New media math

Mandatory employee training.

It’s enough to spark fear in the heart of corporate drone – but even more so when your job is to produce a product that will impact the bottom line not next month, not next week, but tomorrow.  More on this job – a recent acquisition – later.

A new media representative from GateHouse came to town on Tuesday to rehash my undergraduate career take a look at our website.  Four hours, easy in, easy out, I’m an old pro at this stuff anyway, right?

Wrong. Because for some reason, our readers expect Wednesday’s paper on Wednesday – regardless of how much mandatory training we sat through the day before.  (Might I add that Wednesday’s paper is a hefty edition with lots of extra pages and a special section for yours truly to design?)  I know, the public of Eastern Jackson County is pretty unreasonable.

Knowing this, I was filled with dread as our editor marched us single-file into the conference room.  OK, I’m lying.  We were not marched.  Still, you should have seen the expressions of dread.

But here’s the thing: there really are a lot of cool things we could be doing when we update our website.  Too bad by “we” I mean me, armed with a can of Diet Dr. Pepper as I stare bleary-eyed at my computer screen at 12:30 in the morning.  And that’s the shame of it.  I desperately want to create layers of maps and multimedia and sidebars because oh, look how pretty! But I also like to be home before 2 a.m.

So the temporary euphoria of “Oh, I’ll get a chance to put my online media skills to good use!” was quickly replaced with the reality of putting together a daily paper – seriously behind schedule.

When I was a student journalist, I thought being an actual journalist would be easier.  You know, real pay, real hours, no homework.  I was mostly right.  But it also means a whole lot less time to be innovative.  It used to frustrate me when newsroom faculty resisted making changes based on ideas that came out of the convergence curriculum.  Now I see the other side of the equation.  You can add “y” to “x,” but you can’t take away from x.  “X” remains what they were hired to do, no matter how snazzy y might be.

Of course, it’s a more complicated equation when you remember newspapers are “dying” and it’s going to take some real creativity to save them.  Or else repurpose them, which is largely what posting to the web is all about.

Suddenly I’m not the new hire but the newsroom curmudgeon, saying, “It’s a nice idea, but I’ve got a job to do here.”