THE INTERNET AND IT'S WEBSITES AREN'T A THREAT TO JOURNALISM, THEY'RE A NEW CHALLENGE AND A CHANCE FOR GREATNESS, SAYS SEUMAS PHELAN. ARTWORK BY JOHN SHAKESPEARE

Today’s lesson is taken from a couple of incidents in the newsrooms of a national newspaper, let’s call it The Australian, and a major metropolitan daily, let’s call it The Sydney Morning Herald.

First the national. As is common these days, the paper’s home page lists the top stories from its website, with handy links so you can call up any item. So a sub-editor spots an error in one of the web headlines – “Stock market finishes in the end” it says, when it clearly means finishes in the red. Easy slip to make – none of us is infallible (sorry, Benedict, not even you).

So the sub goes over to the web editor and points out the mistake (handy hint to managements everywhere: keep print and web people in the same room so they can talk to each other). If this happens on a print page and there is an error in a headline, the chief sub will say gosh, or words to that effect, recall the page, fix the typo and send the correction as a drop-in. This means the printers have to make a new page plate and drop it into the system while the presses are running.

It’s a nuisance – it takes at least 10 minutes from start to finish (and remember some modern presses can print 100,000 copies an hour) and costs a minimum $500, allowing for the time and expense from the newsroom to the printworks. But no self-respecting newspaper would let a typo run in a headline – they look so much worse in 60 point and it damages your credibility with the readers, which, when you get right down to it, is all you’ve got.

With a website, on the other hand, it should be easy. All you have to do is call up the master page, make the change and then put the page back on the site. But it turns out it’s not that simple. The main web operation is not in the newsroom, and it’s the web people, not the journalist on the spot, who have to make the correction. And crucially, the ethos is: “It’ll change anyway” because what’s on the web keeps moving and doesn’t stay on the record like print. Or as a modern media manager put it: “When the web’s wrong, it’s not wrong for long.”

Maybe so. But I believe the lesson is that if a good newspaper wants to attract people to the web, it has to value net readers as much as print readers. Nothing can beat the web for speed, which makes the old print motto even more necessary: “Get it first, but get it right.” And the bigger the websites grow, the more important this becomes. For the other side of the picture, consider the incident at the metropolitan daily.

Let’s say one night there were a few stories left over that didn’t make it into the paper; they were good yarns, but there just wasn’t enough space. That used to be too bad; a paper only has so many pages, and once they’re full, that’s it. But now we have the web, with virtually unlimited capacity, so the obvious thing is to sub the stories for accuracy, legal problems and readability, and then bang them on the website. At this point, some subs object: “We shouldn’t be doing this,” they say. “It’s not our work.”

The industry is in flux, and such feelings are understandable. And they’re right in one way, it wasn’t our work in the past. But by god, we want it to be our work in the future. The train of merged print/web operations is coming, and we either get on it or it runs us over. Trying to stop the internet newspaper would be like walking along waving a red flag and saying these horseless carriages will never catch on. There are issues to be resolved, and they’re being worked out now, as you read this.

The first is who these operations are aimed at. Mark Day, one of the top judges of media strategies, says newspapers should accept that we’ve lost the under-30s, concentrate on serious journalism for our print readers, and go the light and fluffies on the web. The British Guardian, on the other hand, is producing one of the world’s best news websites by focusing on quality, reasoning that the people who want worthwhile news and views don’t suddenly change personality just because they log on to a computer.

As an example of where this is going, The Australian, which pays my wages, regularly gets a million hits a day on its website; we could only dream of having a million daily sales. So who should do the work? Whether it’s hard news or soft, in print or on screen, this is all journalism. They can call it text and images, but they’re still stories and pictures. And that’s what we do. Enjoy the ride.

Seumas Phelan is a senior sub-editor with The Australian. He has won two Walkley Awards.
John Shakespeare is a Walkley Award-winning artist with The Sydney Morning Herald; www.johnshakespeare.com.au