Web Editors As Self-Promoters: The Future of News?

By: Pauline Millard The Online News Association conference closed last Friday and most of the 600 participants left Toronto with some new ideas and pockets full of business cards. One thing I noticed at the awards banquet was how much amazing journalism is being done on the web -- and how little of it gets acknowledged outside of these industry events.

The Oakland Tribune walked away with two awards, including top honors for their project, "Not Just a Number," but as the masters of ceremonies named some of the other projects, all of which sounded fascinating, I wondered why I had never heard of some of them before.

As online editor at E&P, I spend a lot of time clicking around newspaper Web sites, and every few days, in Pauline's Picks, I highlight a deserving project. Some of my old colleagues at The Associated Press won for their coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, and still I had no idea of the special nature of it until they were accepting their award in Toronto.

Perhaps the problem is rooted in newspaper people. By nature, they are not shameless self-promoters. If they were, they would probably be in sales or running businesses. They are observers, the note takers of the world. They are not there (usually) to participate in events, they're there to make sense of it all for everyone else.

It's often an altruistic mindset, but in this age of declining newspaper profits, perhaps news organizations need to digest the fact that aggressively pushing your products is a reality of the job.

One point that was made during a session about using games as an editorial tool was that it is key nowadays to engage readers and keep them on your site for as long as possible, hence the role of games. But many of the projects that were finalists at ONA certainly would be able to keep my attention, mostly because they were inherently interesting.

I have many friends in media, and we often talk about articles we've read in the New York Times or the New Yorker, for example. We talk about them because we see blurbs about them in other media, and the piece becomes viral.

Not once has anyone ever said, "Hey, did you see that newspaper interactive about declining schools in the inner city?" But you know what, they should.

Why spend all that time and resources on a project, only to have it enjoyed by a small and/or very local audience? Other newspaper people shouldn't be the only ones recognizing our work.