The Daily Web
The World Wide Web ought to be the ideal medium for newspapers. So why do so many online papers stink?
"The Next Great American Newspaper" by David Gelernter, in The Weekly Standard (June 23, 2003), 1150 17th St., N.W., Ste. 505, Washington, D.C. 20036.
Newspapers on the World Wide Web have their minor uses, but they’re so-o-o boring— little imitation-newsprint newspapers that are standoffish and hard to browse. Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University, thinks that "America’s next great newspaper" will be published on the Web but that it will be very different from today’s "conventional Web-based losers." "No Web newspaper will match all of newsprint’s best qualities," says Gelernter, "but Web designers should understand those qualities so they can concoct new ones that are (in their ways) equally attractive." A print newspaper, in his view, is "a slab of space . . . that is browsable and transparent. Browsability is what a newspaper is for: to offer readers a smorgasbord of stories, pictures, ads, and let them choose what looks good. ‘Transparent’ means you can always tell from a distance what you’re getting into... and you always know (as you read) where you are, how far you’ve come, and how much is left." Today’s Web newspapers allow readers to "search" them for specific subjects. But what readers mainly want to do, says Gelernter, is browse. "They want to be distracted, enlightened, entertained." A Web newspaper, he says, should be thought of as "an object in time," and news as a "parade" of events. "Imagine a parade of jumbo index cards standing like set-up dominoes. On your computer display, the parade of index cards stretches into the simulated depths of your screen, from the middle-bottom (where the front-most card stands, looking big) to the farthest-away card in the upper left corner (looking small)." The parade is in continuous motion, as new stories pop up in front, and the oldest ones in the rear drop off the screen. "Each card is a ‘news item’—text or photo, or (sometimes) audio or video," he explains. The card has room for only a headline, a paragraph, and a small photo. It can lead (with the click of a mouse) to a full story or transcript, but "the pressure in this medium is away from the long set-piece story, towards the continuing series of lapidary paragraphs." Instead of producing "a monolithic slab of text," as in "today’s standard news story," he says, reporters "will belt out little stories all the time, as things happen." The new sort of news story will consist of "a string of short pieces interspersed with photos, transcripts, statements, and whatnot as they emerge. It is an evolving chain; you can pick it up anywhere and follow it back into the past as far as you like." Despite the competition from all-news cable channels, Gelernter contends, newspapers can still be first with the news—if they’re Web papers. "Because a Web-paper is a ‘virtual’ object made of software, capable of changing by the microsecond, lodged inside a computer where fresh data pour in constantly at fantastic rates, a Web-paper can be the timeliest of them all—and it can be a great paper if it plays to its natural advantages and delivers timeliness with style."