Jeff Beckham

Jeff Jarvis passes along word that the Greensboro (NC) News & Record, one of the papers that people point to as one that has embraced the Internet in the right way, announced layoffs last week. It shows that even though a paper may make the right moves to adjust to today’s news-sharing environment, the economic pressure on newspapers continues. To quote Jeff:

This is why I think that everyone — everyone — in the newsroom should be trained in audio, video, blogs, wikis, maps, blog search, interactivity, and more, not because they’ll all do all of this but because they need to stop thinking of themselves as paper people and they need to start thinking of the new possibilities. I’d even train ad sales staff and certainly publishers in this — with lighter lessons — to open their eyes up to new ways. I’d argue that newspapers need to reinvent and reimagine themselves as new, smaller, faster, more open organizations — now. There is not a moment to waste. The axe is dangling.