News after the newspaper

Arianna Huffington likes to say that her Huffington Post blogsite is becoming an “Internet newspaper.” There’s just one problem: there’s no such thing as an Internet newspaper. That, anyway, is my contention in The Great Unbundling, the initial post in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s weeklong forum on Newspapers and the Net: “The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way.”

Also appearing today is a response from Clay Shirky, who argues that experimentation in the new medium may lead to new and perhaps even better ways to produce quality journalism.

2 thoughts on “News after the newspaper

  1. Bertil

    Can’t they be newpapers on-line like they are other obsolete form of significantly good objects that have adapted? Closed Encyclopedia on-line, poetry without philosophical boudoirs, paintings in a world of photography?

  2. grizzly marmot

    There is a reason the word trust is often associated with (and even printed on) money. Trustworthy information is valuable. The net is full of information – both accurate and inaccurate. Thus any single piece of information has little value unless it can be trusted.

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