It seems every other day I have to stop and ask myself this question: Am I focusing on the right things? I had another one of those this morning reading a post by Mark Potts.

Potts points to a post by Douglas McLennan about why newspapers need to take the web more seriously.

Potts says this post is a must read “for newspaper publishers and executives attending the NAA convention this week.”

I agree. The point is made very clear. It is hard to beleive that newspapers are taking the web serious, McLennan’s says, when the organizations are so “under-invested” to play in the web world.

McLennan makes his points very clearly:

  • Most digital operations are seriously under-staffed and under-resourced. They don’t employ even the basic traffic-building strategies that independents are using with great success.
  • Newspapers have declined to innovate as eBay, Craigslist, Monster.com, Google and myriad ad networks have sprouted, thrived and stolen away customers.
  • Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and others are experimenting with community selection of news, while newspapers pay little more than lip service to reader involvement.
  • Hundreds of small web operations have sprung up to compete with traditional newspapers, while news organizations remain mired in old conventions.
  • Social networking has changed the way young people interact, yet newspapers have failed to meaningfully take the plunge.
  • The back end digital news production structure at most newspapers is a mess.
  • Many papers still bizarrely consider their online and paper versions separate operations.
  • High-paid editors who ought to be spending their time on content spend their days snarled up in uploading jpegs and other technical mazes.
  • Reporters and editors are pressed to add digital duties – blogs, podcasts etc – as add-ons to their “regular” jobs instead of incorporating the digital world as essential tools that should make their ability to gather and tell stories and interact with their communities easier. This shouldn’t add to the work load (but always seems to). Instead, these things ought to make reporting easier.
  • Most web operations are seriously understaffed and technically deficient, making what should be even basic tasks difficult to impossible.

The biggest complaint I get about a blog post like this and others is that it seems to be too negative and does not offer any real solutions.

I’ll post my solutions to some of these points tomorrow, but in the mean time, what are your answers to some of these points?