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The old Enquirer building, Downtown Cincinnati
Q: What animal has a dickhead halfway up its back?
We haven’t explained TCM’s general position on the Cincinnati Enquirer yet. This means that it’s probably time to delve into that a little bit.
It is this blog’s opinion that the the Cincinnati Enquirer is a dying newspaper. This is evidenced through the well-publicized newsroom cuts it’s had to make over the last few years, the multiple size reductions that it’s had to make, and the overwhelming reduction in quality that we’ve seen since these stories were printed.
Couple all this with a poorly built and difficult-to-navigate website, and the apparent fact that upper management doesn’t clearly understand new/social media, and you get the Enquirer.
All this said, the loss of the last paper we have left is something that would be terrible. Never you mind the fact that they haven’t given us all that much to cheer about, get excit:ed about, or even appreciate over the past few years–a city without a newspaper is pretty much akin to a man marooned on a dangerous island. If we don’t know what happens in our community, we don’t know our community. A newspaper, good or bad, gauges a city’s reputation, keeps it in check, and maintains it through the stories it publishes. This is something that the Enquirer has lost sight of, I feel, over the last few years. Until this article was published.
A: A policehorse.
If you haven’t read it, or didn’t feel like clickin’, here’s the deal: the Enquirer broke off a fucking brilliant piece of investigative reporting wherein they expose a little bit of petty corruption in the Cincinnati Police Department. It’s a complicated situation, but here’s a quick rundown, as I understand it:
- Mounted police officer dresses his horse up in Steelers garb.
- “Concerned citizen” writes letter to Tom Streicher essentially saying that such is bullshit.
- Streicher agrees.
- This lights a controversy wherein the original officer and his superiors are in a he said/she said war of words–the officer says that his superior told him to dress the horse in Steelers garb and/or approved it, and the superior says she didn’t, even in the face of damning evidence that she did.
In the end, nobody wins here. Except for the Enquirer, who managed to break off a good, solid piece of reporting. Now, I understand that our city’s only newspaper doesn’t necessarily deserve applause, that they’re only doing exactly what they should be doing. That’s not my point here–I’m only trying to encourage more reporting like this.
I know that our readership isn’t anywhere close to the Cincinnati Enquirer’s, and that we don’t have a reputation, much less a good one. But it’s my opinion that the only thing that will save the Enquirer at this point isn’t more advertising, or a size change, or moving its printing operations out of town. It’s good reporting like this, which points out a serious problem in our community–that’s what people want to read. We don’t give a shit about your reporters’ Twitter-branding, or your poorly informed efforts to “evolve.” Just keep publishing hard-hitting journalism, and we’ll keep appreciating it. We promise.
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Brilliant. Enough said.
[...] changed my mind. Right after the Cincinnati Enquirer published what we posited to be a great investigative piece, they turn around and publish [...]
As the person who wrote our social media plan at the Enquirer, I’m all ears as to how we could be better informed when it comes to social media. I consider myself to be pretty well-researched on the subject, but by no means an expert. Please drop me a line.
@Mandy: (I think we may have met when I was down there a few times). I can’t speak for Jason et al here, but you can talk with Chris Graves about the properties we discussed (and some that I demo’d) about social media plans for media agencies. I understand that you’re in some ways hamstrung by the multi-layer CMS you have…and maybe the reason of us haven’t seen the full effect of the SM implementation (I know it took us 18 months of building just to get our CMS and site interactive-ready at MIT), but the interactivity with the news isn’t there (also understanding that Gannett rolled out the site design which is lacking in many ways). I’m flying to England to speak at a media conference about business, news and social media – talking with lots of really smart British folks who are truly engaging with their networks using ARG-like platforms and centralized networks to move citizen journalists and reporters together, then visualizing that data in ways not being done much here. Clearly an issue that many traditional companies are struggling with – but folks like Pegasus News are starting to get their heads around it. Even Jay Rosen has an interesting idea for bug-tracking the news for corrections. All kinds of interactivity through social media that aren’t being used by the Enquirer (or Gannett). You can combine those three things — engagement, news and business — into powerful tool. Simply having a Twitter account for reporters, for instance, is the *least* interesting thing that can be done with this technology.
Hi, Mandy. I’m not an expert on social media, and I don’t really think I’d be qualified to give you any pointers. I suppose that what I’m primarily getting at, though, when I state that Enquirer upper management doesn’t seem to fully understand social media, is that making reporters open Twitter accounts in order to “brand themselves,” so to speak, seems like stacking stuff on top of other stuff, when it’s possible to roll it all together. Now, that said, in order to be able to do that kind of ‘rolling’ would maybe require a complete re-do and simplification of the Enquirer’s website. Simplifying things from a complicated place can be a very, very difficult thing to do, and I’m not begrudging anyone that.
[...] bravo Enquirer for bringing this stuff to the forefront. I know that applause for simply doing your job might [...]