Online enterprise reporting: How to get it right

The longer I was involved in online journalism, the more I realized how different it needs to be from what print newsrooms are used to. The more, too, I realized that much of what I thought was a part of “good journalism” was really just good print journalism.

Here’s another case in point: enterprise stories. The traditional newspaper project, whether a single day or a short series, almost always started on a Sunday. And while the reporting might take weeks or months, publication itself only occupied at most a few days. Certainly there were exceptions, but most editors and reporters will recognize the above description.

That approach runs into several problems when you shift it online. Among them:

• Working on a project takes time and people away from the daily, even hourly, task of filling up your site with fresh headlines.
• When all the work does come to fruition, it blossoms on the site for only a few days at best — for less than a day, at worst, depending on other news and how you design your homepage.
• If the project is truly groundbreaking — covering things you haven’t reported on — your site will have little credibility in the topic as far as Google is concerned, so people who care about it may not find your stories even if they look.
• By the same token, people who do look at your site regularly won’t have had their interest in the topic developed, so they may skip the headlines they do see.
• If people do stumble across a part of the package after it first publishes, they may not realize it’s part of a larger effort unless it’s packaged smartly.

Some of these issues can be addressed through smart packaging and use of social media, or simply through posting when traffic is peaking rather than on the weekend. Those are things Steve Buttry mentions in his recent post about teaching his company’s papers to unbolt from the “Sunday” idea. He also has many good ideas (which apply to all stories) about rethinking the components of projects to make them more at home online.

But when I was asked a short time ago about how enterprise could work online, I realized that it’s not just about adding digital elements. We need to rethink entirely how we approach the concept.

Months of posts, not just months of reporting

One-shot stories or short-term series are too flash-in-the-pan. Instead, newsrooms should conceive of enterprise ideas as themes that will cover at least several months’ worth of content. Instead of reporting and reporting and then producing a splash, posts should appear throughout the course of the reporting. The reporters should maintain a blog that combines elements of their own reporting with aggregation.

The project may include one or more splashes, but they must happen in the context of a broader kind of reporting. In this way, the big stories will benefit from the months of posts leading up to them; they will build reader interest and search-engine credibility.

Being able to package the splashes with a lot of other content will offer many more clicking opportunities for outsiders who run across a single post through a search or a social-media link.

Another advantage of the post-as-you-go system: The project doesn’t drag down the site during the months of reporting leading up to the splashes. While the reporters may be less productive for certain periods, they should never sink out of sight completely. Even if they have to take a break from their regular coverage, they should still be producing project-related posts.

Topics, not stories

One way to think about this: Enterprise should become a way of creating mini-beats. They may last six or nine months, or they may prove so popular that they become permanent.

Topics for traditional enterprise projects often aren’t as broad. Say, for example, you plan a project about what it takes to rebuild a local bridge. That could produce a nice, splashy print package — big graphic, timeline, etc. But spread out over months, that could get boring. It won’t be of much use after the bridge is done. And it probably won’t have much interest outside your local area.

Instead, make your theme the safety of bridges, or even crumbling infrastructure in general. Now you can aggregate stories from around the country. You can create a database of local bridges, with details about when they were build, what kind they are, when they were rehabbed — and plan to keep it up to date. Amid that work, you can look more closely at the bridge that’s being rebuilt.

Is that asking too much? If you were doing the job right in the first place, you weren’t just looking at that one bridge, anyway. You were reading up on other bridges and related issues for background. You were asking questions about why this particular bridge was being rebuilt now. The difference with online is that instead of relegating that information to a sidebar, or a few lines in a bigger story, or just some stuff buried in your notebook, you report it as you go along.

As an example, The Plain Dealer did a project a few years ago about the Cleveland Clinic’s heart unit. The basic idea was to camp out in the unit for a time — it turned out to be 26 hours. Of course, it took much advance reporting to lead up to those 26 hours, and it took a crowd of reporters and visual journalists to cover the whole unit during that time. The story of those 26 hours said a lot about the heart unit overall. But it ran as an eight-part series and … and it was over, except for some scattered follow-ups. (The reporting did get turned into an app, but that’s a story for another day.)

In the run-up to publication, we scrambled to figure out how to draw the attention of health professionals around the country. What if, rather than waiting for that one big splash, we had made heart care our focus for the year? If we’d held online Q&As with heart specialists from around the country, created a blog that aggregated advances in heart care every day, packaged all of it from Day One?

Other things to think about

STAFFING: More than ever, enterprise has to be a group project. With shrinking staffs and increasing demand for content, the days when one reporter could disappear for six months on a single story are going extinct. Buttry writes about all the different kinds of content that can be used — video, audio, data, photos, graphics, reader engagement, on and on. No one person can do all of that and do it all well.

EDITING: No matter what you do to your editing process on regular stories, projects should get special attention. These are your showpieces, the best that you can do. That requires coaching during the reporting and editing afterward. If you still have some copy editors, by all means use them.

LONG TAIL: A key factor in choosing the topic for enterprise should be long-term potential. It’s not an absolute, but it is important. Considering all the time and effort you’ll put in to a project, you want to be able to see a payoff for years to come.

UPDATES: Projects should never really die. Even if you don’t keep adding content, you must keep them up to date. Just as you have a tickler file to remind you of upcoming news events (you do have a tickler file, don’t you?), you must set up regular reminders to check the project posts for needed updates and fixes.

Can this really work?

More than a decade ago, long before we paid much attention to online, I was asked to manage our coverage of the bankruptcy of LTV Corp., which was largely driven by the condition of its LTV Steel unit. The company was based in Cleveland and its local mill was among our largest employers, so this was a big deal. On top of that, Cleveland had been a steel center for much of its history. I was able to assemble a team of six reporters working full- or part-time on the story.

But we still had to produce daily business sections. So I committed to producing more than just a few big hits and some news stories. We expanded our sights to include coverage of the steel industry overall (we went to Indiana, Pennsylvania, South Korea and Russia). We explored bankruptcy proceedings in general and the state of the nation’s retirement system. We profiled every major steel facility in Ohio.

This took a lot of time and manpower. We borrowed reporters from other departments for specific stories, on top of the original six. But it worked: We kept the business section in business. And we built up tremendous credibility with readers and sources. On top of that, many of the stories we wrote had resonance long after LTV went under.

If I were looking at enterprise projects for a newsroom today, I’d start with a model like that. I’d think about the pieces differently — we didn’t have the ability to do much online then — but as with LTV, I’d look beyond the big splash to a broader theme.

If you don’t do that — if you add online widgets but still only target a short run of posts — you’re throwing a lot of effort away and giving up a lot of potential readers.