Farewell, Press Gazette. Hello, the future

I've been meaning to blog for a few days about the closure of Press Gazette. As a business journalist, I'm sad to see the end of any business publication - especially one serving my profession. But I must confess that I've never been a Press Gazette reader.

Anyway, the publication's owner Wilmington Group is planning to turn the PG website into "a resource for the UK journalism community"; its editor, Dominic Ponsford, explains: "The news element of this website will cease - but Wilmington does plan to introduce new community features."

That's interesting, because there's a bit of a debate going on in my company at the moment regarding the "news element" of our community websites. The site I work for provides its particular business sector with around a dozen news stories a day, often more. Some of these are unique to the web, others are repurposed print stories.

If the number of news stories per day was cut to half a dozen, say, it would certainly free up resources to work on new features such as photo galleries, or to improve existing features such as our forums or our blogs (although both forums and blogs can offer alternative forms of news provision). But what effect would cutting the number of news stories have on our site's traffic? On our reputation? On the value of our offering?

If we reduced our news element, our reporters' roles would also change. They would spend less time working on the traditional news story and more time exploring unfamiliar concepts such as live blogging*. The question I have is: do we put so much emphasis on the straight news story because it is what serves our community best, or because it's what we're used to from print? Don't ask me, I'm just a sub.

Incidentally, it's worth reading the comments following the Wilmington statement, if only because one of the commenters tells Roy Greenslade to 'stop waving his willy about'.


*I went to a very interesting discussion on live blogging today led by my colleague Adam Tinworth of One Man and His Blog. Had I live-blogged it, it would - I suppose - have been an example of meta live blogging. Or live meta blogging. Like I said: don't ask me, I'm just a sub.

'The most miserable, put-upon job in media'

Yesterday my line manager forwarded me on a link to a Guardian Unlimited blog post by Roy Greenslade regarding the future of subs ('copy editors', for those Americans out there). In it, Greenslade says: "I can see that they will be the first journalistic victims of the digital revolution."

Although I was a little disturbed that my line manager sent this on to me – is he trying to tell me something? – I was also amused by the comments that the blog post had attracted, many of them written by reporters or subs. Among my favourites:

The reason people become reporters is because they want to find out things and see their byline on important stories. This rarely goes in hand-in-hand with being an enormous pedant who loves words, has a dirty mind and suspects that everyone else constantly makes mistakes, which is what makes a great sub.

and:

Subs, if you want to persist in the most miserable, put-upon, unappreciated and least perks-laden job in media, start coming up with ideas. You are the most talented members of staff, you must be able to do it. Tell the writers how they can improve, in a nice mentoring way, preferably in front of someone important. Make suggestions about improving the system and let the boss think it was their idea. Above all else, write stuff. They will find it much harder to get rid of you.