“As a medium, print is on an irreversible decline relative to digital. We are headed for an inflection point at which print newspapers as we knew them in the past will be unsustainable.
Like it or not, print must change.
If you are a wire editor or features editor, your odds of surviving in such a position until retirement are slim to none. Those jobs are obsolete. We can not save a system in which thousands of people sit around reinventing the wheel in parallel processes all around the country.
The Tribune Company’s bankruptcy raises the urgency of facing this issue, but it will be an issue for everyone sooner or later. This is just another case of “the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”
If you imagine that jobs will simply move from a print focus to an Internet focus, you’re wrong. Some jobs, like the wire editor and the features editor, will disappear. The Internet presents us with completely new tasks, requiring different skill sets.” HEH HEH
I can see with my own eyes that copyediting and proofreading have not moved from print to the Internet. Not enough time, I guess—got to get your stuff out there before the other guy.
One thing that has happened, though, is that now that books are being copyedited on computer, younger people are being hired to do it, and while they may have the skills to edit on computer successfully, they lack the years of experience and the knowledge of the English language that the older copyeditors have. Thus the rise of the ancient proofreader, who cleans up after everybody else is finished.