Felix

Do newspaper editors know what an internet is?

You’d think they had no idea, from reading the financial press. For instance, the WSJ’s Pui-Wing Tam started an article today by talking about “little-known social coding start-up GitHub”. Or consider this, from the FT’s Barney Jopson:

Most consumers still view Amazon as an online book retailer. Some are surprised to find it sells much more than the single product with which Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief executive, started in 1994.

I’m unclear on the purpose this kind of thing serves. For tech-savvy readers, it certainly makes these papers seem incredibly out-of-touch and irrelevant. Is it a way of reassuring the Old People that they’re not completely out of the loop? If so, it’s a pretty ham-fisted way of doing it. My guess is that it’s ultimately coming from crusty old editors who still view smartphones with suspicion. And that it’s going to be a serious impediment to these titles going effectively digital.