How Can Print Not Get It?

This is pretty alarming. Jeff Jarvis said most of it here. Basically the Philadelphia Inquirer has now issued an executive order for all staffers to jump in their Deloreans and go back a few decades. If there's a sudden run on Deloreans, staffers are ordered to stick their heads in the sand. From the memo:

"Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won't post those stories online until they're in print. We'll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we'll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson."

Memo to the Inquirer: Those aren't blogs. Blogs are vehicles for emerging stories and a direct line from a reporter to an audience-- no editors in between. The best bloggers are efficient at breaking news because they throw things out there and use the responses they get to dig further. Many of my best stories evolve from a blog post or the comments I get on one. Blogs aren't dumping grounds for news that's not important enough for the paper, nor are they your vehicle to simply promote stories from the paper. As Ted Stevens says: "The Internet is NOT a dump truck."

Jarvis advised that Inquirer staffers "get out now." Yeah, cause it's that easy?

Reporters are smart. Sure, there are some in denial, but everyone I know at a daily knows it's a big ol' sinking ship. They look at the numbers. They look at the several-times-a-year layoffs. They look at the morale. But news is a world that's transitioning from print to online-- and not taking equal revenues with it. The sad truth is there are simply not enough jobs in the online world (yet?) to match up with every legacy print reporter. It's musical chairs right now and many of the savviest reporters I know (Kara Swisher, Om Malik, Matt Marshall) took their seats long ago.

The bigger question to me is what journalism schools are teaching, because anecdotally I hear it's the same curriculum heavily weighted towards AP style newspaper reporting. No offense to anyone, but I always thought journalism was a wasted degree. I know more people who went to journalism school who are not working journalists than are. You just learn more on the job-- and even in the past many journalism schools tended to ignore there were other types of journalism than the daily paper. In recent months a lot of aspiring journalists have contacted me for advice. I always ask what their career goals are. Not a single one has ever said the de facto answer for generations: Work for The New York Times. (Or, if you like, insert Washington Post or Wall Street Journal) If journalism schools are indeed still hewing to that model-- they're far more deluded than the Inquirer.