Read it here last
By William M. Hartnett on Feb 21, 2007 in newspapers
>Fire the Wire — And Hire Locally (E&P)
(Via Romenesko)
We hated wire copy during my college newspaper days. (Which, alarming realization, were a decade ago.) It was a last resort, filler of no unique value to our audience. Why put something that anyone could get anywhere on pages so carefully targeted at a specific audience?
A quick spin through 312 Tuesday front pages at the Newseum showed 50, nearly one-in-six, with an AP report on the war’s disproportionate impact on small towns. Forty-three, almost one-in-seven, carried various wire accounts of the same insurgent attack on an American combat outpost. Which leads me back to the link I started this post with, in which Mark A. Phillips writes:
“Wire service copy has become a commodity that is sent around the globe via the Internet at blistering speed. … By the time your valued local newspaper reader gets a copy of your paper, the news could be a day old. Is this really serving your readers? Don’t you want to give them something they truly cannot get anywhere else?”
To which I say, simply: Church!
(See also: Online editor see’s NYT.com becoming everyone’s A section)
