My favorite Steve Outing quote about online news

‘Rather than have a coder/programmer on staff who can create, fix or modify things quickly, they’d prefer a “hands-off” system where to do much innovation they have to wait for the vendor to get to it, which could be months. Hell, using Drupal, say, a small newspaper could probably get by with one programmer and contract out new feature requests to local Drupal shops/consultancies — or some inexpensive shop in India. And they’d save loads of money over the proprietary solutions.

Have newspaper execs who make those decisions learned anything in the last decade? Geez, they’ve hired expert tradesmen to run the printing presses for years. Along comes the Internet and they won’t hire enough tech experts to maintain and innovate as a Gutenberg moment in history slams into them and which requires major adaptation.’

–Steve Outing, posted on the Online News listserv

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