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Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 8/12/2008 6:08:47 PM
Title: Philly Inquirer clarifies online guidelines
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From: Marimow, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 5:27 PM
To: Inquirer
Subject: online guidelines

August 12, 2008

To: The staff

From: Bill Marimow, Mike Leary, Eric Grilly and Wendy Warren

Following Mike Leary's e-mail last week, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about when to break news online. This new set of guidelines should be clearer for you.

Please give it your attention and let us know if you have any questions. Thanks very much

Our goal is to publish our content in our products in a thoughtful way. Use our powerful Web site for its reach, immediacy, ability to connect readers with each other and ability to build deep packages. And use our two newspapers because of their strong reputations, ease of use and ability to reach an audience who love and subscribe to the product.

So let’s break as much news as we can online, particularly if it’s a story, column or review that readers might get from another source, or that benefits from the strengths of the Web. That includes – but is not restricted to – these kinds of stories:

*Breaking news, and lots of it.

*Competitive stories – which we know other media may be chasing or that are breaking elsewhere. This may include a number of sports and business stories.

*Stories or reviews that would help readers plan their weekend, including deciding which movies or plays to see. Movie reviews are highly competitive online, and should be published there first. Play reviews that would help someone navigate, say, the Fringe Festival – and that won’t be published in the paper until days later –should be broken online as well.

*Reviews of movies, concerts, sporting events or other events that end too late for the print editions.

Other stories should appear online concurrent with print publication. That would include (but isn’t restricted to):

*Columns that don’t contain breaking or competitive news, but that readers seek out because they know and enjoy the columnist's work.

*Exclusive stories that we know won’t be broken elsewhere.

*Feature stories that have no strong competitive reason to be broken online first.

Stories from The Inquirer bulldog edition should be handled with the same care. Stories that are competitive, as described above, should go online as soon as possible. Some bulldog stories can wait for online publication on Sunday, when most people read or buy the paper.

Generally, let’s experiment and see what works for each publication, and that includes reverse publishing into print and new refers from online to print as well as refers from print to online.

There are plenty of specific instances not covered in this note. In those cases, if you have a question, consult with the online desk in the newsroom or with Philly.com’s content team.

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