Changes at PBS’s News Hour:
Until recently, the employees who worked on the Web site of “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS were based in a building a brisk five-minute walk through city traffic from their on-air colleagues. The Web and television staffs interacted only at Mr. Lehrer’s annual holiday party. “They were all the recognizably young ones,” said Linda Winslow, the show’s executive producer. But in early November, the staffs were merged into a single 20-person bullpen…
Martin commentary: The writing is so on the wall. You’re web team cannot be separate from your TV or print team. If you do not have a transition plan for a web-centric future then your program or publication will die. It appears that a severe budget shortfall and the ill-health of its anchor is causing this reassessment at NewsHour but maybe desperation is the mother of reinvention.
An intern who spent time studying the Amish paper The Budget found it’s culture already mirrored the internet:
By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus. “They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”
"Despite the crackdown, the videos and tweets indicate to many that broadly distributed Internet tools — and the spirit of young, tech-savvy people — cannot be completely repressed by an authoritarian government."
