KEY POINTS:
The other night when the news was agog with Air New Zealand's charter flights to the Gulf, the Herald's political editor at Parliament, Audrey Young, put a 7pm posting on her Herald Online blog that began, "Winston Peters has just held a press conference in his caucus room
... "
It hastily related what happened: "No rushes to judgment from Peters. In fact there was no sense of urgency in his attitude to what National is rightly calling the biggest foreign policy embarrassment for ages and what Helen Clark concedes is "appalling".
"Peters wants to talk first to Simon Murdoch, Foreign Affairs secretary, and to find out more from Air New Zealand about exactly what the company told Murdoch. He thinks the airline executive who made the call to Murdoch back in January should have kept a minute of the meeting. Unfortunately, Murdoch didn't and he is relying on his memory of the conversation ... "
Next morning the newspaper gave a well-displayed front page account of what was known of the flights plus the blame that Defence Minister Phil Goff had flung at Foreign Affairs, which the Foreign Minister, Peters, was deflecting to Air New Zealand. Somehow the story didn't have the same immediacy.
We who like reading and writing are worried these days for the future of newspapers. When the internet became a news medium we were fairly complacent; the same dire predictions had been made when radio and television came on to the scene and it turned out there was still a demand for indelible print.
But the net is more fearsome. We survived broadcast news because it is ephemeral. Read that web posting again and notice that it could be a well-crafted radio report, if a little too concise for normal speech. It has the spontaneity of a live broadcast but also the precision of print. That is what is frightening.
Possibly there are readers who love the screen as much as I love words on paper. They will not understand my worry and, rationally, nor do I. If the web can convey news and thoughts with the care and composition of the printed word, why should it matter to me if newspapers wither and die?
So long as the web can make money, reputable news media will invest in it and writers, known as content providers, will continue to eat. Nevertheless, I think something would be lost.
It is a worry shared I think by thoughtful readers, as is the difficulty of rationalising it. The best we can do is mutter that reading words on a screen is "not the same somehow".
When pressed for the reason we say you cannot take a screen outside and lie under a tree with it, or settle back in your armchair with it, or read it on the bus or at the beach. But you can now, with a wireless laptop, and the flexible foldable screen is probably not far away.
Actually, it would make no difference if computers were as portable as paper. That is not the reason we prefer to have words in our hands. The reason, I think, is their physical existence.
Words on paper have an existence independent of our attention to them. We don't zap them from sight once read, they lie there living, lasting. It is the reason we instinctively do print-outs of material on screen that seems useful or just too good to leave in electric circuits.
Any printed periodical has an organic life, a character, a tone, strengths, weaknesses, values and foibles all its own. When you work for it you are conscious of its character and your part in it. I'm not sure a website can be quite the same.
My experience of writing a web-log is limited to one I did from a cruise this year. I found I couldn't sweat over it, not like I sweat over everything I do for the paper. It didn't call for the same chisel.
Web writing probably should not be hard lest it lose its best quality, printed spontaneity.
Audrey Young's blog has been quite a newsmaker in recent weeks. It was instrumental in the downfall of David Benson-Pope and pinioned the National Party leader when he tried to wriggle out of a position he had clearly stated to Herald staff on the therapeutics bill.
"I am bloody angry with John Key," she wrote on her blog. In the paper she was much more circumspect.
Newspapers survived radio and television partly by importing their strengths: the telling, rather than writing, of stories, the focus on people, celebrities and real.
If newspapers are going to survive the net it seems to me they will need to be written with more immediacy. It can be done, and newspapers will be better for it.
