The Guardian examines the dilemma of the headline writer as newspapers "integrate their web and press productions:"
Headline writing, of the clever, punning variety that is their stock in trade, is fast becoming an anachronism. For the role of subeditors is changing as media organisations do as the Sun has done and establish integrated newsrooms; producing papers, website, blogs and broadcasts from one desk.
According to E&P, Bank of America analyst Joe Arns says the value of an online reader to a newspaper company is on the rise:
On the day of 60 "early retirements" from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, columnist Bill McClellan feels like a dinosaur witnessing the end of his era, and he points to two meteoric events. One is the arrival of the Internet. The other is corporate ownership.
That's probably a popular viewpoint in most newsrooms these days. And there is some truth to it. But in the big picture it's wrong.
For the last couple of days I've been playing with my latest tech toy, the Nokia "please don't call it a phone" N800.
This and similar devices, including the iPhone, have world-changing implications for newsgathering as well as publishing and distribution.
I'll get to those points shortly, but first a few words about why I went with the N800.
While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.
Journalists are chronically confused about why people read newspapers. As Clayton Christensen has pointed out, the best way to understand product-market relationships is this: People don't buy products; they hire products to get specific jobs done.
In most newsrooms, if you chat long enough, someone will bring up the moldy old question: What about the digital divide?
Let's bury that.
Some 60 million U.S. households have Internet access. Daily newspapers reach only about 50 million households. Should we be talking about the print partition? The crushed-tree chasm?
Jakob Nielsen tackles the subject in his column this week, noting that falling prices for computer technology have demolished the "economic divide" argument.
