Web Management@Ramblin’ Prose

MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Web Focus Leads Newspapers to Hire Programmers for Editorial Staff | PBS
Finding Solutions WithinJohn Robinson, editor of the Greensboro N.C. News & Record, expects to eliminate a newsroom position — it might not be a reporter — in order to hire a programmer, and hopes to find someone with journalism experience as well. He’s curious about the Tacoma experience, and says that newspapers have been slow to court programmers in the past and have failed that vision thing.

This is an interesting and welcome change. In most newsrooms I’ve worked in, technology has been a naughty word unless it supported the daily production of news stories or when it was the focus of a news story, such as a piece on the iPod or a new advance in medicine.

But the Web provides a means for newsrooms to enhance to collection of relevant facts and brings to the fingertips of consumers of information new ways to interact with content — from links to relevant content to interative databases and multimedia to adding their own content.

News leaders have their own ideas about how their readers should interact with them and having programmers in the newsroom who are solely focused on producing content (and not advertising) would be very beneficial.