Newsroom With A View

(Originally posted on June 21, 2010)

After all the cuts every newsroom in the country has made in recent years, “We don’t have enough people to do that” may be the most-used sentence (or thought) in response to any suggested change, especially asking newsrooms to start posting to Facebook and/or Twitter posts and the Web throughout the day. The editor of the 6,000-circulation paper in Middletown, Conn., says she heard it, but she found a way to get her staff started. Her staff, besides her, consists of three copy editors, two people in sports, and an unspecified but obviously small number of reporters, so it’s larger than I would expect most 6,000-circulation papers have, but not by much. Consider her general approach and see if any of it could work for you. Consider especially that when her copy editors said they didn’t have time to do their regular work plus the Web work, she changed everyone’s jobs, including her own — and let the editors themselves work together to figure out how to accomplish the new work.