...that they'd previously nailed shut with righteous resolve
Gee, you'd think there were wild-eyed dot.com idealists from the 1990s running amok or something.
The way these folks rapidly abandoned their efforts at interactivity in the late 1990s, they acted like the dot.com bust was an indictment of interactivity and active media requiring a cost-cutting retrenchment cheered by the folks who like to do things "the way it's always been done," rather than a necessary adjustment to over-hyped venture capitalists throwing around money like paint at the wall and then wondering why it didn't stick.
Just because stupid money was chasing all kinds of stupid money around in the late 1990s doesn't mean that some "visionaries" don't actually base their ideas on real live solid theories of interactivity, media, and communication, and quite a bit of that stuff bears no resemblance to dot.com humbug at all.
On the other hand, the stupid money chasers never really learned the fairly easy methods of distinguishing between the two types. Not that actually reading a business plan wouldn't have made a big difference.
Old media retrenchment indeed! Do they contradict themselves? Very well then, they contradict themselves. They are large. They contain multitudes.
But ya wanna bet the PR departments are freaking out at the idea of staff actually talking to customers/the audience without their pre-filtration? What if some mentally-unstable reporter decides to flame a critical viewer? I do believe this sort of thing has happened before.
Link: Editor & Publisher: 'Wash Post,' 'NYT' Invite Readers into the E-mail Conversation.
'Wash Post,' 'NYT' Invite Readers into the E-mail Conversation
By Joe Strupp
Published: February 13, 2006 3:05 PM ET
NEW YORKThe Washington Post and The New York Times are opening up the lines of communication between readers and staff writers.
Last week, the Washington Post began hyperlinking bylines on washingtonpost.com to Web-based e-mail forms. On Tuesday, NYTimes.com will institute a similar feature, which is designed to provide readers with greater access to reporters and columnists without burdening staff with massive amounts of spam e-mails.
Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, explained the move in a statement released Monday afternoon: "The many interactive features on washingtonpost.com have shown that the dialogue between writers, editors, and readers is mutually beneficial. Not just for conversation, but for perspective, source material and story ideas as well. These new links to e-mail offer an additional opportunity to build a better relationship between writers and the audiences they serve."
In a column in the Post's Sunday edition, Brady explained the paper's efforts to create a civil dialogue among readers, reporters, and editors in light of his well-publicized decision last month to shut down reader comments on a blog that had become "ground zero for angry readers."
For the Times, the decision to allow greater e-mail access grew out of the Siegal Report, a review of the paper's codes and practices launched after the Jayson Blair fiasco. Executive Editor Bill Keller informed employees of the new policy today in a memo posted on the Romenesko site.
"We've struggled for a while with the question of how to invite more readers to communicate with our reporters without inviting tons of junk mail or spam," Keller said in the memo. "Creating such a system was a recommendation of the Credibility Committee in its report in April. Now we have an answer."[...]
On the connection with readers, the report stated, "Making it easier for the public to approach Times people has numerous benefits. It sends a message to the paper's readers -- our customers -- that we are indeed accessible. It also opens up another avenue for reporters and editors to get ideas and tips that can lead to stories."
Keller cited that suggestion again in his memo, adding that the new e-mail option is "a nice system, with great potential benefit to all of us institutionally and personally." He did not explain why it took several months to be instituted.[...]
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