sances.info

An interesting exchange from the May 2nd, 2008 broadcast of WGBH's Beat the Press, "Press Packet" segment.

Side note: I have been watching this show religiously since the Jayson Blair scandal, and have never seen an episode with more than one woman on the panel, excluding host Emily Rooney; and very rarely more than one minority. Why is that?

Snarky blogger comment: The reason it took me a week to type this up is that I had to edit out all the "uh's" and "yaknow's".

Joe Sciacca (Boston Herald): I think this notion that you take a newspaper and you simply take it and you sort of slap it into a website is just not the way it's going to be. It's a different vehicle for news, it looks different, writing for the web is different, because you're writing with key words that you want to be searched to get the hits; the web changes, it's a very fluid product. So that raises to me questions long term about the impact of a paper that goes entirely on the web--it's not going to be sitting on the board room table in the CEO's office, it's not going to be sitting on the Governor's desk. What's the impact in the community, what is lost when that happens? Those are I think open questions.

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Kara Miller (Metrowest Daily News): I think newspapers are going to have to find a way of putting themselves on the web. I mean look, I write a column for a newspaper and yet nobody, none of my peers subscribe to a newspaper. It doesn't mean they don't read them--I get several artices a day e-mailed to me by people, they're like "look at this"--so they're reading the New York Times online or they're going to Boston.com, but people--and in terms of having a print product on the table in a CEO's boardroom, people have their Blackberrys now, they can read on their iPhones or whatever article they want, or they can say "hey look at this." So I think that's increasingly the direction things are going, so I think advertising's going to have to move to the web, and actually the Newspaper Association of America said that's up almost 20% in the last quarter, so that's a good sign.

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Joe Sciacca: To me, the thing about a newspaper is, you see it on the street, you see it in the coffee shop, it's "there," it's ever-present, the headline is there. And so clearly something will be lost, the impact might be lost, and yet we've seen big stories break on the web, so we know there's hope that you can have an impact.