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Reformers Believe The Las Vegas Sun Is One Of America's Best Online Newspapers

The Battle To Conform Electronic News

New York –The evolution of electronic news is still in its infancy. It will surely be years, possibly even decades, before the online news business is fully defined, or, for that matter, all that well understood. The reason it will take so long relates to the complexity of the issues and what has become a titanic battle to conform the nature, means, organization and structure of electronic news.

The Migrators

The Big Question For Newspapers

The polarized forces seeking to conform electronic news are diametrically opposed because they rest on very different philosophical foundations. On one side are the migrators — people who favor relocating centuries old newspaper traditions to the Internet. Migrators favor a slow transition from print to online. In the newspaper business today, slow migration translates to optimizing existing cash-flow and reducing investment.

Migration is predictable and less risky. It builds on longstanding traditions and well understood models. It assumes that news gathering, editing and production skills honed over several centuries are the source of value. With nearly everyone on the planet experienced at using newspapers, whatever is to come must rest on experience, credibility and organization.

The Reformers

The other side, the reformers, are younger, hipper and media-savvy. They value technological opportunity with the same degree of enthusiasm migrators have for journalistic history.  For reformers, migration is not only slow, it also burdens designers with concepts, ideas and problems from a dying medium. What they seek is a reformation of journalism driven by technology and borne of the energy and possibilities of an immensely powerful new medium. For them, reformation rids the world of unnecessary journalistic standards, doctrines, practices and methodology. When freed of the unwanted baggage of history, the reformers see a new world ahead which will arise, like the Phoenix, from the ashes of everything gone before.

Reformation is necessary if new media journalism is to fully exploit the tools and technologies now evolving. With nearly everyone on the planet experienced in new media systems, the future of electronic journalism must be based on hypertext, community, connectivity and multi-media capabilities.

Life And Death Comes To Newsville

For newspaper owners and publishers what’s happening in their business is terrifying. Were it not for the fact that the contraction in their present business is so painful, few might consider an online presence.  But trying to survive in what increasingly appears to be a dying business is painful. So painful that even the least receptive publishers have launched what they hope will be an orderly transition. Such a transition is made all the more difficult by those publishers who have jumped onto the Reformist movement.

For those who see a transitory migration, the online services provided by successful newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Sydney Morning Herald point to a future of online newspapers predicated on enduring values and traditional newspaper qualities. For these publications being online is just another way to monetize their immense investment in news gathering and publishing by migrating their content to electronic media. These newspapers have not intention of reforming. They are confidant that their hard won reputation, reportorial quality and mastery of layout and organization translates to successful websites.

The Reform Model — A Container Of Content

Like The Sun, The Minneapolis StarTribune Offers A Reformist Style Website

While migratory newspaper sites are built on the newspaper model, reformist style sites are modeled largely as hyperlink pools, Java wrappers and HTML containers. Each site thus becomes a standardized index to content whose appearance and operation are as important, if not more important, than content.  Content, reformist designers contend, must be presented in the most useful and interesting way. Their point has merit to the degree that it separates the media experience and content value. Good websites, they believe, are not dependent on content quality. If journalism is what matters to migratory style sites, it’s immediacy, searchability and cross linking that makes reformist style sites.

While the Las Vegas Sun and The Minneapolis StarTribune are reformist style, neither is solely reformist for both sides use features from both design camps. For newspaper people who fully understand their model, the reformist view is not well understood. if you’re one of these people and you’d like to know how reformists see a newspaper website read what theBivingsReport has to say about what’s good and what’s not on the Las Vegas Sun website.

If that doesn’t open you eyes, you may be in more trouble than you thought.