Hold the Homepage! ONLINE: The internet enables closer engagement between journalists and readers HUGH LINEHAN

As I sit writing this at my kitchen table, I have the irishtimes.com homepage open in a browser to one side of the screen. Other tabs on the same browser carry the homepages of the BBC, the New York Times, RTÉ and the Sydney Morning Herald. Any other major media site I might care to check is only a couple of clicks away. I can listen to most of the radio stations on the planet. And, should I be so inclined (which of course I'm not), I can download pretty much any piece of music ever recorded, and watch any TV series or sports match for free. All for the price of a basic computer and an internet connection.

For the consumer, this is an unprecedented Golden Age of media, unimaginable only a few years ago.

For the media, technology offers exciting opportunities to enhance the work we do through new interactive tools; to get closer to our readers; to deliver information in a faster and more relevant way.

But it also challenges us to think afresh about how we run our operations and about what our raison d'etre is in a totally wired world. Some of these challenges are not new – the importance of maintaining an authentically Irish perspective within an increasingly globalised media environment, for example – but they're more pressing now. The fundamental point, though, is this: at the moment when The Irish Times celebrates surviving a turbulent 150 years, the medium through which our first edition was published a century and a half ago – the same medium it is primarily published for today – faces the greatest challenge in its history. Around the world, famous and venerable newspapers are disappearing from the landscape. Circulations are falling. Newsrooms are shrinking.

Not all of this can be blamed on the internet. As the world slides into recession, deep-seated problems in the way many newspapers – particularly in the US – were run and financed are being cruelly exposed. But online technology is what's scything through most newspapers' revenue models, and collapsing revenues are what is ultimately bringing newspapers to their knees.
Facebook, iTunes, YouTube, Twitter. Much of the nomenclature of new media seems so ephemeral and of the moment, it appears inevitable that much of it will appear out of date within 150 days, much less 150 years.

But, whatever about the names themselves, the phenomena they represent are far from fleeting. Search engines, social networks, mobile applications and a range of other innovations are fundamentally redefining the media and communications landscape. Newspapers need to adapt to these changes if they are to survive.
In June of last year, The Irish Times removed the subscription fee which it had charged online users for the previous six years. At the same time, it moved from its old address of ireland.com to a new one, irishtimes.com. These changes are in part a recognition of the fact that the subscription model was not tenable, but they also represent a statement of confidence that the quality of journalism in The Irish Times is strong enough to build a substantial audience online, complementing rather than competing with the daily newspaper.

In practical terms, the changes have also seen the integration of online and print journalism in our newsroom, the first stage of an ongoing process of integrating all our editorial processes. Ten months on, the results are encouraging, with more and more users coming to the site every month.

It would be a mistake to fall into the trap of seeing the internet purely as a threat. There's no reason why the basic values of good journalism – commitment to accuracy, objectivity and fair comment – should not be able to survive online. And technology offers exciting ways of adding new kinds of value to the work we do. Rather than just presenting an electronic facsimile of the daily newspaper on screen, or attempting to compete directly with traditional audiovisual media such as radio and television, our challenge is to harness new technology to translate what we do best into new forms. For example, audio slideshows take the proven skills of Irish Times photographers and present them in a sophisticated narrative format which was never achievable in print.

Online journalism also opens new spaces for a much closer engagement between journalists and their readers; it allows those readers to communicate directly and almost instantaneously with us, and with the broader community.

And it has unlocked the potential for entirely new forms of writing, such as blogging, which draw their strength from their immediacy and interactivity. irishtimes.com already has the most extensive team of bloggers of any Irish media site, offering news and opinion on everything from politics and business to music and the arts. And we'll soon be offering readers the opportunity to have their own say online on the issues of the day.

Most relevantly for this week's anniversary, technology has allowed The Irish Times to digitise its entire archive online. To mark the anniversary, this magnificent resource is free for everybody to access over the next week, and we'll be opening up parts of it on a regular basis over the following few months. I hope you'll discover, as I have, the pleasure of immersing yourself in the social, political and cultural history of the last 150 years, of exploring our own family and local histories, or just browsing through the peculiarities of daily life as recorded on our pages over successive generations.

Hugh Linehan is editor of irishtimes.com