“What’s your editorial staff?” I asked Susan Richardson, who on September 18 takes over as editor-publisher of the venerable Chicago Reporter.
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Let’s assume the rebuilt website—underwritten by a grant from the Open Society Foundations—that the Reporter intends to roll out in a few weeks is a thing of beauty. A website is like an orca; it’s insatiable. How can Richardson’s tiny staff feed the beast and still find time for the long, probing pieces that earned it its iconic reputation? Richardson won’t be the first editor to face this dilemma. It’s such a familiar quandary that a couple of years ago I wrote a column about it. “This is the core struggle of my human existence right now,” a San Diego editor told me.
If you’re a reporter committed to long-form journalism, a blog’s a nuisance. Worse, it’s what the law calls an attractive nuisance, treacherous but irresistible—like the backyard trampoline that neighborhood kids keep sneaking in to jump on. Knowing that just a couple of hours’ work will launch your next whimsical notion into the blogosphere—and who can predict which choicely worded whimsy will go viral!—makes your blog a hard temptation to resist; but give in to it too many times and that opus you’re working on just missed its deadline.
Richardson says she noticed that articles the Texas Observer featured online and then published in the next issue reached “somewhat distinct audiences,” and even though the print audience was much smaller it was precious. Here were the Observer‘s “bedrock” readers, the ones who’d been loyal for a long time and had written the checks that kept the Observer afloat. They needed to be catered to, and they wanted ink and paper.
