Questions about the reorg report

I’m playing catchup with life right now after going to Chicago last week for the Pitchfork Music Festival.

While I was gone, Angela Grant posted about our newsroom restructuring report. (I noticed this via Spokesman-Review multimedia coordinator Colin Mulvany’s blog.) She gave us some kudos — thanks! — but also raised some questions and suggested we could go further in encouraging multimedia and online journalism under the new structure.

I started to post a response on her blog, but when it grew longer than three paragraphs, I decided to post  here instead.

Before I get to that, I should re-emphasize that our report contained suggestions only. Some of them might advance, but many will not. And I should note that we’re expecting a second task force report this week, this time looking specifically at what kind of content The Spokesman-Review should be producing in print, online, on the radio and beyond.

Big changes await our newsroom on the near horizon, and when those come, it’s hard to say how much attention either of these reports will get. For the time being, here are those clarifications.

Re: reporters voluntarily shooting video.

Angela suggests we shouldn’t just encourage this but require it. In interviews with senior editors, we heard that the voluntary adoption of multimedia has been seen as crucial for the success we’ve had. We wanted to continue this approach with the idea that the bug to shoot would spread. Also, we were trying to be realistic about equipment. We just don’t have that many cameras and laptops yet. The idea is that we could gradually build up those reserves.

Re: online producers having enough time

Angela wonders whether we’re asking too much of these staff members. I’m an online producer, and I authored the section of the report that discusses this position. Right now, I assist reporters and editors in a bit of a haphazard manner. In the report, we suggest assigning producers to set groups of editors and reporters. With a clearer definition of who I work with, I think I could significantly increase my productivity.

Re: combining the photography and multimedia departments.

Two  questions here:

• Will we require photographers to shoot video?

We’ve got a fast-growing corps of photographers who also do video, which is fantastic. We’ve also got three people, including Colin Mulvany, who can throw all their effort at video. With those resources, we didn’t see the need to require video of the entire department. Although I’d love to see the day when that is the case.

• What the heck did we mean about removing redundancy among video and still shooters? Angela wrote:

“I’d be cool with that if it means this: A photog is covering an event, they decide the event is good for video too, and so the photog is assigned to do both stills and video. I won’t be cool with it if it means this: A photog is covering an event, which would be good for video, but they don’t want to send an additional video producer so it just doesn’t get done.”

We meant the former. And if the assigned photog hasn’t yet trained in video, we send somebody along who is. Of course, I’d expect the video potential to be tremendous to warrant such doubling up on an event.

Re: requiring page designers and graphic artists to do interactives

It’d be great if these staff members had the time and training to design projects in Flash. But we have one graphic artist for all platforms, our day designers are already working at capacity to produce the print sections, and we don’t really have dedicated designers at night.

I hate to sound like I’m making excuses, but absent new hires, we could only throw interactive design into the mix if we came up with the ultimate model of universal copy/design desk efficiency.