Editor's note: This article is the first of a two-part series based on Poynter faculty members' visits to print and TV newsrooms this spring. Their goal was to learn more about what news organizations are doing to develop their online products. This article, along with the one to follow, is an analysis of the insights they collected. For more information on the metholodogy of the faculty study and to see which news organizations participated, see the sidebar below.

As newspapers and TV stations rush headlong to bolster their online offerings, some are blogging, some are not; some embrace citizen content and comment unfiltered, others say they are not going there. Everyone, though, wants breaking news to be a core component that will prompt visitors to return to their sites time after time.

How to do breaking news online isn't so obvious. Some organizations want many of their reporters to add the quick post to their repertoire. Others are employing a variant of the "get me rewrite" approach, handing off notes and information to online producers. Still others leave it to a small, dedicated online staff to do the online version and let reporters, especially on big stories, work in their traditional rhythm. What if you dash out of a trial for a quick file and can't get back in?

The implications for storytelling are big. Reporters and editors are getting in touch with, or discovering for the first time, their inner wire-service muses. For breaking news online, the inverted pyramid is back -- short, quick, unembellished. At many papers, telling a crime or trial story that way in the print edition has been deemed dull and passé -- reporters instead look for the telling detail and entrance from an angle.

Maybe Poynter is going to have to start teaching "post-narrative writing," Pat Yack, editor of the The Florida Times-Union, mused to me over lunch at the recent ASNE convention. (My colleague, Chip Scanlan, in fact, had a consulting gig earlier this year at Yahoo!, where the key unit of composition is the single-paragraph summary with links).

ABOUT THIS SERIES

In March and April, Poynter faculty visited with more than a dozen news organizations for a "reconnaissance" view of what is currently happening in development of online sites and multi-media newsrooms. The primary purpose was to gather information for Poynter curriculum planning. Statistics and comments were not for attribution in this report. We make an exception to our usual insistence on named sources partly because of the original purpose of the reporting but also because none of the anonymous assertions are accusatory or potentially harmful. In this and a subsequent piece, we attempt to summarize a couple of the main trends (with additional on-the-record examples and comments). Participating news organizations included the Chicago Tribune, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, USA Today (by phone interview), KING-TV/KONG-TV of Seattle, The New York Times, the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald- Tribune, The Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post, The Arizona Republic and KPNX-TV, The (Syracuse, N.Y.) Post-Standard and The Denver Post. Contributing faculty members included: Karen Dunlap, Keith Woods, Rick Edmonds, Wendy Wallace, Aly Colon, Scott Libin, Kenny Irby, Chip Scanlan, Butch Ward, Jill Geisler, Al Tompkins, Paul Pohlman, Bob Steele, Sara Quinn and Roy Peter Clark.

The same dynamic is very much at play in photojournalism, my colleague, Kenny Irby, tells me. Not so long ago, the photographer on assignment was trying to get one best image -- or a couple of telling images. Now the job may include a quick post to the Web or capturing an extended gallery of images that tell a story. The assignment might also include shooting some video. This is not impossible, but not without bumps: the photographer on the fly may not be a discerning editor, and multi-tasking can be a formula that yields several distinct pieces of mediocre work.

In television culture, the challenge is even bigger. Reporters and producers are proficient at writing scripts and can ad-lib 45 seconds from the scene of an event in a way print folks could not hope to. But to file breaking news in writing directly to the Web may be a new trick even for accomplished and experienced professionals.

Pull back from the trenches, peruse the sites and it is clear that news organizations have (mostly) gotten over resistance to scooping themselves. But more broadly, in embracing the Web, they are altering an internal culture long organized around "the daily miracle" in the case of a newspaper or a crescendo at scheduled broadcast time for television stations.

This also means conceding that more and more news, starting now and going forward, will be consumed in short bursts, often at work through the course of the day, rather than in the construct of a leisurely newspaper read or 30 minutes of continuous news broadcast watching.

The new basic skills for this phase of the Internet era start with story recognition. Now, an event or development likely to be reported elsewhere is breaking news; a variety of solid trend stories or featurized treatments are not.

Next comes finding a multi-platform comfort zone, which may not be so easy for individuals or newsrooms. Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, has said that his vast 1,200-person news operation can accommodate some editors and reporters wedded to print and inclined to stay that way. Our listening tour found a number of editors who concede that, in their newsrooms, pockets of resistance to working on two platforms remain. Those editors said they plan to work around the hurdle.

Others take a blunt line with newsroom staff: They make it clear that online contributions and dexterity will play in evaluations and promotions. With that in mind, it seems likely that the number of print-only jobs is in for a steady decline.

To put the matter more positively, the breaking-news boom creates a demand for professionals who can write lean and basic stories quickly and accurately.

It is at this point that some skeptics are throwing up caution flags. Barney Calame, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor and current New York Times public editor, said recently at Poynter that he is trying to keep an open mind. But at a minimum, he said, maintaining standards with quick posts and details to follow shapes up as a challenge.

Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University and columnist for The Miami Herald, recently took a more prosecutorial approach to the wholesale embrace of a multi-platform model. Doesn't this amount to "a bold new push for reporting that's hasty, fragmented and half-baked?" Wasserman asked. Potentially, he argued, this multitasking will worsen working conditions for reporters and end up "diverting energies away from the kind of richly detailed, thoughtful reporting that exemplifies the best of journalism."

