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News after the newspaper

April 07, 2008

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.

Advertisement: Are you ready for "The Big Switch"? Fast Company calls Nicholas Carr's new book "compulsively readable - for nontechies, too." Salon says it's "magisterial." Order now from Amazon.com.

Comments

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?

Posted by: Bertil [TypeKey Profile Page] at April 7, 2008 05:31 PM

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.

Posted by: grizzly marmot [TypeKey Profile Page] at April 9, 2008 03:27 PM

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Nick's new book: bigswitchcover2thumb.jpg "Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company

"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews

"Riveting stuff" -New York Post

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Read Q&A with Nick

Greatest hits

The amorality of Web 2.0

The editor and the crowd

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

The great unread

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar

Sharecropping the long tail

The social graft

Steve Jobs' devices

MySpace's vacancy

Other writing

The ignorance of crowds

The recorded life

The end of corporate computing

IT doesn't matter

The parasitic blogger

The sixth force

Hypermediation

More

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