Sure, the shareholders will want that. So, you might want to buy some other newspapers, start selling books to, do whatever you want. But is a growth in profit a goal in itself when it comes to a succesfull product which only lets you make more money out of it when you make it less good? I hope someone can clarify this.

When I was an intern at a local Dutch newspaper last year, people said things like that all the time, by the way. They fear cutbacks, and have every right to do so, since only a few months later, the publisher announced a further round of cutbacks; many journalists are being fired. And it’s not that they don’t see anything in internet journalism; in fact, when their newspaper section will have been deleted, in favor of some new internet initiative, they hope they will be the staff that runs it. ‘What, I have to guide and counsel citizen journalists instead of writing my own articles? But I can write, that’s what I do! Ah well, I’ll have to keep my job, I got mortgage you now, haha, yeah, well, I’ll be the citizen journalists’ coach, why the hell not right, that’s modern times they say, who wants coffee?’

I felt that they’re not in the journalism business - they are in the newspaper business. I think journalism is too often considered something medium-independent, while both in essence as well as in practice it’s to a high degree something that’s interwoven with the medium. They have a newspaper page to feel. They know that page through and through, and they visit the newspaper website only as readers.

(by the way, my CoComment plugin gave an error while trying to post, I had to shutdown the CoComment Firefox extension.)