Browsing My Morning (Electronic) Newspaper over Coffee

I have posted a number of previous posts about newspapers and their decline in the face of new media (see: Mainstream Media Begin to Adopt Link Journalism, A Strategy for Saving Our Hometown Newspapers). My hometown newspaper, the Ann Arbor News, will soon cease publishing and its decline has been sad for the town residents to watch. In my view, the key error that was made by the publisher of the newspaper was forgetting that the company was in the news business rather than in the newspaper business. 

I love newspapers and I have also loved reading them over my morning cup of coffee or after dinner. But stick with me as I explore some of the facets of these rituals. I confess that I bought the idea that a critical component of the ritual was connected to the tangible feel of the newspaper in my hands. For me, at least, this turns out not to be true. I discovered this when I recently bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a small netbook weighing abut 2.5 pounds. It connects automatically to my home wireless network for Internet access.

So I now keep my little netbook close to the breakfast table and fire it up as I brew my coffee. I have the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Google News tabbed on my Mozilla browser so I can easily scan the news from multiple sources using my netbook. I can also view the news on a horizontal timeline with Google News Timeline which was just released by Google Labs. I can also point my browser to Mlive.com which provides a web version of the soon-to-be-defunct Ann Arbor News. By the way, Google Timeline intersperses video clips with textual news, providing a whole new slant on news content. Any time that I want to dig deeper into a news story, Google search is only a tab away. It's not your father's newspaper.

I am not happy to see the local newspaper exit and there will be an unfilled void remaining, part of which will be filled by new media. However, let me also reaffirm that our print newspapers have fulfilled in the past the key function of investigative journalism for which there is no current web equivalent (yet). Nevertheless, I have come to view my access to the electronic news in the morning as superior in many ways to the former hardcopy newspaper product.

Comments

[quit smoking plan]

Based on what you've said, it just show how our technology developed, you should be happy about it, That only proves that we progress as well as the time passed by.

[Karl Robstad, MD]

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