When I read the Gannett "Information Center" memo and its attached Q and A, I immediately worried that there was so much in it that it would be misinterpreted and lead to unpredictable side effects. Faced with the enormity of it all, people would naturally latch onto the little parts that felt most comfortable (like hard news 24x7, or video).
While working on a presentation today I was looking for some dates and stumbled across Wikipedia's Online Newspapers entry, which may be the worst page in the entire collection. What little information it has is riddled with inaccuracy. This probably is an illustration of the Cobbler's Children principle. Perhaps some J-prof could armtwist an undergrad into fixing it.
Fortunately we have Dave Carlson's Online Timeline, which is thorough and accurate.
Not long ago someone suggested I might be an isolationist, based on something I had written about the fading role of world and national news and the rise of hyperlocalism in newspapers.
I'm an RSS addict. Once you have an RSS reader set up, it's easy to get addicted. But RSS is still a fringe technology, used by a small percentage of the population. Why? Because it's broken. Getting better, but still broken.
The broken part has nothing to do with the competing standards -- RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 (which has nothing to do with 1.0), Atom, et cetera. That's behind-the-scenes stuff and users don't need to care.
The broken part is the subscription mechanism. It's too complicated.
Jonathan Dube points out that the Washington Post, CBS News and Newsweek all have added comment capabilities to story pages. I don't think comments are the best way to build community, comments are infinitely better than no conversation at all. We've come quite a way from the days when editors would look at you and say, in all seriousness: "You mean you let them say anything they want?"
Quite a few newspapers are now either using Drupal CMS or planning to use Drupal soon, so Nikolai Thyssen of Dagbladet Information in Copenhagen has created a space at groups.drupal.org. You can join at http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal.
Time magazine has a piece proclaiming the continued existence of newspapers, which is a nice observation (yes, they are still extraordinarily profitable relative to other types of business).
But in in a sidebar, Bob Mong, editor of the Dallas Morning News, is quoted:
