Sunday 3 April 2011

Column, or news?

Sun Media columns posted online should be designated columns, not news stories, says a TSF reader

He offers a Joe Warmington column posted online at the St. Catharines Standard as an example.


The TSF reader, who is absolutely correct, writes:

"I have noticed that more and more QMI articles are becoming more inclusive of commentaries rather than objective journalism that I am accustomed to reading.

"What's more troubling is that they are not labelled as columnist's articles when they in fact, are. I take journalism quite seriously and this is becoming a common issue in Quebecor-owned newspapers. Why is this being tolerated? Whatever happened to objective journalism?"

News is news, opinionated columns are opinionated columns.

9 comments:

  1. What the reader doesn't understand is that a computer program and someone in India takes those stories off the system and just auto posts them to the other papers.

    The guy or girl in India has no clue what is a news story or column. It's why so many stories end up all over the place on the websites or local stories end up filed under national, etc.

    You get what you pay for.

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  2. It doesn't even look like the smaller Sun family sites have columnist sections.

    And since when has the online editorial stuff been outsourced to India?

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  3. Sun Media's community newspapers do not have "columnist" sections on their extremely limited website templates. Perhaps if they were upgraded to at least match the urbans, these types of problems could be avoided.
    There is no outsourcing to India. Ridiculous statement.

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  4. Yeah, no one has ever heard of website stuff being outsourced to India. It wouldn't make sense at all.

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  5. I think a lot of these websites would be better if they were outsourced somewhere. At least then there would be someone actually working on them and paying attention to what they look like, instead of content just being dumped on.

    For all the company talks about online being the future, it certainly isn't devoting many resources to it. You can't make a decent looking, user friendly news site by cutting corners and having people just cut and paste content into some automated form or whatever.

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  6. Oh so website postings from India would make no sense but layout and calls for subscriptions do. I humbly apologize.

    Either way, the sites get updated by someone who has no idea if it's a local item it a column. They see "news" and that's where it goes. The non-Subsites are a mess.

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  7. There are lots more troubles with the websites than this..... nothing against the NOJHL but have you noticed that the Bloggers section is constantly filled with posts about the NOJHL? I'll give these bloggers their due for being enthusiastic however readers have asked why these are on our site.

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  8. The company needs more bloggers like the NOJHL guy. He posts on a regular basis and he's got a good audience of people who actually care about what he's writing about, largely because he provides stuff that you can't find elsewhere.

    A lot of the Sun Media blogs will be updated every few weeks for a couple of months and then just go dormant.

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  9. Re: 7:54 You are right. Very dedicated. Great example for the rest. Blogs should be an important component at all our papers but we are stretched so thin nobody has time unless they want to give us 25 points for a blog post. You look at any other major chain and there are lots of blogs but not us.

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