DOOMSAYERS have been predicting the demise of newspapers since the introduction of the wireless.
The prophets of gloom became louder when television came along, then video and more recently the internet.
Sorry to disappoint them, but newspapers in one form or another will be around forever. I spent most of last week in Melbourne at a newspaper industry conference.
Much of the discussion was unsurprisingly about the synergy between newspapers and the internet. The buzzwords were convergence and integration.
I’m the first person to admit the Kalgoorlie Miner is not exactly a world leader in harnessing the power of this synergy. In fact, to my shame, we are perhaps the only daily newspaper in the world that doesn’t have a web page, let alone a functional site.
That will change in the near future and I have no doubt it will evolve and grow over an extended period of time.
The internet is a powerful medium. It combines all the attributes of press, radio and television in one package, especially as broadband becomes more commonly available.
Anyone can publish a web site, of course. Blogs and community sites have become widely read and are recognised as news sources in their own right.
The strength of newspapers on the web is the content they can provide. Press content is seen as authoritative, objective and reliable compared with your average blogger.
The newspaper is also able to bring together content from various sections of interest (eg business, sport, entertainment, etc) and present it in one package.
The message from the Melbourne conference is that nobody in the industry has so far discovered the magic formula for seamless integration between print and the internet.
However, there are many success stories and some common themes emerge from them.
Journalists in many cases now write for both media. The catchphrase from Melbourne was “report to the web and write to the newspaper”. In other words, breaking news goes online and the detail appears in the paper.
Newspapers have employed various devices to change the culture of newsrooms to manage this transition.
Generally, it requires new thinking by journalists that deadlines for the web are non-existent and news should be reported 24 hours a day.
It’s an exciting time to be in newspapers and our motivating force over the next couple of years will be to give the community an outstanding online news service while maintaining the strength and pre-eminence of our newspaper.
A key benefit of the internet is that it’s interactive. Readers can publish their own opinions, comment on individual articles, ask questions and communicate directly with journalists.
There are no space restrictions either and everything that’s published can be archived for future reference.
My guess is that newspapers will continue to be published in print for decades to come, with a greater separation though in the style and content of the print version compared with the web.
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