Oh, the humility of having to beg for a Wi-Fi connection at a conference on Web journalism: The eighth annual International Symposium of Online Journalism is going on at the UT School of Communications, and your humble reporter had to beg at UT ID from a friend to go online.
The 9:30am discussion, The Transformation of Newspaper to Multimedia News Organization – The Merging of Online-Print Newsrooms and the Challenges of a Continuous News Flow, just ended, featuring Jim Brady (vice president and executive editor of WashingtonPost.com), Neil Chase (continuous News Desk editor of NYTimes.com), Bill Grueskin (managing editor of WallStreetJournal.com), and Kinsey Wilson (vice president and executive editor of USAToday.com). Highlight of the discussion? The dispiriting admission from Brady that 80% of the traffic to their most-viewed stories come from Drudge Report. Oh, and the harsh comments criticizing Post scribe Deborah Howell on her inaccurate Jack Abramoff reporting came from “the far left.”
Journalism is indeed doomed.
This article appears in March 30 • 2007.