Content area
Full Text
Participants bad views and experiences to share about the intersection of mainstream media and the Internet. Edited excerpts of some of those comments follow.
Conor O'Clery: Another fundamental question is whether companies make the Internet edition a rolling newspaper. People are going to access the Internet edition at any time of the day or night in different parts of the world. Should you involve the reporters in the newsroom in getting away from the idea that they just do one big story for one big edition of the newspaper? Or should they be involved in providing news, breaking news, for the Internet edition? I'm a business correspondent, and I go online to The Wall Street Journal during the day to get a heads up on what's happening in the markets because it provides a rolling newspaper service. This raises two questions: How do you finance this? And what is the role of the reporter in the newsroom? Should that reporter be utilized by both the newspaper and the Internet edition or should there be a wall between the two? Most newspapers now are ending up with two sets of staff; sometimes with opposing interests.
Steve Ross: I actually have the best data on the Internet and newspapers because I do the Middleberg-Ross survey. [See more about this years' survey on page 39.] I've got seven years worth of data. As of last fall, only about 45 percent of the newspapers sampled never allowed the Internet to scoop the newspaper. Our pre-survey sampling this year says it's down to about 30 percent. These news organizations are not thinking it through well. Ifyou talk to editors around the country, they're slowly being converted from a belief they held that if the paper came out in the morning and something happened at 10:00 in the morning and they put that on the Web, no one would read it on the Web except for the local radio station and TV station, which would then scoop them. And what they think they're now finding, on the basis of remarkably little data, is that enough of their readers are getting the stuff from their Web site by 10:00 that it's worthwhile for them to break the news.
From the...