Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the New York Times.  This morning, the Times published her piece “My Man Newt.”  I’m not going to address the substance of the article — this post isn’t intended to be about politics.   

But to give context, in one part, Dowd discusses Newt Gingrich’s alleged hypocrisy.  Dowd levies six distinct allegations in the course of three paragraphs, with each pair of two reinforcing the belief that Gingrich is a hypocrite.  Here’s a screen shot — but don’t read it.  Instead, count the number of blue links going to a source, backing up Dowd’s assertions:

Zero.

I’m not saying Dowd is making this up — in fact, each of the assertions can pretty easily be verified by looking at news reporting around the time of the actions alleged.  Heck, the New York Times itself covered most, if not all of these stories.

And that’s the problem: The Times just doesn’t link to them.

The reason here is neither evil nor sloth.  It’s newsprint.  Dowd is probably sitting around in her Washington-area home, typing her roughly 600 words on whatever springs to mind, with a specific mindset: She has a column to fill for the next day’s paper.  To the extent that she has to provide her editors with backup verifying her allegations, there is no expectation — on her behalf, or on that of the Times — that these sources are going to be revealed.  After all, you cannot put a hyperlink into newsprint.

So we have to take Dowd at her word here.  She’s an opinion writer, though, so it behooves her and the Times to make the facts she assert easily verifiable.  For print, that’s hard.  For the web, it is a problem which is easily avoided by simply using technology which has been around for two decades.  (<— See how easy it is!)  

And this really hurts the end product — the digital one, at least.  Compare Dowd’s piece with the DNC’s “Mitt v. Mitt” video, below:

The video is full of clips of Mitt Romney saying one thing first, then the opposite thing later.  It, like Dowd’s article, attempts to show that a leading Presidential candidate is a hypocrite.  And the video is an order of magnitude more effective.  A lot of that has to do with the medium — the audio/visual of the video versus the black and white text in Dowd’s column, but it’d be easy to bridge that gap.  All Dowd would need to do is link to her sources, especially if those sources were videos of Gingrich speaking.

But that doesn’t happen.  It’s okay to focus on the written word — I do that, too.  It is not okay, as Dowd and therefore the Times do, to focuse on “print.”

Newspapers, the product, are going to die because there is digital technology out there for content reproduction and distribution than the paper and ink version newspapers employ.  Newspapers, the companies, are going to die because culturally, they’re still stuck in a “print first” mindset.