Michael Getler is The Post's ombudsman. He can be reached at (202) 334-7582 or by e-mail at ombudsman@washpost.com, or c/o The Washington Post, 1150 15th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20071. E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version

By Michael Getler
Sunday, December 24, 2000; Page B06

Just inside the entrance to The Post newsroom is a small but prominent television studio. Several times a day, Washington Post reporters sit in front of its lights and camera and provide news updates and analysis for a growing number of viewers. The operation started three years ago as an alliance with local all-news cable Channel 8. It has since grown into relationships with PBS's "Newshour with Jim Lehrer," with the local NBC outlet, WRC-TV, for business news, and then, last year, came the big linkups with NBC network news and MSNBC.

A few yards farther into the newsroom, one finds the editors of PM Extra, a special afternoon, online edition of The Post, started last year, that updates the newspaper's washingtonpost.com Web site with stories that broke after the morning newspaper was printed and with other stories that will be in the next day's newspaper but, for competitive reasons, can't wait until then to be told.

So every day, a small but growing number of Post reporters stop what they are doing and appear on TV or write an early version of their story for the Web site, or perhaps are made available for an online chat with readers.

What is happening here is not unusual. It is happening in many big city newsrooms. It is an enormously expensive, not yet profitable, yet important effort by newspapers to meet the intensive new world of competition represented by cable television and the Internet/World Wide Web revolution, and to prevail in that world as they do in print.

The strategy is simple. Wherever people get their news -- in print or online -- they should get it from The Post, or whatever their main newspaper is. Wherever the advertising dollars, especially classified advertising, wind up, The Post needs to have a print and electronic receptacle to receive it.

These seem like sensible investments in today's rapidly evolving field of cyber-publishing, and The Post's Web site is certainly among the best of its kind.

What is less clear, at least to me, is how all this will affect print journalism and people who rely on newspapers to know what's happening.

Here are some questions:

Will newspaper reporters who interrupt their news gathering, interviewing, thinking, research or writing to do that "quick update" for TV or the Web ultimately do less reporting? Will reporters and editors, knowing that one story may be more appealing to NBC-TV than another, focus on that story?

Will reporters, already wed to computer screens for information, get out of the office even less and further reduce the chance encounters that often change stories? Are the stories that reporters put on the Web at midday, so that the newspaper can have its own brand online, appreciably better than what the wire services can do, and is it worth the break in concentration and reporting schedules to do that?

Will Web sites and their expanding staffs, frequently separated physically from the newspaper newsroom, reflect the news values and judgment of the mother ship and capture complicated, impromptu shifts in how stories are being thought about?

Do top editors at newspapers, who now must spend time thinking about where next to take the newspaper electronically, think less about news than they used to and more about multi-media mergers and managing the already complex mix in the newsroom?

Does the focus of top editors on the new world of online or cable TV journalism send signals into a newsroom about what's important; does it influence how junior editors and reporters think about their future and their commitments to in-depth and aggressive newspaper reporting?

Finally, how will we readers of the morning newspaper know what we are missing?