Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The 'stickiness' of newspapers

While searching our wire services today for interesting stuff for Thursday's op-ed page, I ran across this column by Washington Post blogger Joel Achenbach about the future of the newspaper industry.

Here's a portion:

Newspaper journalism is different these days: Suddenly everyone is obsessed with eyeballs, page views, “stickiness,” “click-through rates,” and so on. No one shouts “Stop the presses!” anymore, but they do whimper “Why aren’t I on the home page?” The noble product that we manufacture and distribute throughout the metropolis — the physical thing so carefully designed, folded and bagged — is now generally referred to in our business as the “dead-tree edition.” It gets little respect.
And indeed, so often the print version of the news is Old on Arrival. (By the time Karl Rove’s resignation made the front page last Tuesday, the only people who didn’t already know about it were the ones who didn’t care anyway.) The motto in the corner should be What Happened Yesterday or Maybe the Day Before.


Something for all of us to think about, isn't it?

You can check out Joel's work here.