The same nichization is happening in the world of publishing—the Internet is home to hundreds if not thousands of electronic publications. So what’s a hometown paper to do? Just how is Time magazine responding? And in such strange times—normal times, actually, once they’ve been around long enough—what becomes of books, especially when you consider the digital piracy issue. In the next chapter I’ll lay out the problems and even suggest a few solutions.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Pulped Wood versus
Electrons: Can the
Print World Learn to
Love the Net?
I ran across A. C. Snow on the Internet the other day, and old memories poured forth.[[4.1]] A.C. is as low tech as they come. He writes a Tar Heelish column with jokes and stories about church picnics and football and beach trips, and yet there he was online with the folksy prose that I remembered from eons ago. The Raleigh Times is gone now. A.C. works instead for the bigger News & Observer, a sister newspaper that thudded against my dormitory door when I was in college. Weekday circulation is around 150,000 nowadays, and many state legislators wake up each morning to the N & O—it just might be the most powerful paper in North Carolina.
Millions of people on the Net, however, would question the need for the three-story tan brick building, the fleet of delivery trucks, and the recent decision to invest $36 million in color presses.
You can’t update the ink on pulped trees the way you can move around dots on a computer screen. “Aren’t newspapers obsolete?” scads of techies are asking. Besides, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area has changed. Thousands of locals swap e-mail addresses at cocktail parties, while many schoolchildren grow up reading off computer screens as well as from books. IBM and other Fortune 500 companies are in Research Triangle Park outside town.