You may have seen Paul Farhi’s interview with Jeff Bezos in today’s Washington Post, the newspaper he’s buying for $250 million. If you saw it in print, you found it on Page A1, on the left below the fold. If you saw it on washingtonpost.com, who knows how you found it — Twitter? a Google Alert? an email newsletter? — but once you did, you saw a URL that started with /lifestyle/style/ and “Style” emblazoned on top of the page.
Since when is an interview with the new billionaire owner of a newspaper a Lifestyles/Style story?
Old newspaper hands know that the Post’s Style section has long had an unusual-for-American-newspapers relationship with the paper as a whole — sometimes covering the same political stories that an A-section reporter does, but from a different angle. Style has been a big Post asset. But that unusual divide isn’t really the issue here: It’s that the story in the print paper actually ran on A1, not in Style. So if it’s a business story on A1, why does it get a big Style banner?
Answering this question falls somewhere short of a national crisis, but it still got some smart people riled up. A cast of characters: Dan Sinker runs Knight-Mozilla OpenNews; Alex Howard writes from D.C. on nerdy issues; J. Freedom du Lac works at the Post; Jacob Harris codes for The New York Times.
Job one for Jeff Bezos: get someone to stop putting media business news in the style section. pic.twitter.com/rdXLiYlmjx
— dan sinker (@dansinker) September 3, 2013
@brianstelter And it ran in the "lifestyle" section? Someone must have reserved a sense of humor over there..
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) September 3, 2013
So why’d it run there? Turns out the answer has to do with where Paul Farhi’s desk is:
@digiphile @brianstelter accounting, really. @farhip is on the Style staff. so his stories default to lifestyle on our site.
— J. Freedom du Lac (@jfdulac) September 3, 2013
Some folks didn’t like that explanation.
@digiphile that is the world's most shit explanation.
— dan sinker (@dansinker) September 3, 2013
@dansinker @digiphile I really hate how print layout determines desk structuring determines site design for newspapers.
— Jacob Harris (@harrisj) September 3, 2013
@harrisj @digiphile IT IS MAXIMUM CRAZY.
— dan sinker (@dansinker) September 3, 2013
@digiphile "His stuff defaults there," is a shit explanation for anyone publishing on the web. Mind-boggling.
— dan sinker (@dansinker) September 3, 2013
@dansinker @digiphile It’s a pretty weird example of Path Dependence.
— Jacob Harris (@harrisj) September 3, 2013
@kissane @harrisj @dansinker I default to blaming this sort of thing on CMS structure that maps print cow paths onto the Web.
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) September 3, 2013
@digiphile @kissane @harrisj The shorthand for that explanation is "stupid decisionmaking"
— dan sinker (@dansinker) September 3, 2013
They’re arguing, in other words, that a print structure — and the system of “desks” and “sections” in the modern American newspaper evolved in a manner particular to its print-centric, production-minded context — shouldn’t constrain the needs of digital publishing. As in:
@digiphile @kissane @dansinker When it gets especially crazy is when you have Enterprise subjects that multiple desks contribute to.
— Jacob Harris (@harrisj) September 3, 2013
@kissane @harrisj @digiphile as much as the HuffPo "sideboob" section makes me want to set fire to the world, AT LEAST THEY CAN DO THAT.
— dan sinker (@dansinker) September 3, 2013
@dansinker @kissane @harrisj the shorthand @jayrosen_nyu provided is that “the print folks won,” over a decade ago. And here we are.
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) September 3, 2013
@digiphile @dansinker @kissane @jayrosen_nyu I would just say that online organization followed print structure. Not “won” more “was there”
— Jacob Harris (@harrisj) September 3, 2013
And, Sideboob aside, they mention another born-digital news organization that doesn’t stick to rigid, topic-based structure.
@dansinker @digiphile It seems like @qz is on to something by not organizing around sections.
— Jacob Harris (@harrisj) September 3, 2013
Again: The fact that a Jeff Bezos interview ran with a /lifestyles/ URL and a Style banner doesn’t mean much. I doubt it cost the story a single reader. But it’s good to be reminded that, as part of the newspaper industry’s sleepwalk into digital, it carried a lot of old habits/workflows/assumptions with it. And dealing with that fact — a fact that, again, is far broader in scope than a URL structure — will be one of the keys to how Bezos and his team can turn the Post around.
