DIALOGUES -approaches for a publication

Jeff Jarvis on a shared Google pressroom

Another interesting article from today's Guardian, again this was something that I mentioned on the Graphics blog. One of the problems with this idea of death of print or death of newspapers is that online media doesn't alter the content(well it can do if you read Charlie Brookers article), the content isn't dying- the medium is. The journalistic quality of The Guardian is still there and online media can allow newspapers to expand in new ways. Links, blogs feeds, comments, videos and so on. The Host with the Most

Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer be in manufacturing and distribution, which have become cost-heavy yokes. And they should no longer try to be in the technology business - because they're bad at it. When I said this on my blog, Bob Wyman, a technology entrepreneur now at Google, commented that technology infrastructure "is a cost of doing business. It is not a thing of value." So I asked him whether Google should fulfil Roussel's vision as a paper's new pressroom.

A shared platform for news organisations wouldn't be anticompetitive: it would be pro-efficiency. If any paper, station or site could pluck software from the cloud and freely use and adapt it to perform essential functions then it could concentrate its resources on what matters - journalism.