Broadband Emmys For Newspaper Sites; What Gives?

This has generated some amount of commentary over the last week: that NYT and WaPo led the slate of nominees for the first-ever Emmy Award for broadband news and documentary programming. NYT had three and WaPo had two; MTV News got one; as did National Geographic’s four-part webcasts on Katrina, as shown on MSN.com.
LAT: The fact that two newspapers dominate illustrates the erasing of long-established boundaries between newspapers and TV, crTeating new opportunities for print journalists, sai Av Westin, co- chairman of the TV academy’s news and documentary awards committee.
Vivian Schiller, senior VP and GM of Nytimes.com, said one advantage the site may have is that it has sought to produce reports that do not resemble TV pieces, noting that Web viewing requires different pacing and editing.
Variety: There’s a tempting revenue premise here, through sponsorships. The production costs for the content are generally low…the paper also can take advantage of a reporter’s enthusiasm in a way that saves on costs.
“But the expansion goes beyond the short-term revenue implications to a larger, more philosophical question: Will the addition of video represent a more radical reinvention, one in which even the word newspaper becomes a misnomer, and a paper turns into a kind of all-encompassing incubator in which reporting is created by staff, given the imprimatur of the brand and then put forth into every conceivable medium?”

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