E-Media Tidbits

News of Saddam's capture came at the worst possible time for American newspapers: early Sunday morning, when the presses had already rolled. Grand papers like the the New York Times and Washington Post had their Sunday editions on doorsteps with no Saddam news, just as broadcast and digital media started pumping out the news. The only way someone in the U.S. might have learned about Saddam first from a print newspaper was if their electricity was out all day yesterday, they had no social contact, and they read the news in Monday's edition.

To my mind, this timing was wonderful for digital media and terribly harmful for print. Sunday was a day when Internet news (and television, for that matter) made it clear that print publications are becoming less and less relevant for breaking news. Much of the younger generation has already figured that out; this episode confirms their behavior of abandoning newspaper readership and replacing it with digital media as logical. The Saddam-capture-news timing was a gift for online newspaper websites. As Jeff Pelline pointed out in a CNET News.com story, both the Times and the Post missed the capture, but both of their websites led with staff stories on Saddam first thing Sunday morning.

What this episode signifies to me is that Internet publishing operations of newspapers are now clearly as critical as the printing presses. On Sunday, those papers' websites were more important. Perhaps through this episode, more newspaper executives will come to realize that the transition to becoming "news" companies, not merely "newspaper" enterprises, is here.