Newspapers, Journalism, and the Web
The Washington Post is celebrating ten years of being online with three special articles (may require free registration):
- Web Site Starts from Memo, Gains Millions of Readers
- A history of washingtonpost.com, from a hand-written memo in 1992 to its finally turning a profit last year.
- As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry is Forever Changed
- Asks some hard questions about the future funding of serious news journalism: as readers flock to online news, will news outlets make enough revenue to fund serious journalism?
- Web Users Open the Gates
- Discusses how newspapers must adapt and respond to the disruptive power of the web.
“When the Web was born as a commercial content enterprise back in the mid-’90s, we thought it was about replicating — that is, ‘repurposing’ — our news and information franchises online,” Curley said. “The news, as ‘lecture,’ is giving way to the news as a ‘conversation’.”
I’ve no idea whether the articles were supposed to be read in a particular order, but placing them in the order I have makes for a nice read: how they got to where they are today; what the problem is that they face; and, some thoughts on how they need to respond.
