"Unimagine The Paper"
By Neil Dodds
03 April, 2006
"One of the challenges of thinking about this future in the context of the internet is to unimagine the paper. What if there were no set story lengths? What if stories could be filed at any time of the day or night? What if the story were not a story but a sentence describing a breaking event, followed by a series of short, updating bulletins?"
Guardian Unlimited's editor in chief Emily Bell gets to grips with the concept of redefining what a newspaper is - and how they'll look a decade or two from now.
It's definitely a notion in the air at present. One need only browse the vast number of online journalism, future news and whither publishing conferences that the industry has sponsored in recent months. Newspapers - the Guardian included - pay new media gurus to advise on incorporating bloggers, podcasts and user-generated content into their operations. Sometimes this works - the Guardian's Comment is Free section is very good. Sometimes it doesn't - the LA Times experience of opening an editorial column to Wiki-inspired user input ended in tears, when readers covered the article in the internet equivalent of obscene graffitti.
The truth is - and as Bell admits - nobody really knows what 2026's newspaper will look like, or if newspapers will ever stop evolving. Correspondent.com would agree with her that the newspaper - the physical edition, that covers your fingers with ink when you read it in the morning - will not fade from view as quickly as some net evangelists think. Reading a newspaper, for many of us, is actually quite a pleasant way of absorbing the news.
But it will change. Newspapers provided the template for much of what we see on the web today: Features, op-eds, photo stories, articles arranged by geography and subject all originated in newspapers. Internet editions take these concepts and run with them, expanding the definition of an op-ed (for example) to include comments from readers, accompanying blogs, an archive of the writer's previous columns and a link to his website, where his views might be elaborated in more detail. To this you can add the web's unparalleled ability to break news, to update it every minute - and to present video footage.
It's difficult to see how a newspaper - printed the evening before it is delivered to the newsagent - can be influenced by the web in the same way the web was born from print editions. Digital paper might mean the newspaper can be updated almost as often as the website and eventually carry video, but where does this leave the daily paper? And should it try to compete with the all-singing, all-dancing web edition?
Will newspapers become a fogeyish minority interest, sold at a premium to those who either can't use or refuse to use internet technology?
Perhaps. But there are things that we would argue that newspapers do better than the internet. Ordering news is one of them. Bell writes that people come to the Guardian's website to listen to podcasts, to get involved in political and cultural debate, to search for jobs - but the vast majority of visitors, she says, come to read articles. 33,000 different stories are read every day by the Guardian's web users
Ordering these stories becomes a challenge, and it's one that newspapers do quite well. The internet provides straight-to-the-story access to subscribers of news feeds and Google News readers, but people who are willing to pay to read news still put their trust in the discernment of editors.
Bell writes that it may be the case that the news article is a format like the 3 minute pop song - it endures "because it just feels right despite being freed from its formatted boundaries." But with the internet, the news article gets a huge backing cast, whether from links to archives, comment from readers, support from other sources: It no longer exists in a vaccuum.
In the early days of internet news, we used to discuss how the internet edition complemented the print newspaper. Now the question is reversed: How can print editions offer something that the internet can't? And if they don't, how can we expect paying customers - that is, those who buy and read the print edition - to continue to fork out for an inferior product?
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