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> > 1. Recently, we introduced shovelware to our site that enables us to 
> > automatically place our news stories onto our web site. Consequently, we 
> > need our news staff to help us by coding their stories properly. Some get 
> > it. Others say it's our job to put out the newspaper on the web, not 
> > theirs. I'd appreciate any tips from those of you out there who have made 
> > this transition. Or, if you'd like to share any horror stories, misery 
> > loves company.

 In reply to the above, Christopher Miller wrote:
>
>That's simply a matter of altering their job descriptions,
>the ones they've been doing the same way for years.  You must have
>power from high places.

I couldn't agree more emphatically with Christopher. In my experience
newsroom cooperation with online efforts is an oxymoron in any case,
especially if the latter is driven by 'visionary' individuals rather than
by unanimous and high powered policy decisions. 

Having been involved in the setup of online efforts eBeeld
(http://www.ebeeld.com) and Pretoria Online (http://www.pretline.co.za) for
newspaper Beeld, cooperation with regular newspaper staffers emerged as one
of the major problems. 

While staffers and management are ostensibly prepared to help, even
excitedly so at times, this does not work out in real life. Part of the
problem is that the merit system in this case revolved around a so-called
"Core Performance Area" (CPA) system which is actually a fancy name for a
job description.  Viewing themselves as underpaid and overworked to start
with,  reporters are judged against their CPA's and are often under
pressure to stick to the standards set out by the CPA. Catch them on a bad
day and they will tell you it's not their job to hand you stories on a
tray, let alone getting involved in basic formatting for the web. It's not
part of the CPA, you see. I concur with Christopher: Change the job
descriptions.

I also believe that management at newspapers (all over) labour under a
delusion that they already have the content and putting it on the web
should not necessarily entail any additional work or effort. Apart from
this view opening up the way for unadulterated shovelware that may or may
not be suited to the web, it does not hold true - even with shovelware.
Added to this we had to contend with an additional workload of translating
mostly Afrikaans copy to the English lingua franca of the web. 

Perhaps because they were freelancers without CPA's, the translators could
be coerced into helping with basic formatting (cleaning up copy that was
copied and pasted from a Windows-based editorial system and adding all
those little 
's and 
's. A system that the IT people devised to
export editorial copy to HTML turned out to be slower than actually doing
it manually as it had to be cleaned up again.

In the end it comes down to people and their willingness to cooperate. Not
software or systems. When I recently initiated a four day webcasting
exercise together with a group of enthusiastic and dedicated, albeit
totally inexperienced journalism students from the Pretoria Technikon, the
actual exercise turned out to be bliss when compared to the preceding
months of experience with editorial staffers tied down to CPA's. We devised
a very simple system of templates, writing was done in Notepad and putting
it all together was a simple issue of copying and pasting directly onto the
templates. It worked better and faster than any other web publishing effort
I have ever been involved with. Can this kind of cooperation by enforced by
changing job descriptions? Perhaps.




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