President's Column

News' On-line Product
Demands Guild's Vigilance

By Bob DiCesare
President

The Buffalo News is finally going on-line with its editorial product - and it isn't stopping there.

The News is venturing well beyond adding its editorial product to its current address at buffnews.com.  It's creating a wide-ranging community portal site (buffalo.com) that will include links to numerous sites, most tied to businesses and organizations in the greater Buffalo area.

We should applaud the effort.  The success of The News is important to all of us, and striving for a dominant on-line presence in Buffalo helps to safeguard the business.

Granted, The News may have finished last in the race among sizable newspapers to put editorial content on-line. But by basing its editorial content in a company-owned portal site that will attract widespread community interest, it is dissuading competition from some major Internet presences, such as Cox Intearctive. In Pittsburgh, for example, Cox Interactive has teamed with the local NBC affiliate to produce perhaps the city's foremost community portal site.

The News said it will provide the Guild with a preview of the portal and editorial-content sites upon completion.  In the meantime, a visit to sites such as boston.com, cleveland.com and syracuse.com will provide an idea of the type of product The News is producing.

The News says its editorial-content site will by fully automated.  A computer technician will push a button directing software to sort and organize the stories by topic and place them on-line.  The Sunrise editions will be posted Monday through Friday, the final editions on Saturday and Sunday.

If a mistake of substance is transferred from the hard copy to the on-line site, News executives said the link to that story will be rendered inaccessible.  No corrections will be made. Stories will not be updated during the course of the cycle. No concessions will be made to important breaking news.

And that's bound to last, what?… two weeks?

The Internet is a medium of immediacy, and to ignore that advantage over the long haul would be self-defeating.
Which means that as The News' web sites evolve, work will have to be done. And whose work will that be? From the Guild's perspective, the litmus test is a simple one.  If it looks like our work, it is our work.

The Guild already has jurisdiction over much of the advertising that has been appearing on The News' online sites.