A list of the built-in psychological obstacles newsrooms have toward publishing information online:

I’m no shrink, but there are a few blaring cries-for-help I see in newspaper and newspaper-dot-com land. This is a fun list of all the newsroom newspaper journalism patterns I could think of that don’t work so well on the web:

1. The Front-Page Mentality: All the most important stuff goes on the front page of a newspaper. But lookee here, on the web we can make our front pages as long and as big as we want! Let’s put all our important stuff on that front page! Make it huge! Yeah!
2. The Deadline-And-Its-Over Mentality (also known as “The Print-It-And-Its-Done Mentality”)
3. The It’s-Got-To-Be-As-Perfect-As-Possible-Before-It-Launches Mentality: This is a sister of “Deadline-And-Its-Over,” and it comes from years spent publishing information with a printing press. With a printing press, the only way to revise information that was published was to issue a correction, which was one of those Bad Things That You Did.
4. The We’re-The-Only-Game-In-Town Mentality: Competition was much easier when the competition was just radio, tv, maybe another daily. Now well … the entire internet is your competition. The.entire.internet. And, know what? There are some folk out there putting a whole heckuva lot more thought and effort into what it means to publish local information than you. Okay okay, that’s just a guess.
5. The Our-Content-Can-Only-Exist-In-One-Place Mentality: This takes a little explaining. A few of the print people doing online work who I’ve talked with about stuff say they have a hard time conceptualizing that an article headline link can be both on the home page of our site *and*, say, the opinion page section front.
6. The We-Don’t-Have-To-Listen-Unless-We-Want-To Mentality: This is a holdover from the days when the letters to the editor were the only place readers had a chance of sharing ink on a page with the professionals.

Got any more? Please, share:

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