It's not the medium, it's the message. People want news, and they will adapt (not adopt; somebody needs an editor) to new ways of getting it:
There was no call to throw open the gates. But this is not to pick on our friends at the AP, which is now reorganizing its business to serve the new world (and is a news supplier to this site). The whole industry was slow to recognize that the Web is not a proprietary medium, like print, but a distributed one.
Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft understood that the consumer need was not newspapers but news. Yet for years the newspaper industry thought the purpose of going online was to drive people to read newspapers. The futility of that task is at last beginning to sink in.
Newspapers didn't get it then, and I'm afraid they're slow to get it now. An instructive moment happened last week when I was talking to a colleague who went to a meeting of Indiana editors. The big news was that Hoosier journalists are all agog about how they use their Web sites to dazzle readers with . . . photo slide shows.
And what's the difference between a slide show and actual video, which is where the Web is right now? Well, one is a frame about every two seconds; the other is 30 frames a second. Newspaper people still think in static terms; they capture stuff and freeze it for all of time. They go with what they know. The world is blazing by us at 30 frames a second (and that's not even hi-def), while we're still trying to figure iust how to make people slow down and notice us. Could AP have figured out where things were going and gotten out there ahead of Google and Amazon? I don't think so.
