The web as newspaper support

Many years ago, I recall thinking and speaking about how newspapers should deal with the arrival of then electronic information services, well before the web arrived. I said then and I keep reminding myself today that the best way to think of the internet is as a giant support or supplement to the printed newspaper. Well, I don't mean any longer necessarily the printed part of it, but I do think there is lots more that can be done to enhance the value proposition of most newspapers.

What I mean, really, is that the internet ought to be viewed as a supplemental means - in a support sense - to do more of what a newspaper has traditionally done with print - to be what an advertising acquaintance once said --- the physicall representation of the geographic market the newspaper seeks to serve.

With that thought in mind, I am beginnin gto think more about how to view the interrelationship between printed newspaper and the internet.

My desire to do stems from having watched a couple of news programs on French television here and being very frustrated not to find anything in their websites that gave me the additional links I needed to pursue the subject of the shows. In the US, I frequently have had the same problems with sites such as for the Today Show.

I am going to look at some more newspapers here, and their websites and see what sorts of things are being missed in viewing the internet as the action arm of the newspaper. Other than tearing out a page, or maybe copying it, there is not much that can be done with the printed copy beyond reading it. Having read it, of course, you are free to think, to call someone, to buy something, to write something....lots of things.

Among them is that you are free to take something that is the product of having that printed newspaper in hand and DO something in the internet - either via a website or e-mail.

The question I want to address is how good a job are some newspapers doing at taking advantage of that opportunity?

I'll try to start with the Interntional Herald Tribune, and Le Figaro, Le Monde, Liberation and possibly some United Kingdom papers available here in print, plus La Stampa and Il Secolo XIX from Italy.