PJNet

Tim J. McGuire , former Minneapolis Star Tribune editor and now Frank Russell Chair at the

Walter

Cronkite

School of Journalism and Mass Communication at

Arizona

State University, argues that editors need to be in the forefront of the debate on whether newspapers should work cooperatively on developing national website platforms. Citing Tom Mohr’s earlier article, “Winning Online — A Manifesto,” McGuire writes:

Mohr argues that newspapers are going to lose the online battle and the communications war unless we find a way to put together a national, industry-wide consortium and migrate onto common platforms for our newspaper-dot-com Web sites.

The newspaper industry and newsrooms need a healthy debate about whether we can feasibly construct a common platform for all our newspapers, and we need editors at the forefront of that debate. There will be some crucial and complex questions surrounding local and national control. The first tendency will be to run from them. That’s the wrong tendency. Editors need to be the authors of the solutions.

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