about how and when to begin to charge for content online,” Preston said. Audience member Ben Harder ’94, a health editor at U.S. News and World Report, wondered aloud whether lower Web advertising rates mean advertisers have realized they were paying too much for print. “Is this about advertisers waking up to the fact that they have overpaid for years?” he asked. Harder acknowledged that journalistic value alone doesn’t pay, literally: pharmaceutical advertisers flock to a Web page with a story about heart disease, but not to a story about rare diseases. That’s driving publishers to cut certain areas of news, he said. The notion rankled Preston, who praised the New York Times for maintaining a wall between editorial and advertising. “You can’t have a search optimization machine determine what health news is in a newspaper,” she said. “You can’t, ethically.” She went on to lament the possibility that the Times could be a rare survivor in the current media meltdown. “The whole newspaper business is based on competition,” she said. “What made us great is fear of being clobbered by the competition.” That competition, in many cases, has a reduced reporting staff and fewer editors to ensure accuracy, or has closed shop entirely. But the move toward online news didn’t concern everyone. “Why isn’t news in a multimedia format as valid as print, or more valid?” one alumna asked. “There are no rules on the medium anymore. It’s really the message.”
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Rosenfeld pointed to an up side of Web news—easy access. She said she read classmate Nancy Shohet West’s article in the Carlisle Mosquito while she was in Guatemala. No matter the media fallout, as a TV sports producer, Rosenfeld realizes she is protected. “Regardless of what happens, people will still care about the Red Sox,” she said. See more Reunion Weekend photos at concordalum.org.
Clockwise from top right: Cyndie Phelps ’64, Susan Packard Orr ’64, and Casey Morgan Peltier ’64; canoers on the Sudbury River; the Class of 1964’s hymn sing; Barbara Gifford Shimer ’74 and Marjorie Aelion ’74; Elena Mead ’04, history teacher Sally Zimmerli, and Christina Onorato ’04; Reunion Weekend children’s camp