Secret Hesperia Star project
The Internet scares the bejeesus out of the newspaper industry, as I’ve mentioned before. Although the industry’s current slump in circulation began before the birth of the World Wide Web, there’s certainly reason to be concerned: Even more than radio or TV, the Internet provides an immediacy that the daily newspaper, which once was the place where breaking news was reported, can’t compete with.
I’m a big advocate of newspapers competing by working smarter and harder. The Internet, at this point, does not cover all news equally, and some of it, it doesn’t cover at all. Newspapers, which have infrastructures and credibility, can and should push their ways even more aggressively into these areas. At the end of the day, a newspaper Web site is no different from a blog or a rumor site, except that the newspaper site can have a credibility and authority the others can’t match. (Obviously, if it doesn’t have that, fixing that is job one.) So pursuing, say, local news and politics — which regional media rarely does — is a key part of the picture.
But so is using the Internet to reimagine the news business. It removes a great deal of the overhead from taking on aspects of other media, and can potentially bring in more eyeballs and, more importantly, help develop more of a relationship with the eyeballs already there.
So what does this mean for the Hesperia Star? Well, the holidays will delay a formal announcement, but we will have what I think is a first of its kind for a weekly newspaper (maybe a first for local newspapers generally) announcement early in 2006.
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Gosh, the tenterhooks hurt. What will the face of journalism be like? Just make sure it doesn’t get too AJAX-y, that would be too much.
Comment by Joel — December 20, 2005 @ 12:48