A couple of interesting quotes about this business of newspapering.
Al Neuharth, celebrating 25 years of USA Today, in an interview with Forbes:
I don’t want to sound like the railroad chiefs when they said that they’d be OK forever when the airplanes came along, but I do think that newspapers printed on newsprint will be around for a long, long time. I’m not sure they will show large circulation growth. They may not show much circulation growth at all. Some might show less. But I think the hunger for news and information in every sense is so great around the world that there will be more and more consumers of news and information in more and more ways. I’d just be surprised if newspapers were eliminated.
And, in a widely-quoted memo from New York Times assistant editor Jonathan Landman:
Times have changed. Our online storytelling skills have evolved to the point where you really can get the whole story without reading a newspaper article. It’s a remarkably rich experience that goes well beyond using video or maps or pictures to tell a story—something we (and others) have done well many times. The innovation lies in putting them together in a way that tells the story with all the nuance, comprehensiveness, authority and depth that define The New York Times. (It’s hard to imagine online storytelling at this level coming from a non-integrated newsroom. Neither ‘newspaper people’ nor ‘web people’ could have done it alone.)
Neither statement cancels the other, of course: they’re two parts of the same story. But the most surprising of the two is Landman’s, not because it’s not true but because it’s coming from an august ink-on-paper institution.
SOURCES: I WANT MEDIA CYBERJOURNALIST.NET | TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, PRINT, ONLINE, storytelling
