New media and old media to develop in parallel

NEWS Managing editor of The Times, George Brock, has denied the Internet poses any threat to the newspaper industry. Brock was giving an interview to Silicon.com at London's New Media awards ceremony last week. Many industry observers claim that fate of the printed word depends very much on the progress and adoption of the Internet as a source of news and comment. But Brock claims there is no threat to his paper which is thriving online as well as off. "We've found that it doesn't do our print readership any harm to have an extremely successful Web site. The two things simply interact and I don't see any problem with it," said Brock. Brock proceeded to map out the future for his company on the Web. He plans to develop the paper and the Web site in parallel and predicted that the proportion of audiences accessing The Times online will grow quickly. He also predicted that online newspapers will undergo a massive change over the next year: "Every newspaper Web site in the world will be completely different within a year. We'll look back at today's sites and see rather messy, experimental versions compared with what we will have," said Brock.