Connecting Web and print publishing

Roy Greenslade presents an interesting scenario in which free-to-access newspaper Web sites cannibalise paid-for print sales (Why the Web is friend and foe Roy Greenslade, Media Guardian, November 15, 2004). One issue is, as he notes, getting the relationship right between print and screen. But, more importantly, newspapers need create a valuable screen-based publication, closely tied into its physical sibling, which people will pay to use. Too many newspaper Web sites add little to their print edition beyond searchability, and their facility is greatest for the limited number of readers who – like their editorial teams – sit all day in front of an Internet-connected PC.

Some of the challenges for publishers were outlined in a recent issue of ACM interactions magazine I co-edited and include: personalisation and location-based services, creation of malleable ‘content’ and delivery to new platforms, understanding context of and competition for use, and developing new interface models.

News may finally become a commodity – a trend that preceded the rise of the Web – in which case the value of newspapers may reside in curating, contextualising and appropriately facilitating discussion around information, stories, features, and opinion. Offline the Guardian has already addressed some of these challenges with its Editor section, as has MediaGuardian online with its daily Briefing and Media Text Alerts.

Published, slightly edited, in Media Guardian, as New tricks for old dogs, 29 November 2004