Guardian editor sets out web challenges

You have until Friday to hear Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger talk about how the web is challenging newspapers on Radio 4's the Message.

Some form of Craiglist-style disaggregated advertising will present a 'very severe challenge' to newspaper business models in the UK, he says.

"Just as Craig Newmark is trying to disaggregate editorial from advertising, there are thousands of people out there who are trying to dismember a newspaper and are providing very rich, deep sites," he told Steve Hewlett.

"A newspaper is a mile wide and an inch deep - these sites are an inch wide and a mile deep. Newspapers can either bitterly resent this and say 'that's not what we do', or say 'this is an interesting, different way of doing business so we will adapt what we do'."

He also described US celebrity blog the Huffington Post - cited as an influence for the paper's new 'Comment is free' project - as the 'new place where all the liberal debate has energy and focus'.

Listen to the full interview.

• Equally worth your time is Lisa Mullins' recent interview with Rebecca MacKinnon on the WGBH show Thinking Big.

Rebecca quite expertly explains how blog credibility is evaluated by readers, why she left broadcasting for blogging and why it is the most exciting development since sliced newspapers, or something. Worth your lunch break anyway.

Watch the full interview.

• Finally, the New York Times' first public editor Daniel Okrent spoke yesterday at Williams College in Massachusetts. He said that the mainstream media will be 'beaten by blogs' unless it can live up to its own standards of accuracy and thoroughness and protect its brands. Beaten how exactly? There is an intriguing write-up on the charmingly titled Media Giraffe project.

Listen to the speech.

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