Newspapers and the Internet: Convergence

Richard Campbell - Author, Media and Culture

Newspapers may not eventually survive in the form they're in, but what journalists do is going to survive in some way. Eventually as this all moves to the Internet the role the journalists play are going to move to the Internet also.

Clarence Page - Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

For people who are working in newspapers, TV, the "old media" if you will, the role is changing. We could see changes that were going to come along with the Internet was going to change the way we do what we do and was going to put paper out of business. I've been seeing that for years.

David Little - Editor, Chico Enterprise-Record

The advent of the Internet and convergence as a whole has been beneficial to us, especially us old-timers in the newsroom. For years we've operated under the assumption that we just have to know what's going on by midnight when the press rolls and we have all day to work on that story. So you work and work and work on it, at midnight you hit the button, you send it, it goes out to the press and the paper hits the doorstep at 6:00 a.m. Well now when something happens we've learned to adjust and get the news out on the Web right now and we're better at it in our market than television and radio are right now breaking this news on the Web. It's really a lot of fun for us because before, we'd have the story first but we wouldn't get it out to the people first because we had to wait until six in the morning. Well they say, "Hey we can play this game now, we can beat TV at this. It's a lot of fun for us."

Clarence Page

I find it very exciting because I'm able to do things I couldn't do before. I can, not just write a column, I can shoot some video and put that in there, put it on the Web. I can actually link you to examples of what I'm talking about so you can read quotes in context, for example. I could just go on and on. So, I think folks throughout the industry feel this way. We're both excited and very nervous at the same time.

Eder Diego - Video Reporter, The Orion

The Orion you can easily go online and it's right there and that has links to multimedia and it's easy access. Especially nowadays, a lot of students can get access to the Web on their phones.

Jenny McClaren - Student Editor, The Orion

It's where media's going and as a college publication we're trying to strive to be as much like any other publication as we can be and that's what big-time newspapers are doing so we're trying to be like that also.

John Kastliometes - Journalist, Las Vegas Sun and Las Vegas Weekly

We are seeing in journalism, in my experience, a little bit of the tail wagging the dog here because when I came up I was under the wing of some veteran editors. Some people who had been in print journalism and newspapers for their entire career. Guys who were old enough at least, to be my father and they were training me. Now I've cycled through and I've been in the business for more than twenty years and I'm working with younger people who have grown up in this technology and there's a lot of simultaneous training going on where I'm showing them and teaching them about the underpinnings of journalism and they're teaching me how to use equipment. Stories are going to need a video component, an audio component, and a written component as a single entity. You're not just going to be able to out and interview someone, interview a series of sources and do some research and come back and write it down and stick a piece of art on it and have it stand as a printed work. It's going to—everything's going to be a multimedia effect and in a multimedia context.

Clarence Page

Change is our business, it's why we call it news. New things are happening and unpredicted things are happening. It's part of not just our job and our profession but I think our identity as journalists to want to get ahead of it. To see what is the real story happening here, and see how it can be used most effectively to help us do our jobs better.