kaf,gd,cpr,aid,first,aid

Doing this requires a lot of learning on the part of current staff. How will you teach them, partly to offer new skills and attitudes, and partly to gain trust.

I recently told a print editot that he should evaluate his newspaper personnel this way: what could I cut tomorrow that READERS wouldn’t care about.

The first things to go would be the local columnists. They;re boring, old, predictable, and not interesting. No one cares, Move them only the web only, and make the blog everyday, and answer comments. But that runs into the heart of the newspaper’s reputation and honor. Bad columnists are a sign of strength.

As someone who studies the transition from idea to enactment, I know you’ve got your work cut out for you. I said more over at Jay’s. Good luck.

I sit here in Oregon in a town that only gets the Times in print only on Sundays. I do not make a distinction between print and online. It is all the same. The Times IS the Times. Why WOULD, if one could start from scratch, make these worlds separate?

Nowadays people are less tolerant of “word of God” monologues - the modus operandi of 90% of print writers. I am unconvinced that many of them can make the transition to the sourced open-dialogue architecture of the internet.

Furthermore, these print writers are not the best writers in the country. They have been sheltered from any real competition for decades. Watching Big Media founder is not schadenfreude but rather a celebration of progress.

Long before there was a Web, reporters at the print WSJ had to file immediate stories for the Dow Jones news service wire throughout the day, as soon as the news occurred. So the paper’s internal culture was oriented toward immediate news before the Web site even came along. That greatly smoothed the Journal’s transition to the Web–while other newsrooms (including the WashPost’s, I know from firsthand experience) grumbled that there was some sort of magic in waiting until 6 pm, to let stories marinate and age before filing them, the Journal reporters already were conditioned to filing news in real time. That made WSJ.com a superb news-breaking online product right out of the box when it launched in 1995. So regardless of how the Journal’s newsrooms are set up, its culture historically has been based on immediate, 24/7 story production. That makes a big difference.

Incidentally, at least one top WSJ editor wisely suggested years ago that the Web site should essentially be the primary product; the newspaper, ideally, would be just a snapshot of what was on the Web site at 11 pm. That’s not quite true in reality, but philosophically, it’s absolutely spot on. All newspapers should think that way: the Web site is the dog and the newspaper is the tail, when it comes to wagging–not the other way around.

For all these reasons and many more, the online WSJ is an outstanding product. I use it multiple times a day and have zero problem paying for the privilege. Like many people I talk to, I actually think it’s underpriced. Take that, anti-Web-subscription zealots!

chuckR