Earlier this week, the American Society of Newspaper Editors became paperless. Members voted to change its name to the American Society of News Editors.
That’s the same move the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors made earlier this year.
I’m a member of both groups and on the board of FSNE.
I support the change, and voted in favor during the FSNE roll call, but am not in love with it.
Surprised?
The editor who has been writing a blog for nearly three year, who has pushed the use of social networks as reporting tools and who can Tweet with the best of them, cast a “yes” vote on the FSNE move with reluctance.
The reason is simple: The medium doesn’t matter; ink on paper or digital, who cares?
What matters is the quality of the journalism. That’s the bottom line.
And there is still a fundamental difference in the type of journalism done by newspaper organizations and others on the Web. And the reason for that has nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with money.
We're certainly willing to fight for space on the Internet. Just yesterday, we moved our monthly Business Matters news magazine to an online-only publication and now have an extensive list of digital products.
But for most of the last hundred years or so, printed newspapers have provided a business model to support quality journalism. Right now, only the great search-engine companies and a few aggregators of other people’s content create that kind of revenue.
That’s what makes the remarks by Eric Schmidt, CEO and chairman of Google, at least suspect, if not ironic.
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