The Daily Press site gets less static
I don’t think a lot of people noticed this story on the Daily Press Web site this week or, if they did, grasped its importance. Maybe I’m wrong. But it is important, and (hopefully) points the way towards an exciting new era for the Daily Press, Hesperia Star, Desert Dispatch and other papers in our little corner of the Freedom Communications empire:
HESPERIA — One motorist was killed and another seriously injured early Wednesday morning in a crash that shut down all traffic on Main Street near Topaz for at least two hours.
An eastbound motorist apparently strayed onto the right curb, then overcorrected and veered to the left across all lanes before crashing into a westbound green Honda.
The motorist in the green Honda was killed, while the driver of the other car was airlifted to an area trauma center.
Other than not having a byline, pretty standard stuff for the Daily Press site, perhaps. Or perhaps not:
For more on the story, see Thursday’s Daily Press.
That line at the bottom referencing the full story the next day tells it all: This was news that was being published on the site between print editions and that would not, in this form, ever appear on paper.
Once upon a time, newspapers could afford to create “extra” editions, to let everyone know when major breaking news had occured. The economics of that practice, along with broadcast media that could do it faster and less expensively, killed it off pretty well. I’ve never been at a paper that printed an extra edition while I was there, although a few had in the past.
The Internet can change that.
So often invoked as the scary boogeyman by the old guard in the newspaper industry, the Internet is a printing press essentially without cost. Creating a new Web page for readers to view doesn’t cost measurably much more than having them read the page that you created several hours ago. And with that epiphany in hand, the industry can leverage newsgathering — particularly local newsgathering — that the broadcasting companies cannot, with a credibility that few bloggers/citizen journalists currently have. The biggest papers — the ones with more than three people on their New Media staffs — are already dipping their toes in this water, although mostly just with Associated Press feeds.
It was a small step. The Daily Press site is still static pages that have to be manually updated (hand-coded) to make a change or to add a story. Kate Rosenberg, or whoever wrote that initial breaking news piece, couldn’t just pull up a browser window on her computer in the newsroom and add the story, which an editor could then approve and send to the site.
But it’s the first step on a journey that could lead to some very exciting places. In 50 years, I don’t believe that anyone will differentiate between a print news company, a television news company or a radio news company. We will all be producing text, video and audio, which our readers will use as they wish. All the end-user wants is timely, accurate and convenient news. There’s no point in waiting 50 years for us to get there. So it’s exciting to begin that journey, no matter how large the step.
More steps to follow. Soon.