I continue to hear that more and more newspapers requiring reporters to hit story quotas, writing five, six, seven and more stories per week to fill the paper, in addition to posting to the web throughout the day.
Editors and publishers, here’s the deal: you’re measuring the wrong thing. Providing a lot of stories is not the same as providing service to readers.
Here is the real impact of quotas:
Reporters often subvert their good news judgment to reach an artificial number. Consequently, news items that merit all of three paragraphs (or no coverage whatsoever) get turned into eight or nine paragraphs so that the reporter gets a byline and meets the day’s quota.
Meanwhile, as reporters focus on that relatively inconsequential story, important stories, stories that have the potential to affect a large number of people, go unreported. They take too much time, require too much digging and too many interviews. Spend one day reporting a story without writing means you’re in the hole — you must write two or three stories the next day to catch up to your quota.
There’s no relief.
The result: The newspaper staff is worn out and demoralized. But editors can crow that the paper is community-based and filled with local stories.
But that’s the spin based on the wrong measurement. What really happens too often is that readers page through the paper, shopping for a story that interests them. They find little and wonder why the paper isn’t writing about important things, or at least, interesting ones. Readers lose trust in the paper, and they turn to other sources.
You know, the Internet has all the stories any person could ever want.
It is true that every marketing survey of news content I’ve seen says that readers want “more.” But it’s not more “stuff.” It’s more content that affects their lives. Story quotas provide one side of that equation but not the other.
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Excellent points. A corporate friend of mine at a major newspaper conglomerate used to visit their newspapers and demand a certain number of stories from reporters. He also required they include at least two quotes from minorities to show diversity–whether the people selected knew the issues or not.
That pretty much summarizes the newspaper business today.
Quotas are a cure for a symptom, not the disease. The disease is lack of relevancy to the readership, and a contributing cause of the disease are reporters who couldn’t find relevance if it were delivered on a silver platter. It’s easier to manage by objective numbers, but the more difficult task is making subjective judgments regarding each employee’s contribution to the overall relevance of the enterprise.
Bingo. I’ve worked under quotas and I’ve seen them do exactly what you’ve described: Reporters start churning out junk to keep editors off their backs.
Readers notice, readership drops and advertisers lose confidence in us.
Publishers who require quotas don’t understand how a news department should work and need to trust their editorial department.
Editors who require quotas don’t have the backbone, or the training, to lead and need to get out.
As a publisher and editor who also does the court and crime beat and all major investigations, I see this from all sides. Quotas are indeed poison, for all the reasons mentioned. The key is to teach reporters which interesting stories can be done quickly (but accurately and with adequate verification) so there is time for doing that one or two stories each week–and maybe one that can be done as time permits over a period of weeks–that will meet the “Hey Muade” test. Wish I could remember the paper but it was in the northern US–Michigan I think–and the publisher had one rule: He wanted the staff to be certain there was at least one story each week that was on the front page and would allow “Dad” to jump from his easy chair, paper in hand, and go to wherever “Mom” was saying, “Hey, Maude, you’ve got to read this story in the paper.” (He made it clear that he wanted just as many stories where it was “Mom”, “Hey Joe”.) Too often, we forget what readers want–something that excites them, as well as all the staples. Some of my readers rebel if we don’t cover the monthly meeting of the water board, others rebel if we miss the city board meeting for a town of 250 in our coverage area, etc. We can’t attend all in person, but if we do our jobs right we can make one or two phone calls armed with the agenda and a knowledge of the people, talk to the clerk who took minutes, and write a story that both presents the facts and is interesting to read. The only quota for an editor, whether in a community or a big city, is how often a friend, acquaintance or even stranger who finds out his job, says, “Hey, that was a really great story the other day about XXX–I read every word. Fascinating (or outrageous, or chilling, or made me laugh, or made me cry).” And if that means some secondary stories get just a few grafs–because that is all they are worth–there’s a word for that: Good news judgment and good time management.
Quotas are implemented by managers who don’t know how to manage. They can’t hire well, they can’t motivate well and they can’t fire well.