An interesting post, and a lot of interesting (and validating) comments about the intergenerational clash between old and new media within the newsrooms. Ed Driscoll has further thoughts.

I remember a few years ago, when I first started writing pieces for on-line publications, that the editors I was dealing with viewed the web as a foreign land. They initially requested pieces in Microsoft Word, with instructions as to where to put the links, that they could edit and then hand off to their "web people" to put on line. Note that these were not original pieces, but supposedly the best of my blog posts for the time period in question. What they were asking was for me to take the HTML (the native language of the original posts), and convert it to Word, so they could then reconvert it back to HTML (with all the potential for screwups therein). It took a while to persuade them to simply accept my HTML in the first place (since they didn't even understand what HTML was--that was one of those "techie" terms, that they let their "techies" handle).

I don't get this so much now but back in the late 90's I used to get a lot of calls from people needing help printing their emails. And of course they were always stressed because they said they had several important emails that had to catch up on and must print them immediately. I'd often point out, guised as a work around, that they can just read the text on the screen, but they would often belly ache about the screen giving them headaches and how my suggestions would impede their productivity. But you know how that customer is always right.