The New News Thing

Just inside the entrance to The Post newsroom is a small butprominent television studio. Several times a day, Washington Postreporters sit in front of its lights and camera and provide newsupdates and analysis for a growing number of viewers. The operationstarted three years ago as an alliance with local all-news cableChannel 8. It has since grown into relationships with PBS's "Newshourwith Jim Lehrer," with the local NBC outlet, WRC-TV, for businessnews, and then, last year, came the big linkups with NBC network newsand MSNBC.

A few yards farther into the newsroom, one finds the editors of PMExtra, a special afternoon, online edition of The Post, started lastyear, that updates the newspaper's washingtonpost.com Web site withstories that broke after the morning newspaper was printed and withother stories that will be in the next day's newspaper but, forcompetitive reasons, can't wait until then to be told.

So every day, a small but growing number of Post reporters stopwhat they are doing and appear on TV or write an early version oftheir story for the Web site, or perhaps are made available for anonline chat with readers.

What is happening here is not unusual. It is happening in many bigcity newsrooms. It is an enormously expensive, not yet profitable,yet important effort by newspapers to meet the intensive new world ofcompetition represented by cable television and the Internet/WorldWide Web revolution, and to prevail in that world as they do inprint.

The strategy is simple. Wherever people get their news--in printor online--they should get it from The Post, or whatever their mainnewspaper is. Wherever the advertising dollars, especially classifiedadvertising, wind up, The Post needs to have a print and electronicreceptacle to receive it.

These seem like sensible investments in today's rapidly evolvingfield of cyber-publishing, and The Post's Web site is certainly amongthe best of its kind.

What is less clear, at least to me, is how all this will affectprint journalism and people who rely on newspapers to know what'shappening.

Here are some questions:

Will newspaper reporters who interrupt their news gathering,interviewing, thinking, research or writing to do that "quick update"for TV or the Web ultimately do less reporting? Will reporters andeditors, knowing that one story may be more appealing to N