The Philadelphia Inquirer has issued orders that no news articles be placed on the newspaper’s Website until AFTER the story appears in print. This includes “signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts.” Some breaking news might make it to their site, but that’s it. Sounds sort of like the way PJStar.com used to be. Now, many routine stories, features, columns and editorials appear hours before deadline and the day’s edition is sent to the printer.
Blogger/online news advocate Jeff Jarvis offered this advice to Inquirer staffers:
Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery.
To which I responded:
Jeff, you are missing the big picture. This is actually GOOD news for the future of online journalism. Print journalism is dead. The body just hasn’t stopped moving. By tossing all their news onto the Web for free, newspapers are freezing out online start-ups that would probably need to charge a small subscription fee to survive. Much smaller, in fact, than the cost of home delivery.
In other words, by offering for free what their would-be competitors would have to offer for a fee, newspapers’ free Web sites are an anti-competitive act.
By insisting that their news must appear on paper first, the Inquirer is actually opening the door for an online start up. I’m sure that there are forward-thinking entrepreneurs who are thinking that Philly is now a target rich environment.
The best thing that could happen for the news gathering industry would be for a newspaper like the Inquirer to vanish off the face of the earth and be replaced with an online-only norg (love that term, BTW). It would scare the rest into evolving, at last.
Jarvis makes a ton of good points in this post and in the one referenced in the quote.
Seriously, people. Delivering news by newspaper during the digital age is sorta like traveling cross country by covered wagon right after construction of the Interstate Highway System.
Tags: Jeff Jarvis, Philadelphia Inquirer
