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Will We Miss Newspapers?

January 30, 2009

Rebekah Wade this week lamented the tendency among media commentators to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by their seemingly ubiquitous predictions of the imminent demise of the newspaper.

One wonders what she would make of this list, compiled by AllMediaScotland, of 30 Reasons Why We Might Miss Newspapers?

Excellent Newspaper Experiment

January 30, 2009

“This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.”

Thus spoke David Cole of the San Francisco Examiner 28 years ago, as he explained the paper’s foray into electronic publishing. Thanks to YouTube (inevitably), footage is available from a KRON TV interview at the time. The presenter’s last words are classic.

“The new telepaper won’t be much competition for the 20 cent street edition,” she says.

You can decide whether she was guilty of hubris, or blessed with disarming innocence, by watching the footage here. Image courtesy of School-Clipart.

Rebekah Wade: the flame-haired editor set for the top

January 29, 2009

Much rehearsal went into Rebekah Wade’s debut Hugh Cudlipp lecture, and it seems to have paid off. The “flame-haired” editor of The Sun even impressed Roy Greenslade, who nevertheless rightly corrects her attack on the likes of Mr Justice Eady and their supposedly unilateral creation of a privacy law (when one, as Professor Greenslade points out, already exists).

What next for Wade?  Commanding of presence, calm under pressure and now, evidently, polished in public performance, she has been at the helm of The Sun for five years. Before that she was editor of the News of the World for three. Avowedly a red top woman, a move away from News International to a competitor title is difficult to imagine. Will she move into the upper echelons of NI’s management, or, just possibly, might she fancy politics? After all, perhaps the most striking thing about her lecture was how much she believed in campaigning. Might so accomplished a bout of public speaking inspire her to move away from journalism?

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