NEWSPAPERS ONLINE, 10 YEARS ON

At the Online Journalism Review, Nora Paul take a look at the promise and reality of newspaper use of the internet, going back to what was predicted 10 years and what’s happened with those predictions. Nora delineates the promises…

• Limitless newshole
• Give me more
• Hyperlinking
• Communication between reporter and reader
• How I wrote the story
• New expressive reporting styles
• Follow-up on stories
• New relationships between words and graphics

..and finds newspapers haven’t lived up to the potential perceived a decade ago.

People often object to the term “new media” – look, it’s been around for at least a decade. But if you look closely you’ll see that the great promise that was seen for this as a new form of journalism has yet to be fully realized. New methods for crafting and delivering compelling news stories online are still a long way from being fully developed.

As interesting as the article are the comments that follow, several of them pointing out that some of the promise of what the internet could do for newspapers is being delivered outside of the mainstream media. Robert Niles concludes his response:

That’s why I think an examination of the field 10 years from now will look not at ways that traditional newsrooms could employ online technology, but at how online technology transformed the structure and function of what we now call the newsroom.

Overlooked in Nora’s article and the comments are the handful of newspapers that have made significant strides in melding the strengths of the newsroom with the strengths of the ‘net, not just the New York Times, but newspapers like the Greensboro News-Record, Spokane Statesman-Review Spokesman-Review, Ventura County Star and Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World.

TECHNORATI TAGS: ONLINE MEDIA, JOURNALISM, NEWSPAPERS