what it was), halting home delivery in one city, experimenting in one city to outsourcing reporting to India (even if it won’t end journalism as we know it) unable to compete with the web in terms of classifies due to the popularity of Ebay, Amazon Marketplace and Craig’s List, unable to compete with the Internet’s mega-updates and content that’s cost-free to readers, and now sharing content….
And they still expect to KEEP the older readers they now have…and ATTRACT younger readers???
OF RELATED INTEREST:
—Romenesko reports that bigwigs at both papers don’t expect staff cuts due to content sharing…but they could be “redeployments.”
—Daily Intel has a lot more inf about what’s happening around the country. In a post titled “Newspapers Learn To Share,” New York Magazine’s lively blog starts out a long list this way:
If you were to talk to Scrooge today, he’d tell you the newspaper as a medium is dying. If you talked to Tiny Tim, he’d say it’s just going through some changes. Some papers are now sharing stories, and some editors are exiting. But one bankrupt newspaper owner might buy himself a holiday gift of — yep — another newspaper. The media’s awkward stage continues!
–Detroit News Commentary: Let’s not lose newspapers, a key to democracy
–Alternet: The Newspaper Industry Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes
–Kansas City Star Commentary: Newspapers are key to democracy
–Jeff Jarvis: Newspapers: Defensive, Depressed and Desperate?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.