Editor's Notebook: New Year's Resolution

By Polly Keary, Editor
I might have made a couple of personal New Year's resolutions, and so far the prognosis for their success is middling.
The resolution I intend to stick to is the one we've made for the paper.
In 2014, starting with this issue, we are turning our focus to posting the stories online as soon as we write them.
At the end of the week, we'll collect all we've posted during the week, add to that the feature stories that weren't time sensitive and anything that needed the weekend to produce, and publish it in the paper.
This switch to online-first reflects a shift in our industry. Print is still our primary product, but the writing is on the proverbial wall. Eventually many, many of us legacy newspapers are going to have to have good digital products in place soon or we won't get a second century in business.
In order to see how that might be done, I researched and wrote a 30-page paper just before Christmas, (leading to a personal resolution about not taking on too many projects through the holidays).
What I learned is that the early digital success stories involve steady and reliable news posts on news websites.
So while it's going to take a lot of logistical adjustment and occasionally some weird hours, we intend to post information on emergent stories like power outages, storms, car accidents, sports games, city council meetings. election results and other time-sensitive stories up within hours, if not minutes, of when we get relevant information.
All that information will still appear in the regularly-published paper, and we don't foresee that coming to an end anytime soon.
So if you hear on Facebook that U.S. 2 is closed or that the upper valley is flooding, check in at www.monroemonitor.com.
We're resolved to see that you'll find what you're looking for.
 

Comments

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.

Sign in to comment