In describing Jeff Jarvis’s “ethic of the link,” Jay Rosen makes a vital point about why newspapers flailed and largely failed online for the first ten years of the medium: they rarely produced web-native content and therefore completely missed the development of a different ethic, writing style, and media economy.
As I’ve written before, too much media analysis still lacks this basic insight. Print media people are bringing their content online and are baffled, shocked even, that it doesn’t succeed. Bloggers and google repackage it, no one comments on it, people don’t click through from the homepage.
Why? Because it’s too long, it’s in a daily rather than streaming form, it doesn’t aggregate. They are like radio people reading a news story on television, shocked that people aren’t nearly as interested in their content as they are the people who are using on-the-scene video, quick cuts, facial expressions.
So if you write for a newspaper and want to get on the web, the solution is simple. Do what those of us who didn’t start with years of history producing a non-web-native product did: start from scratch by forgetting everything you knew about producing daily copy, start writing for the web, and then wait five years or ten years…
Via a great post on newspaper linking at Publishing 2.0.
