by Barry Schaeffer

While few would deny the impact that new media is having on the newspaper business, the focus has been largely on the delivery media and its impact on the business and economic side. Newspapers are, nonetheless, about good reporting and if the product of reporting changes, doesn=t the reporting process change as well? Of course it does and we ignore those changes at our peril. Reporting is a highly individual process. Each practitioner, successful or not, will develop his or her own way of coping with the burgeoning electronic news hole. So perhaps the best way to look at new media=s impact on reporting is to examine the factors that will drive the change.

1. The linear nature of reporting is breaking down: Good print reporters always know their target; more depth than broadcast news, less than the weeklies, all in 24 hour increments ending with each day=s deadline. Eleven AM stories are rewarded in tomorrow=s morning edition, as are eight PM stories if the editor is willing and production can handle the copy. Follow up spreads, albeit using the initial story as research, start from near scratch.

Today, this restrictive but vaguely comfortable pattern is vanishing. Reporters must consider getting every story on the web site, in some depth, as soon as it can be corroborated. The 11AM story should be available by 11:45, leapfrogging even broadcast channels loathe to do Abreak ins@ and whose audience is at largely at work. Challenging in itself, this new immediacy is layered on the traditional reporting focus of getting the entire story for the next edition, now organized so that both the web visitor and the print-only reader will find value enough to keep them coming back. The follow up, now more easily contemplated because of the web=s infinite space, must be planned early in the effort so it can be available within a day or two. Perhaps more than any other single factor, this need for Avirtual@ reporting is the best evidence that having separate print and online reporting staffs won=t work. Two people just can=t think like one nor can they justify two or more salaries to do what is fast becoming one job.

The new world of reporting in three dimensions, without the leveling effect of the 24-hour production cycle, also means that a reporter cannot spend most of the day in the field then rush back to the office to create copy before deadline. Deadline is always Anow@ when news is happening, suggesting that reporters be equipped with laptops, cellular modems and the software to reproduce their office editorial environments wherever they go. Tomorrow=s reporter must not be forced to choose between the investigative and editorial portions of the job. Inexpensive in today=s market, you=d expect to see these devices in every reporter=s hand but they are rare even among the big dailies.

2. Content is no longer two-dimensional: News copy has always had one overriding feature; it was words and pictures; two-dimensional just as the pages for which it was bound. The Web has changed all that. Now, good copy is often a mix of text (including pictures, video and audio) and links to other content. The story can include by reference anything published electronically without making the core story any longer or less easily consumed. Indeed, web users expect to be referred to relevant sites with data to contribute to the core story. The question, of course, is who finds, organizes and includes these links. Traditionally, print reporters have left this function to the online staff, sometimes aided by second shift Acopy editors@ pressed into service to get the story up on the web site before midnight.

This too, is changing as the nature of the base news product becomes more unified. Each reporter must conduct electronic research in the preparation for the story and should include the fruits of this research in the copy itself. Heavy reliance on special staff to fill out the references is both too expensive and too disconnected from the reporter=s thinking processes to endure. Perhaps our laptop computer should serve also as a portable research station capable of capturing links to sites used in the reporting process. In any case, reporters must take readers along on the electronic journeys that underlie important parts of a story.

3. ACurrent Events@ have become truly Current: Anyone who watches CSPAN has seen seasoned reporters covering a news conference completely fail to ask about some event or disclosure available on the web just a few hours or minutes before. With so much data available electronically, often within minutes of its release, reporters must be prepared to conduct an electronic sweep immediately before interviewing a source just to know for sure what to ask about and how to evaluate the answers. Unasked questions are assumed to be immaterial and Aold news@ within 24 hours.

To keep up, reporters must have the knowhow and tools to stay in touch with the constantly unfolding tapestry of events, disclosures and accusations. The remote laptop, again, becomes a key resource as, perhaps, does an online research department at headquarters. A simple message relayed to the research group before an interview, Aget me everything on...@, could quickly produce an electronic list of key data, arming the reporter with question topics and serving notice on the interviewee that timing is no longer a dodge.

Underlying these and other changes in the reporter=s world must be a new mode of thinking about the best way to inform a paying public. Reporters must understand the new resources available to get the news out, and face the public=s expectation for how those resources should be organized and integrated. Only then will they produce a unified news product worthy of a loyal subscriber base that has made the fourth estate both a critical part of our culture and a bulwark of our freedom.