GrayLady.com: New York Times explodes wall between print,
OJR looks at the revolutionary and evolutionary changes at the New York Times as they plan to integrate print and Web operations. Martin Nisenholtz tells Mark Glaser that he'd like to see 30 or 40 multimedia stories per day, and considers a news aggregation service to be one of the pillars of the online efforts going forward. Bill Keller describes how the print side was frustrated at having to fight bureaucracy just to get a Cannes blog.
Here are a few key quotes:
"The Web becomes a part of the DNA of the newsroom. It's not the extraordinary example, because we already have the extraordinary example story covered. It's the everyday example; that's where the integration is really going to work."
-- Martin Nisenholtz, Times VP for digital operations
"I'm constantly hearing from people in the newsroom who have ideas for cool things we could do on the Web. But under the divided operation, all we could do was lob ideas over the transom. Not that the people at the Web site were reluctant to do it. They had other
priorities. It was becoming a source for frustration, and I felt that if we were really going to embrace this thing and own it and tap into the creative energy of all these smart people who are filled with ideas that we ought to be in the same place -- physically, administratively, in every way."
-- Times executive editor Bill Keller
"This has the full support of everyone in senior management at the Times Company and particularly of Arthur Sulzberger. I remember in my interview with him, back in 1995, he said he didn't care whether people got their Times news from a Star Trek beam. His view is we have to be in the news business and not in the ink and paper business. If you go back and read his stuff for at least 10 years, that's always been his mantra."
-- Martin Nisenholtz
"I'd like to think that there weren't any losers in this, that we all win. This is really an important step in the recognition of the Web playing a big part in our future. I'm honestly bullish about newspapers. For all of the difficulties in the industry, I think
there will be at least a few good newspapers that will be healthy and profitable for a long time, and I'm pretty sure this will be one of them. I tend to be skeptical of this fatalistic hand-wringing you see at conferences of newspaper editors. There was a nice line in the American Journalism Review, 'Newspapers may be dinosaurs, but dinosaurs walked the Earth for millions of years.'"
-- Bill Keller
Aug 11, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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