A Sincere Thanks To Ellen Foley, Editor Of The Wisconsin State Journal

I write from my heart on this blog.  If I feel it, I post it.  One of my deep affections, as my readers know, are journalists of all stripes.  In particular, I admire those who work for newspapers.  So when I posted recently about the changes in the Wisconsin State Journal, I did so because I care about newspapers. 

But I also know that others, such as Ellen Foley, Editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, also care deeply about the industry in which they work.  We might disagree on the ways to make the newspaper better, but we both want a solid end result.  So I wish to print the reply that Ellen Foley posted on my blog, as a sincere way to show equal time and fairness about the recent changes to the paper.

I deeply respect the time she took to respond to my blog post.

She writes:

Oh, where do I begin?

Well, it sure is good to know that I am a nice person to know! That made my day. Thank you, blogmaster.

OK, I’ll take the bait.

Our job as WSJ editors was to revamp a newspaper that helps the busy readers of the Madison area make sense of their world. As a broad audience publication, we have a mission to help the traditional reader, such as the keeper of this blog, and the marginal readers, who are mostly younger people who work at the State Capitol and attend, teach and administrate at the UW-Madison. So it ain’t easy to please all of the people all of the time.

Using some of the techniques that USA Today has used, such as color headers, to help busy people navigate the paper was a smart choice by our design gurus. Clustering content in places where readers can find it reliably was also a very good idea. Changing the fonts to a more readable and bold type also enhances our newsier approach in our trend stories, watchdog stories and analyses. Giving younger and female readers content, such as Page Two, that offers them an entertaining break in their hectic days, has also been very popular.

I know traditionalist don’t like it. For them, we have developed the In-depth page and meaty summaries of national and international news. We brought back food and cooking coverage. We are working very hard to put sharper edges on our news stories.

Modern newspapers gave up being the breaking news franchise in about 2001. 9/11 was a defining moment for me. By the time we give our readers our latest available stories at 1 a.m. on most days, the other media on cable, televison, radio and the Internet will have had those stories for hours. So our strategy is to break news in our paper in a second-day way and to post bulletins on our website for the true breaking news.

We also are having a blast using the new tools of the digital frontier to tell stories in very evocative ways. Check out our Hip Hop 101 or our Devil’s Lake feature. Again, we know you traditionalists do not care. We know you want us to be stenographers for the commissions and city council and legislature and the school board. While that turns on government groupies, research tells us it turns off the great majority of readers and sends them to junk TV, catalogs, and even soup can labels. In the end, it will deter civic engagement because readers will stop taking in any information about community issues.

I, like many other editors of larger papers, are managing a transition of local news coverage from the ink-on-paper channel to an Internet channel. The ink-on-paper technology is very good and I don’t see it disappearing for a long time. But I do see a moment in the next five years or so when the under-30 generation (and there are 82 million of them!) will rarely read a newspaper and will instead get their news on their phone or some other brilliant device that has not even been invented. As a journalist, I really don’t care if our work at community building and truth telling is read on paper or via cellphone. I want to make sure that all ages have a comfortable way of taking in and absorbing information. I want to make sure that our journalists — YOUR journalists — can nimbly figure out how to get information to the community in a way that makes it relevant and easy to use.

Are we tweaking the changes that we made this week? You betcha. (The biggest complaint BY FAR has to do with the spacing in Cryptoquote.) Will we have made some mistakes that we need to change? Count on it! We are adept at change over here near the Fish Hatching. We appreciate any suggestions.

I’ve written lots about this in the past three years and you can find that at http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/column/foley//index.php?ntid=265708&ntpid=1.

I also am blogging and you can find that at http://www.madison.com/wsj/blogs/inciteful/index.php?ntid=265941&ntpid=1.

Best, Ellen

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