Mathew Ingram has a fascinating look at the way old publications are trying to come to grips with the web - and it's not always management that provides the stumbling block. Employees and unions suffer from the same kind of old think - after Time Magazine's management set out a policy requiring their writers to target the website, things got silly:

It may have been rather poor timing for a call to arms, however, considering the writers’ union was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the publisher of Time, People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Money magazines. I expect the idea of tying job evaluations to web writing was like red meat.

The upshot: in return for other concessions, according to Women’s Wear Daily (which seems to have been the best source of coverage for this particular story, oddly enough), the management at Time agreed to a clause that says while employees will be “encouraged” to write for the Web, “there will no negative impact on any employee for not volunteering to do Web site work.”

I love that "no negative impact" thing. With circulation plummeting, how can there be anything other than negative impact? The denial of reality there is thick enough to cut with a knife.

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