Leave it to a former rockcrit — and a McClatchy employee (the company just cut 10% of its workforce nationally) — to come up with an eloquent essay on the decline of the newspaper industry and the ascension of the Internet.
Online people, myself included, have been saying for years that the Web should be first in news priority, and that journalists shouldn’t think that they work for newsPAPER companies, but instead NEWS companies. Maybe, coming from an august writer like Leonard Pitts, a world-class columnist at the Miami Herald, this idea will start to sink in with those of you who still have ink in your veins.
He sounds like speeches and conversations I heard going on a decade ago, but better late than never, I say:
We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary.
So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.