Public relations consultant /blog

Independent chief executive Ivan Fallon’s rejection of integrated online and offline newsrooms places him on the wrong side of emerging opinion. But there’s merit to his instinctive view. After Aristotle, Renaissance students were challenged to divide their notes into content and form, in an exercise that showed that words cannot be separated from meaning.

Yet it’s not this deeper debate that appears to inform Fallon’s reasoning, but an apparent misunderstanding of technology. He says: ‘If you say to somebody like Andrew Grice “write for the internet as well”, he will spend the day just updating rather than writing and getting stories.’

Nonsense. You’d think that Grice’s writing wasn’t already online or that readers weren’t already taking the Independent’s RSS feeds and viewing content in all manner of contexts.

All this makes it almost impossible for newspaper columnists to tailor their writing to the medium. Whatever they write simply sits in an XML database waiting to be merged into some template or other. Content has been separated – if not from form – than from medium.
Contact Stephen Newton

Posted at : April 7th, 2006 - 1:06 am
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