Floating Island

Here’s a recent example of how traditional print organizations are becoming more savvy in using the web to their advantage (via Editor & Publisher):

The San Francisco Chronicle recently broke a story of the city’s mayor’s affair with the wife of his campaign manager. (SF’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, is fairly young, photogenic, and recently divorced, so he gets a lot of media attention). Anyways, this piece highlighted the ongoing debate on breaking news online vs. waiting for the next day’s paper, plus the increased productivity offered by online editions (echoing points made at the recent FT workshop on campus).

Here’s what Peter Negulescu, the Chronicle’s vice president for digital media, had to say:

“Even two years ago, there would have been one article and there would have been a great debate about posting it on the Web the night before,” he said. “Today, we push it out to the Web site, it gets picked up by people like Drudge and Google News and the next day people are commenting on it. The press conference comes, we have raw feed of the video and the amount of content we can package around it is huge.”

The Chronicle’s website, SFGate.com, got a record number of hits for breaking the story. Its latest coverage on the affair and its aftermath can be found here.