Making Newspapers Better by Not Worrying About Paper
My friends at Duo Consulting are building the new website for the Christian Science Monitor as it makes its historic move to a 24/7 online publication, with a weekly print edition that explores the news in depth.
The Monitor’s editors have written a note to subscribers explaining the changes, with a slideshow of the new website. It’s an impressive effort, and one I’m sure other newspapers are watching for clues to their own futures.
The strength of the Internet is twofold. When stories are constantly developing, like the current Israeli military operation in Gaza, I want to keep up to date as often as possible, and I can best do that online. Also, I can choose the topics and stories I’m most interested in following, and do so using a variety of sources.
A magazine-style print edition, such as the one the Monitor will debut later this spring, is an ideal format for printing the longer form stories that give people a fuller picture of events. In the case of the current Gaza operation, the print edition could contain:
- A story examining the history of Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel, so readers could understand the context in which the Israeli government felt it was necessary to launch the Gaza operation.
- A story profiling a Palestinian family that lives in Gaza, but has relatives living in Israel or the West Bank, or has family members that cross the border because they work in Israel. That could give readers a picture of the practical and political challenges facing everyday people.
Digital and print aren’t mutually exclusive, especially because these longer-form pieces that put an event in its proper context should be available online, where they’re searchable, linkable and archived. But the bottom line is that the “death of newspapers” is the wrong story to focus on.
Regardless of whether paper disappears as a medium for delivering news (ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader are trying to become the digital successors), the combination of immediate updates and in-depth examination of issues is the best way to provide a relevant and durable source of information that keeps us fully informed about the true complexity of issues.
For more on this:
- My focus group of one – A VC
- The Sky is Falling! – O’Reilly Radar
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Bill Boyd says:
Jan 11th, 2009
The most important thing is not whether you publish electronically or on paper. It’s whether you have an intact news organization gathering, analyzing and reporting the news. Fortunately for all of us, The Christian Science Monitor will move into the digital future with its newsroom largely intact and continue to deliver high-quality journalism. That’s not the case at some other papers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was offered for sale last week with a 60-day deadline. If no purchasers come forward, the paper will close or continue as an online-only product with a far smaller staff. In most markets, newspapers set the news agenda. So, yes, the “death of newspapers” is something we should deeply care about and work (where we can) to prevent. We may not know what we had until we try to live without it.