Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent point in this blog post that urges news organizations — especially newspapers — to focus their dwindling resources on their strengths instead of trying to duplicate coverage that’s widely available elsewhere. Newspaper sites are already posting more national wire and syndicated stories to free up their reporters to cover more local news. But Jarvis goes a step further to suggest they link to sites that are doing a better job covering a story.
There’s an interesting implication here for TV news, as well. The majority of stories in local TV newscasts (and the networks, too) are exactly the same. This sameness is not a detractor in a linear world: most people who watch TV don’t turn off a newscast if they’ve already read or seen a story somewhere else. But on the web, sameness is a drawback: people who have already read or seen a story somewhere else aren’t going to click on it to read it again. Posting the same stories as everyone else has a more tangible impact on pageviews than airing the same stories has an impact on ratings. This becomes even a bigger drawback when you consider all the stories TV newsrooms get from newspapers, which have already been online for most the day before they end up on the TV websites. In the end, covering unique, original stories is a must for TV sites — resources willing — even if it means diverging from TV’s daily coverage. Or better yet, TV newsrooms should cover more enterprise stories as a percentage of daily assignments.