MEDIA: Inky Puts Brakes On The Internets

slow-bloggers.jpgBUZZ MACHINE: What the hell are they thinking in Philadelphia? Inquirer ME Mike Leary just sent a memo saying they are going to hold all but breaking news for the paper and even restrict bloggers from using their blogs to work on stories in progress. Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management: You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves. And my message to staff, the few of them left: Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery. MORE

POYNTER: 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 thebloggerpajamas1.jpg 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. MORE

UPDATE: We asked Chris Krewson — Executive Editor, Online/News for the Philadelphia Inquirer — to respond to the brouhaha, and here’s what he had to say: “This does not affect at least 75 percent of what we’re already doing online, from breaking news to special projects to blogs and Q&A forums. I’ll continue to maintain twitter.com/PhillyInquirer, and you’ll see all kinds of things there at all hours of the day and night. It does mean, for example, that we will be choosing with care which things maybe don’t need to be broken online – an inside-the-section sidebar on a Features story, a notebook item inside the Sports section, etc. Also, we’re aiming for impact – would it not make more sense to break a major story at 11 pm, when our online traffic is low, or 5 am the following day, when there’s a full day of traffic ahead? (Not to mention that newspaper landing on people’s doorsteps.) Thanks again for writing and asking.”

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