Wasserman's column prompted a quick rejoinder, first in memo form, later in print, from Miami Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler. Suggesting that Wasserman was spending too much time in his bucolic Virginia classroom and too little in real-world newsrooms, Fiedler countered: "Providing news when and how readers want is in harmony with our pledge to serve their interests. We'd be Luddites not to adapt."

The news organizations we surveyed would unanimously agree with Fiedler: providing breaking news online is worth the difficulties it poses. They didn't eagerly volunteer ethical dilemmas or painful mistakes from premature postings. Still, there was an undercurrent of Wasserman's concerns, expressed as questions:

• Does having an editor or two look at breaking news as it goes online amount to adequate quality control?  Or should the editing resources of the legacy organization be tapped more fully and creatively?

• Is there a protocol when a big story breaks or can organizations proceed for at least a while longer defining good practices on the fly?

• Is it realistic to accept slightly relaxed threshold for the Internet -- post now; amplify, clarify or correct later?  Others told us they were at pains to move gradually and incrementally with constant focus on being sure slipshod reporting is not creeping into the online report.

Some of those concerns may be embedded in the matter of online corrections.  Tales of one-man-band reporters who write and wield a still or video camera abound these days. Still, that kind of versatility remains optional in most places. Should a different correction policy apply -- or does that concede a two-tier definition of quality and verification? Technology makes it easy to revise or even delete a posted report, but that has a flavor of corner-cutting.

A much broader concern envisions the wholesale migration of breaking news and some other material to the Web a couple of years hence. Editors are beginning to think about how the morning print product or evening newscast might be remodeled, but we did not hear anyone boasting an answer yet.


The widest variation we observed was in staffing patterns for the online push.

Of course, the complete multimedia reporter (or editor) is a person very much in demand, but that comes with a couple of quick qualifiers. Getting highly skilled in the technology is not essential -- it may even be a distraction. Beyond the basics of filing, online technicians and specialists can take care of most of that. On the other hand, being versed in changing patterns of media consumption -- sampling as a reader/viewer/user what is new and effective out there and beginning to think about storytelling adapted to the Web -- are all pluses for newcomers who want to get with the program.

Tales of one-man-band reporters who write and wield a still or video camera abound these days. Still, that kind of versatility remains optional in most places. An exception may be mature, fully converged operations with print, television and the Internet entwined. In those places, management may hope, for instance, that a print reporter could at least answer two or three questions from a television anchor on air.

One emerging pattern, especially at larger news organizations, is to put a very senior editorial hand or two high in the online structure. That reflects a caution about what goes out under the brand name, hewing as closely as possible to legacy standards in breaking news posts.

 If a desire to build a breaking news report online is universal, there is a wide range of where news organizations are or even how the goals are defined. At the other end of the spectrum, some online operations continue to have the rebel/skunkworks feel that was typical in the first decade of newspapers' online operations. We still found some editors from the ain't-too-proud-to-beg school, who prowl the newsroom, courteously soliciting story contributions.    

At one paper, online-only reporters call themselves "the news rats," operating independently from the main newsroom. At another, we found a one-person hit team writing and producing as many as 15 stories each morning and editing them throughout the day. Help -- and a more central position in the newsroom -- is on the way, the online producer said.

Most typically, newsrooms are building systems on the fly, allowing reporters to hand off rough feeds to online editors/producers who can complete the work. That's where wire-service experience or familiarity with a call-in/rewrite system comes in handy.

The range of staffing practices also underscores how transitional the breaking news effort is. Editors told us not all the holdouts are older reporters. Many embrace the chance to do something new. Veteran online staff, we were told, paradoxically, may have an attachment to how things have been done out of the spotlight for the last decade and feel discomfort as they move into the mainstream of newsroom operations.

If a desire to build a breaking news report online is universal, there is a wide range of where news organizations are or even how the goals are defined. On a sleepy summer news day recently in Florida's Tampa Bay area, I found nothing breaking but a car crash on the midafternoon St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune sites.

"24/7" is a catchy slogan, and at The New York Times and The Washington Post -- both with international online audiences -- a continuous all-day news desk is a reality. But for even good-sized metros, it is a live question whether or not there's much of a point posting while the majority of the audience is asleep, or during evening hours when traffic has fallen drastically from daytime peaks.

The borders for breaking content are still being defined. The New York Times typically has an evening post of a story or two from the next day's feature section. When the The New York Times Book Review (a special case because there is small advance distribution to the books trade) did a survey to identify the greatest novel of the last 25 years, the entire package was posted online 10 days before print subscribers saw it.

I experienced the push and pull of these decisions close to home recently when a plea and sentencing was announced for Debra LaFave, a dishy teacher who had seduced a 14-year-old student. My former St. Petersburg Times colleague, Sue Carlton, had a bona fide scoop, an exclusive interview with the victim's mother. It was posted minutes after the decision, in advance of the 6 p.m. local newscasts. I dashed off a quick congratulatory e-mail in praise of the story and the timing of the post, breaking the taboo of "scooping ourselves."

Thanks, Carlton wrote back, "That's nice to hear -- especially from a mentor. But I must confess I didn't want it on the Web today, I wanted to break it in the paper tomorrow. I know, I know -- I'm old school."

NEXT IN THE SERIES:  Ten Toes in the Multimedia Waters