Rogue elephant

Abstract

A new breed of editors has emerged with the development of web journalism. Tom Whitwell, communities editor of Times Online, is one of them and here describes life in the fast lane of the information super highway. He writes: "Traditional [media] power structures are unlikely to last for very much longer. I've never been a staff newspaper journalist, but I've always understood it to be a hierarchical, politically charged operation, where questions of right and wrong are answered by seniority. The online world is still as political as any office, but there's an elephant in the room that can't be ignored for long: In print, you often have no real idea what sells your newspaper. Online, you know exactly what's selling your site, live, 24 hours a day. So the editor can certainly pay his old school chum to write a jolly column about nothing much in particular. But it will be immediately obvious if nobody much in particular is reading it. Similarly, a youngster toiling in an unfashionable backwater who works hard and promotes his or her stuff online can find an audience. It doesn't matter that it's never promoted on the homepage, because traffic can be found elsewhere - from blogs or news aggregators or Google searches."