I’m going to keep referencing the “Full Van Dam,” but I realize the term requires explanation for those of you who weren’t at the Missourian editors’ retreat a few weeks ago.
Graduate student Andrew Van Dam was at the retreat to represent the views of Team Junit, the group of students working with Tom Warhover and Joy Mayer to plan our transition to a new Junit online content management system. The team had crafted a series of recommendations for transforming the Missourian in anticipation of the system’s arrival. One of Andrew’s salient points was that to really transform the rhythm of the newsroom into a “Web-first” (or “online-mostly”? or “platform-independent”?) organization, we needed to compartmentalize print operations into a segregated team, freeing most of us from having to worry about it. Andrew suggested that print work was “infecting” our thinking about our product and said we had to “do the full Van Dam” — totally isolating print work — to get where we want to go.
Today, I just discovered that we’re not the first to think this way. The Middletown (Conn.) Press came to the same conclusion and has tried it — with, it seems, success. Hat tip to Joy for this post from the blog of Journal Register CEO John Paton. Editor Viktoria Sundqvist does most of the talking. An excerpt from her on the results of their experiment with isolating print production work, freeing desk editors to work online only:
We noticed a significant growth in web traffic during our experiment, but this slowed somewhat towards the end of the week. However, the drop-off rate from the early morning traffic into the afternoon slowed significantly, and the amount of time each person returned to the site increased dramatically. The amount of time each visitor spent on our site also increased.
Those outcomes would be very welcome at the Missourian. I think there’s a lot for us to learn from this. Note that Middletown just did this as experiment. Sundqvist herself handled all the print duties for a few days while the copy desk tried this out. She has since returned some print duties to the copy editors. But even as a temporary shift, it seems to have succeeded in resetting rhythms and perceptions. And it suggests this might be worth trying here. I urge you to read the post on Middletown. Then weigh in here. Should we try this?
I’m still not convinced anyone will want to be segregated into print-land only. So much of what our students hear in every journalism class leading up to when we get them is that “print is dying” or “print is dead.” And then we want to ask them to go work on a product that they’ve heard for three years is dead or dying?
What I did really like about the Middletown post was this line:
“To me, the important thing isn’t how often each person posts stories, it the fact that their thought-process now leads to the right conclusions: Web, e-mail blast, Twitter, Facebook, print.”
THIS is where we need to be. A few of us are there. The vast majority of us are not. I’m sure Van Dam would argue that the only way to get us there would be to shake things up so drastically that we’re forced into that mindset.
So, maybe the solution isn’t a “full Van Dam,” but a temporary “full Van Dam.” Try segregating the print product for one semester and re-evaluate. That might be enough to get us out of our habits and into truly thinking Web first.
I also believe that once the editors are all totally on board with truly going digital first, the students will easily follow. As Laura said on another post, they’ll meet our expectations as long as we set them up to be met.
I loved this idea, too, and I am hesitant to segregate print in a way that makes it seem secondary. (Although in a web-first world, it is secondary.)
I know we have to do something that makes this change fairly drastic – or at least that it feels that way. It shows the importance of shifting our thinking.
I liked the idea of how this paper let people in the process work out a schedule. It gave each of them ownership over the site for a designated time each day — and that’s what’s most lacking at our site. We don’t have ownership – a person who everyone knows is on duty and ready to post and manage the site. We could at least start with that concept, but I’m intrigued with the idea of doing a “full Van Dam” for a semester experiment.
It will be difficult for the desk to shuffle between print and online duties as long as it is required to meet hard print deadlines or face paying extra fees. When money is at stake, it’s hard to justify thinking Web-first, right? Part of our Team Junit conversations led to the idea of desk accountability and ownership. If a print-only team is charged with matching print deadlines, and a Web-only team is charged with thinking in terms of online visuals and immediacy, then both teams would work more effectively than one team comprised of both teams could.
I believe it was JPS who said players on both teams could easily sub in and out for each other, depending on the needs of the newsroom throughout the day. I like this idea for several reasons, but I’ll only mention one. When students are forced to think differently (as they’re tasked with different jobs), I believe they learn a lot more. This versatility in thought and execution can only benefit the students and, consequently, the paper.
I’m very excited and interested to see where you decide to go.
I agree with this idea. And I think it’s an important point that we don’t necessarily have to structure it so that the Print People only ever do print and the Web People only ever do online. It’s that on any given night one’s role is defined as one or the other.
Jake, what do we tell students in the Advanced News Design course now?
Isn’t their work overwhelmingly print-oriented?
And if we gave them MORE control, as was suggested at the retreat, wouldn’t that be cooler for them?
I’m with Tom. I think this has the potential to improve the print product. It’s not a ghetto. It could be hella fun. I’d want to be in that print design class that takes over the print edition. But maybe I’m a dinosaur.
One very important aspect of this separation question is money.
While it’s great to say that print is dying and that we need to be Web first, I think we need to know — where does our money as an organization come from? I’m not too familiar with the Missourian finances, but I know for a lot of places, the money comes from the print product. It may be sucking some in, but if you just killed it, you’d kill the business rather than save it because there isn’t another revenue source.
I think it’s easy for students my age and younger to forget about that.
As to Jake’s point about print land, Ryan talked about what I said about switching around. Being in print today doesn’t mean you work print tomorrow, it just gives you a focus, which makes the job easier and makes the products better (I hope).
I’m with Nick — I’d totally want that job, provided I were given creative control to redefine what a print product should be. I’d also want the freedom as the editor to make my own content, and to use more wire content if it’s the most interesting of the day. It can be so fun to work on a secondary product, with fewer opinions and turfs involved. There’s more room for risk-taking.
[...] have some basic agreement that it’s worth trying the print isolation model. This is the model Middletown experimented with, with some success, and it’s the “Full Van Dam” we’ve been discussing here [...]
JPS, sorry for this delayed response.
Of course, you’re exactly right. All the traditional media companies — to my knowledge, anyway — still generate the majority of their revenues from the print product. Quite clearly, our students are still taking jobs with a print focus.
But you’ve made the point that I’m trying to make. It’s not about killing print. It’s about concentrating on one platform at a time. Let’s not divide our attention. Some of us will give the Web the full attention it deserves. And some of us will give that attention to print.