No way, because television's experience is in utterly passive delivery, and the appeal of the Web is users' choice.
Newspapers are very slightly more responsive than TV to audiences, mainly through letters to the editor. Newspapers are also somewhat more in touch with their local communities, if only because they can usually put more staff out on the street than local broadcast affiliates.
To address the bandwidth question: I don't think anything really meaningful depends on bandwidth. Very commercial stuff, like downloaded movies-on-demand, does -- but that's of no interest to me because it's just another form of something I already have (and my local Blockbuster actually has a great selection of obscure independent and foreign films).
What will make or break the online newspapers is how they respond to their local audiences, in terms of content and usability. Every Web site in the world can give me streaming video of President Clinton speaking; nobody but my local newspaper is going to tell me about the toxic waste dump in my backyard.
I almost missed my plane home out of Malaysia because I lost track of what day it was.
I was getting ready to visit the famous snake temple on the island of Penang (this was a few days after I finished working) when I thought, "Wait a minute, if today is Tuesday, it must be ..." Yes, just like that old movie title.
I was a full day off (in my mind), and my plane was leaving that evening. So I had to quickly figure out a train schedule -- it was about a six-hour ride back to Kuala Lumpur. It was tight, but I caught the plane -- thanks largely to a very aggressive cab driver.
I'm really bummed about missing the snake temple.
The lack of colleagues.
I had never realized how much enjoying my job depends on collaboration until I was spending so much time working alone, or doing most of my collaborating via the phone and e-mail.
It's funny, but I do get that urge sometimes (although not because of anything in particular having happened). Mostly it's because The Washington Post newsroom -- or at least the Metro Desk when I was there -- was a very collegial place to work.
Of course sometimes it was boring, and the hours were not great, and working weekends and holidays was no fun ... but the standards were very high, bright headlines were valued and praised, fact-checking was expected and encouraged, the editors on the desk all helped one another, and we usually had time to do a good job. I also had a fantastic boss who was a very good manager.
When I remember sleeping till noon I get very nostalgic about it ... and then I remember not having any social life because I worked till midnight, and the nostalgia flies right out of my head.
Unprofitable, yes, but they pay better. No kidding: Earlier this year I listened to Dale Peskin from The Dallas Morning News tell a group of journalism professors that they could send their freshly graduated students to work for small print dailies for $20,000 (or less), or send them to work online for him for $40,000 -- if they have the necessary skills.
And there's the major consideration you asked for: skills. This does not mean expertise in specific technologies, because technologies are continually changing. It does mean experience and a high comfort level with a variety of software and systems, especially online experience (including e-mail and Web searching).
It means flexibility and a can-do attitude and no whining. Above all, it means an appreciation for the differences between finding, reading and using information online and in print. If you don't recognize the pros and cons of the two media, you can't make that jump.
That depends, I think, on your previous experience. I had two programming courses in 1978 and 1984, so I knew the basic syntax and grammar -- if you will -- of programming languages.
By the time I tackled Perl in 1995, I already knew HTML cold, so I had a good idea of the kinds of scripts I needed to have; that is, I knew what work I wanted the scripts to do.
With that background, I bought an excellent book called Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz et al. I worked through the book carefully from front to back. It took two or three weeks. So, is that easy? It didn't seem especially hard to me, but I wouldn't call it easy. Is there an easier way? Well, no -- not to actually learn to do CGI.
Some people advocate simply copying the public-domain CGI scripts that abound on the Web, but my experience is that you cannot make those work properly until you do, in fact, learn the language they're written in.
For the record, CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is not a scripting or programming language. It's an interface that allows Web pages and programs to communicate with each other -- to send data back and forth. CGI scripts are written in programming languages such as Perl. "Scripting languages" such as JavaScript (not Java, which is different) are pretty similar to programming languages. A CGI script sits in a file by itself on a Web server and does some useful work when it is called from an HTML file -- a Web page.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
Back to SevenQuestions