SALT LAKE CITY — Small, yet intimate and informal groups led to interesting insight for newsroom leadership in the Management Doctor panel at the APSE conference.
The panel, led by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Jerry Micco and Kansas City Star’s Holly Lawton, was created to help sports editors overcome prickly management situations that arise. The most notable challenges involve leading a department as it continues to sustain a viable print edition and go-to digital services.
“I find myself handling more daily oversight since our assistants are busy doing other things,” said Micco. One solution Micco found was when longtime columnist Bob Smizik retired to become a freelance blogger for the papers’ website. Smizik, whom Micco said wanted to go online before retiring, now provides unique and immediate commentary different from what the Post-Gazette’s full-time columnists write for the paper and website. Micco said there was value from the opinion and insight from 300-400 words instead of a full-length column.
Rob King, a print veteran turned vice president and editor in chief of ESPN Digital Media, said perhaps the most difficult thing for newspapers is that they are used to readers coming to stories through sections and pages, but it doesn’t work that way online as readers find content through search portals and social media.
“It’s like you’re having a party and readers used to come in through the front door,” said King. “Now they come in through the back door, the windows, the basement. … You don’t know where and you don’t know why. King added that while editing and writing are better than ever, especially after the game, he wished he saw more consistent enterprise from digital space.
He also said web writers need to adhere to the strict deadlines they faced in print, in that readers want to read about the game online within an hour or two of its conclusion, and that writers taking six hours to file “because it’s the web and there are no deadlines” is a bad idea.
The Miami Herald’s Jorge Rojas said there were two camps at his paper, one that says everyone should be cross-trained and another that promotes specialization. Rojas said he liked cross training since it helps team-building, but that was not the approach used throughout the rest of the newsroom.
“The message out in our department is you have to do something,” said Rojas. “The strong help the weak.” Rojas said the Herald now has someone managing the website 20 hours a day, with someone from 12-8, another from 8-3, and then a daytime editor from 7-12 the next morning.
“The most important thing is we control our own content,” said Rojas.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s Roy Hewitt said not stretching the staff too thin is always a worry, and Cavaliers beat writer Brian Windhorst covering LeBron James’ free agency was a good example.
“There are tons of rumors out there on blogs. Perhaps we can make them better,” said Hewitt. “People are always asking for more on the dotcom side of things, but they don’t realize what the writers have to do.”
Hewitt said the Plain-Dealer’s online operation is separate from the sports department, but he said he helped the situation by turning three writing positions into online production positions. That made it easier to provide fresh content throughout the day. New stories can be posted so fast that others can fall off the page, becoming outdated within a news cycle and unnecessary for print the next day.
“Our web page is basically a blog, and it was hard for me to think of it that way,” said Hewitt. “I have to accept people not looking at our site like it was a newspaper page.”
