Future newspaper, newspaper future
What an amazing man David Gelernter is. Professor of computer science at Yale, author of Mirror Worlds (1991), a book that "foresaw" the World Wide Web, and builder of the commercial Scopeware software. In the 23 June issue of The Weekly Standard, he focuses that formidable mind of his on the newspaper business and predicts that The Next Great American Newspaper will be published on the web and not on paper. Why?
"It's much cheaper to produce and distribute that way, and your distribution network puts you, automatically, in homes all over the world. The web is a medium young readers can manage. Young people don't read newspapers; chances are they don't even know how. But they know how to play with computers. (Possibly this is the only thing they do know. Or almost the only.) And, most important: A newspaper sells timeliness if it sells anything... 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."
What will the web-paper of tomorrow look like? Gelernter sees computing devices presenting something that resembles an array of index cards, where each card is a "news item" — a mix of text, photo, audio and video. These cards are in constant motion so that as soon as news breaks, a new one appears, pushing the previous one into the background.
BECAUSE we're talking about "cards" here, a headline, a paragraph and an image is about the most that can be squeezed onto one. That means a move towards a stream of paragraphs and away from the lengthy print stories we're used to. This, says Gelernter, doesn't mean the end of longer news items, though. Only the opening will fit on the card, the rest will appear in response to mouse-clicks or voice commands. So, instead of the slabs of text which are now shovelled onto the web and updated once or twice before being pensioned off to some archive, we're going to have a dynamic news environment where everything on every "news card" is indexed and searchable.
AS THIS will be a web-only product and not a newspaper transposed to the web, the news story and the methods of compiling it will have to be redefined. Instead of concentrating on longish pieces, reporters will hammer out smaller stories all the time, as events happen. These short texts will be combined with multimedia and, says Gelernter, the great reporters of the future will be those skilled in writing reams of aphorisms. The aphorism is, he claims, the perfect form for timely news, and perfect too for people whose attention spans appear to be halving every year.
THE NEWSPRINT NEWSPAPER is one of design history's greatest achievements, says Gelernter, but what passes for web-papers today is dullness in the extreme. To him, it appears that those responsible for creating newspaper web sites have never even read a paper! The transfer of newspapers to the web, with their print formats and structures, must stop, just as early movies that were created with a camera pointed to a theatre stage stopped. Film had to find its own way to tell stories. Web newspapers will have to as well. Imitation newsprint is a dead end. A new generation of news consumers is emerging and they want to be "distracted, enlightened, entertained," says Gelernter, but mainly, they want to browse. Nothing remarkable about that, of course, as browsing is what we all enjoy doing at news-stands and in bookstores.
This is a brilliant essay. Read it.
Diarist of the day: Joe Orton, 27 June 1967"Went to Larbi's [local male prostitute house] by taxi. The house was lit by oil lamps -- the cooking was done on an oil stove, yet on the wall there was a telephone and in the second bedroom there was an extension. 'My brother he travail on the telegraphie' Larbi said, by way of explanation. There were framed photos of him on the wall. Larbi suddenly produced a gun and pointed it at me. I held up my hands. 'I kill you,' Larbi shouted wildly. We all laughed as he pulled the trigger. I had a feeling that no writer with an eye for the ironic could resist having the gun loaded and the playwright of promise falling dead beside the telephone extension. 'An Evelyn Waugh touch,' Kenneth [Halliwell] said as I told him after the gun had clicked harmlessly."
