Is your newsroom naked?

A guy with my job walks through a lot of newsrooms, and being a corporate suit I'm often in there relatively early.

One thing is unmistakably apparent: we're still staffed and organized for a daily deadline sometime in the evening.

Since we produce newspapers, that's both inevitable and appropriate – but it's no longer sufficient.

Anders Gyllenhaal briefed our editors at the San Diego meeting last month about how the Miami Herald is working to become a continuous news operation. Not everybody has all the Herald's resources to apply to this (okay, nobody else in our company) but there's a fundamental lesson here for us all.

You need to be working early to ensure fresh and enticing websites for the audience that shows up looking for news. It's easy to learn readership patterns from Omniture data; perhaps more importantly, we've also learned how easy it is to change and influence those patterns.

If you build it (and it's good), they will come.