The debate as to whether newspapers and the old press is a better source for information than blogs is endless, I don’t think it has a definite answer and I’m certainly not qualified enough to take a stand on the matter. A fact is that all paper periodicals are moving to the web and struggling to adapt to it.
The Italian press, however, seems to have more problems with it. They sure do have websites which they keep constantly up to date. Despite their internet-awareness it seems they still don’t know what a link is. Their articles are really quite interesting and sometimes very insightful but they can’t put a link to save their lives even when it comes to articles about the web.
That is quite annoying and stupid, it looks as though they want to keep all the traffic to their site, not send surfers away. This brings me to the next point. Everybody knows that there’s no point in reinventing the wheel, especially with web technologies, just leverage the existing ones. Well, everybody knows but them.
Whenever they feel that something has become hip on the net they replicate it. recently both Repubblica and Corriere (two of the biggest newspapers in Italy) created their own sites to share and watch videos. Rather than embedding content from YouTube they went through the trouble of re-developing the technology and taking up the costs of the bandwidth for the streaming. That is not sustainable… and not really smart because I don’t think they’ll ever reach a wide enough audience to justify the expenses. And they didn’t stop just at the video, they also tried to replicate Skype!
Wake up! Look at the New York Times, they don’t only link external articles, but also discuss blog posts on they newspaper.
I think that the main problem with Italians is that they usually wait the example of foreign countries and after a long time they start to follow the trend.
Luckily this is true not only for good examples (e.g., technology research and innovation) but also for very bad examples (e.g., food, tv formats, culture, …)