From Gutenberg to the Galaxy

A memo from Washington Post Managing Editor Phil Bennett:

Newspapers cling to an assembly-line model for news production even though computers and other technologies have rendered it obsolete. Information, which once marched in orderly lines from sources to reporters to editors to mammoth printing presses to fleets of delivery trucks to readers, now caroms every which way in a network.

Jack Shafer adds:

The reason many newspapers rely so heavily on editors—a reason rarely spoken—is that some reporters can't write. Their copy isn't edited as much as it's rewritten. Bennett has a message for them: "Reporters who can't write are a dying breed."