Recommended reading

The Economist has a good look at where the newspaper industry stands and a nice compact retrospective of how the industry has navigated (not particularly well until recently) the emergence of the Internet. See More Media, Less News. Among the observations that still reflect a divided business:

More newspaper companies are likely to treat their websites as a priority these days. “Before, newspapers used their second- and third-rate journalists for the internet,” says Edward Roussel, online editorial director at Britain's Telegraph Group, “but now we know we've got to use our very best.” Many companies are putting print journalists in the same room as those who work online, so that print writers are working for the website and vice versa. Some insist that this is a mistake. “It is completely wrong not to separate web and paper operations,” says Oscar Bronner, publisher of Der Standard, a daily paper in Austria. Print journalists don't have time to reflect and analyse properly if they also have to work for the website, he argues.

But as Jim Chisholm of iMedia notes, “newspapers are halfway to realising an audience on the internet and about a tenth of the way to building a business online.”

Also read the accompanying Who Killed the Newspaper? Its conclusion:

An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.