tiistai 24. toukokuuta 2011

Everything, all over the place

No longer is the newspaper The Newspaper – the main source of information for anybody. Today, every person gets his or her daily information from a myriad of sources – and in a personal way.
There is no “we have it all” anymore. There is only “everything, all over the place”.
Ok, that’s nothing new.
Let’s talk ecology. Give me a more non-ecological way of producing daily news than to print them on paper and transport them hundreds of miles. There is none.
So you see, I am a man of multimedia journalism.
The ecological aspect is easy to understand. The ecological break-even for a web publication vs. a newspaper is tied to minutes of use. It is also tied to the way electricity is produced. 


There is no carbon dioxide free way of producing electricity, so using the web will increase the carbon footprint. Finnish studies suggest that the break-even is somewhere around 40 minutes of newspaper consumption on the web. If you read longer, the paper version is more ecological.
I have a hard time believing this, but I don’t have any evidence.
Then a word about attitude. If somebody in 1983 had put an ad about bingo, poker or – God heavens Girls! -  beside a high quality journalistic article in a high quality paper, there would have been a crisis beyond belief in the newsroom. Girls, games and gambling is nothing you wrap around quality journalism.
Well, now you have to.
Papers are making money on the web, but not enough. And they will not make enough money before they realize that “enough” is a smaller amount than they are used to. And they still not make enough money on the web before they realize that ads on the web are not ads on paper. Girls, games and gambling – in some form – is going to be advertisers funding quality journalism.
You either take it, or leave the web. Until you find something more suitable.

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