The News Agencies Along With Newspapers Have A New Editorial Credo – Be Best On The Best, And Leave The Rest

Philip Stone October 22, 2009 Follow on Twitter

Thomson Reuters and AP have sent new missives to their editorial staff basically telling them they need to “own” the big stories, be best on “higher value” stories and, in the AP’s case, stop wasting editorial resources on stories that few use. It makes sense, but good luck in getting it done.

Truth be told, the news agencies produce hundreds of thousands of words and thousands, yes, thousands, of pictures every day of which few find the light of day with their clients. So, why spend so much editorial resources on what people don’t want? Because editors have not been hard-nosed enough in enforcing the “less is best” rule. And the likelihood is that this time around they won’t be any more successful.

It makes sense to dedicate editorial resources to those stories and pictures and video that are basically page one stories. That’s not what should be the limitation but once you get past page one stories editors need to be far stronger in their use of the “spike”. Just because media electronic news systems can absorb all that wordage, all those pictures, all that video, doesn’t mean it is in the client’s best interest to send them all that stuff.  More source editing would be very beneficial, especially with client editorial resources continually being cut back.

None of these pleadings are really new. When this writer was the EMEA financial news products manager for Reuters in the 1990s there was a major project to see even then if we couldn’t direct editorial resources to where they were really needed instead of everything under the sun being covered in case someone, somewhere, wanted that info. In those days Reuters had an electronic leg up on its traditional news agency rivals, for it delivered its news to financial clients via an electronic system called Monitor, and one of the beauties of that system was that any time a client clicked on a news code to read a story the admin systems would capture that hit.

It wasn’t too difficult to get admin to produce a monthly report on those stories used around the world and those that were not – and it was amazing how many were not. That was the easy part. But try to convince editorial folks around the world that all the time and effort spent on various categories of stories were a waste. It was a losing proposition and it became one of those marketing frustrations that you had the right message but it was like talking to brick walls!

A few years back this writer was hired as a consultant for an international picture agency that wanted to spread its wings.  Things came to a head when the consultant recommended the hiring of a number of picture editors whose main job it would be to stop the continuous flow of thousands of pictures to their clients and would be true editors in deciding if that picture needed to move, rather than just pushing the file button on anything that arrived. And the cost of providing that better service could be met with buying few stringer pictures that wouldn’t be needed unless they were the big stories of the day. The consultant lost, and it wasn’t surprising to hear a few months later the financials were a mess because the stringer costs were so high!

Fast forward to today and Thomson Reuters and AP have at almost the same time, by coincidence, issued new guidelines on their editorial objectives. For Thomson Reuters the first two are to “own the big stories, emphasize higher-value content; to be first and handle news quickly.” Still no mention there of giving a pass to stories that don’t warrant the time.

Over at AP it is “To fuel our way to the top; focus on what gets used and eliminate the leftovers”. There, you see, they make a point of not messing with the truly secondary stuff. As AP Managing Editor Kristin Gazlay wrote to her staff, “Too often, we expend precious time and scarce resources on work that does not excite and does not get used.”

This is something the AP has been concerned with for some time and the agency approached this writer a couple of years back to do a survey of just how much of their material, and what subjects, gets used where in Europe – they wanted an independent view in addition to their local bureau logs -- but once they saw the cost of doing that the survey itself became expendable.

Gazlay says the AP’s priority is to “keep our journalists out on the front line of the news” and she warned, “It won’t happen if we are too busy dishing out dull second-day helpings or larding our report with sidebars and light features, or toiling away on columns and fixtures that no longer have a following.”

And the study the AP made of its US usage is really eye-opening. Over the four months studied earlier this year, the AP produced 2.3 million text items, 800,000 photos, and 16,000 videos. Yet on web sites, one-third of all daily page views came from just the top 10 stories; in a survey of 86 newspapers over a one-week period only 3% of the 4,000 stories that appeared were in at least 20 newspapers and three-quarters were in three or fewer newspapers and an uncounted number never appeared at all.  For broadcast video only 15% of the content accounted for half the usage.

Truly astounding numbers but for this writer who spent some 30 years in the news agency business it merely confirms what was really already known, but never really tackled. No journalist likes to be told he/she is wasting time producing something that no one wants; on the other hand every journalist wants to be covering the big story of the day.

It’s the job of the editors to make sure they get to do that – too many editors are up to their eyeballs in admin and it’s time they got back to the real chore at hand – editing!

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