Striking up Conversations with Strangers

Simon Waldman talks about the way that Guardian Unlimited needs to interact with bloggers. He’s talking about it in the context of the Guardian‘s forthcoming move to a Berliner format.

The world our Berliner will launch into is almost unrecognisable to the one that greeted our last major change – the redesign of 1988. It was a world with only a handful of TV and radio channels, where the only digital device in your home was an LCD watch or a pocket calculator. There were no mobile phones (well none that you could honestly call “mobile”), no Big Brother, and most important of all, no internet.

Of all of these changes, it is the internet that has brought newspapers the greatest threats, opportunities and challenges.

Later on he says

Yes, if we make a mistake – or if people think we have made a mistake – there are plenty of bloggers watching who can, and will, tell the world.

So I’m sure I’m not the first person to point out that the internet did exist in 1988. The internet is generally accepted to have started in 1969. What he actually means is that it wasn’t a part of of most people’s everyday life in 1988.

Oh look. I wasn’t the first. I was even beaten to it by the Guardian‘s own Online blog.

One comment

  1. The inevitability of techno-pendants

    Simon Waldman wrote an interesting piece on Saturday, though not too new if you’ve read his previous work. What was innovative was the medium — the op/ed pages of Saturday’s Guardian. But reading it, I could see the wrath of the blogosphere coming dow…

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.