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.

Posted by nick at April 7, 2008 11:05 AM

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 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 at April 9, 2008 03:27 PM