Why the merging of print and online?

Patrick Smith has written over at journalism.co.uk about how the controversial new content management system, Atex’s Prestige/P-Series, being used at Johnston Press is hindering digital progression in newsrooms. Smith writes:

“Cheap, dynamic blogging solutions like WordPress and Typepad provide all newsrooms need to create a respectable news site. Publishing executives seem to find it hard to believe that something free to use can be any good, but just look at what’s coming in the in-beta WordPress 3.0.”

One commenter under the story, Scoop, made a point about WordPress:

WordPress is great – but show me how it allows you to produce a newspaper. Show me how it manages advertising placements. Show me how it integrates with newspaper production systems without laborious copy and pasting. Show me how it scales up to deliver millions of pages. Show me how it manages dozens of sites under a joint yet devolved framework.

Isn’t online and print writing meant to be entirely different? This “laborious copy and pasting” shouldn’t happen in the first place, surely, as journalists should be writing one article for their print edition and then totally modifying it to be fit for the web: short sentences, SEO, etc.

Why does the system that allows a newsroom to produce a physical newspaper have to be shackled to the website? Why not run the two entirely separately? Why not employ a couple of people to control the website of each title, and allow them to run and design the websites in-house and individually for each title’s needs, instead of having one utterly shit and immovable web template for all?

Then your titles will be able to play with video, audio, slideshows, and all the other goodies readers should be offered.