Why should any important and dynamic region assume that the future of its daily newspaper will be entirely dictated by the market forces of the World Wide Web?
Maybe I'm a journalistic dinosaur, one of the Jurassic few who -- after many years of careful consideration -- refuse to believe that newspapers can not and will not control their own destinies. How?
Content: It's key. And this is where newspapers can and should remain true to their mission and their mandate, which is to survey the landscape, ask the hard questions, dig into information and uphold their end of the democratic bargain. We aren't called the 40th Estate. We are the Fourth Estate -- a lofty position that the newspaper industry must fight to honor.
The mechanics of content delivery have indeed been radically changed by the proliferation of websites alleging to deliver top-notch content. But a careful examination of those popular sites would probably demonstrate that most of the "best" content online is
A) being authored by seasoned journalists who know how to ask the right questions, who know where to look and how to write
or
B) the work of these journalists and journalistic operations are being streamed or aggregated into "new" Web 2.0 creations.
I think newspapers are smart to utilize real-time technology to keep themselves vital in their communities. I am eager to help innovate the online aspects of newspaper content delivery so that a paper can maximize its greatest asset -- content -- and make it accessible and formatted for the growth potential of an online readership community.
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