BY STEVE SAFRAN
MANAGING EDITOR
LOST REMOTE
I want to see the Philadelphia newspaper strike happen. Not out of solidarity with the unions or sympathy with the struggling owners of a dated medium. No, I want the strike to happen because of the fascinating possibility that the newsroom will continue to publish the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News online in some form. Ironically, both the union and the ownership would win.
Since they won’t disclose the URL*, let’s call the new online entity PhillyStrikeout.com. Immediately, the Union has one thing wrong — they say they are going to continue to publish the newspapers online. They’re not. They’re publishing the news online. Just as they should be.
No longer constrained by the artificial deadlines of the newspaper world, they are free to publish news as it happens, where it happens. Free from the shackles of column inches, reporters can take as much space as they need to tell a story properly. Because the paper won’t be laying out big travel expense checks, the world and nation reporters will be around to tell all the great stories in Philadelphia instead. Sports reporters won’t have to follow around the pro teams to get the same silly quotes from the same overpaid crybabies, either. They can just stick around the city and find terrific local stories about hard-working, hard-playing, inspirational athletes. Photographers who have taken more than one picture to tell a great story can now have a photo essay every day. Heck — they can have several photo essays every day.
PhillyStrikeout.com will never be “overtaken by events,†either. Unlike the newspapers, it won’t have those embarrassing days when a major news event has happened right after the trucks have rolled, thus making the day’s paper irrelevant even as it arrives at the doorstep. The editor will just have to roll out of bed, make a few changes on his laptop, and go right back to sleep.
Because the web provides for video and audio, the reporters are free to experiment at PhillyStrikeout.com, too. If they want to record their interviews and post those recordings, they can go right ahead. If the still photographers want to post a little video, they’re free to do so as well. It all adds to the understanding of the story, so I say “good for them.â€
It’s going to be a little tough to do all of this and run a classifieds department, too. So just let people post classifieds for free. Why not? No, it won’t be as succinct as “Queen PT Mat Set (Coil) $159 New in plastic, warr. Can del. 215-7xx-xxxx†(an actual ad online today) but giving people unlimited free space to talk about what they’re selling will invite a community to read your other stuff.
All in all, it would be a big win for the strikers. They would learn an awful lot about the new realities of news and they may even come to like what they see. So how does the other side win, too?
Because PhillyStrikeout.com isn’t going to make any money.
The strikers are going to see how hard it is to run the business and support all those jobs. The strikers are going to see that the ease of production of PhillyStrikeout.com means that anyone can do it. Giant presses no longer roam the Earth, making their masters the overlords. They will see, after a week, that they have put out a terrific publication that hasn’t brought in a dime. All of a sudden, the PhillyStrikeout.com journalists will have to dirty their hands with money. They’ll find out what we all need to understand: journalism is a business. And in business, tough decisions need to be made and we don’t always like those decisions. Shareholders have a say in the companies in which they invest. An entity, once it brings in money, has a lot of parties interested in keeping it profitable. And it’s just not up to the employees to decide how profitable is profitable enough.
Still, it’s not all smug victory for the paper owners. They, too, will see how easy it is for good journalists to put together an excellent online publication without their help. The owners will look at PhillyStrikeout.com, and they’ll have to think “How did they do that without all our memos, meetings and instructions?†The owners are going to look at PhillyStrikeout.com and think “Good thing they don’t have a sales force, or we’d be screwed.â€
Newspaper owners are trying to hold on to dated models of subscriptions, classifieds and ads. Newspaper employees are trying to hold on to dated contracts. So while PhillyStrikeout.com may result in a win for both sides educationally, there’s only one both sides actually win financially: by realizing they’re not in the newspaper business.
(*UPDATE: This was written prior to the announcement that the strike site URL will be at philapapers.com. And thanks to LR Commenter Tim Windsor for telling me. That they are calling it philapapers reinforces point of the editorial, but I’m not about to go in and rewrite it. ALSO: Corrected error that had me incorrectly refer to the Daily News as the Daily Star. Thanks to LR Commenter Chris Krewson for noting that. LR readers are the best editors around.)