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Our Magazine's
Green and Gold World Editions scheduled for The
Africa Travel Library series make sense in the
light of Today's Technology.
Below is an item we
discovered almost seven years ago that covers many
of the points in favor of our decision to balance
our Printed Editions with outstanding Electronic
Editions.
The Next Great
American Newspaper
Excerpts from original which
appeared online in 2003
 America's
next great newspaper is a wonderful idea -but it
will have to be published on the web and not on
paper, and as a new style web newspaper, not one of
today's conventional web-based losers. It is coming
- and (in the nature of things) it will redefine
the news story.
Why on the web
and not on newsprint? 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 know. Or almost the
only.)
And, most
important: A newspaper sells timeliness if it sells
anything. The idea that newspapers can no longer
compete in the "fresh news" market because of
all-news cable channels is silly; radio has been
delivering bulletins for eighty years, but people
continued to read newspapers anyway, for as long as
they were worth reading.
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.
Why a "new
style" web newspaper and not today's style? Because
today's web-papers are wedge-ins, stop-gaps, crack
fillers, with all the character of putty in a
plastic spritz-tube; people read them not for
pleasure and illumination but to extract a
necessary fact or kill time when they are stuck at
their desks. Their builders don't seem to have
grasped what makes the newsprint newspaper one of
design history's greatest achievements. (Do they
ever read a newspaper?) No web newspaper will match
all of newsprint's best qualities, but web
designers should understandthose qualities so they
can concoct new ones that are (in their ways)
equally attractive. The mere timid transfer of
newsprint-style newspapers to the web--standard
operating procedure today--is bound to yield
failure, just as primitive movies had to be boring
so long as directors merely pointed their cameras
at a stage and slurped up Broadway plays. Movies
needed their own, new ways to tell a story. Web
newspapers do too.
The average web
newspaper's biggest problem nowadays is the problem
of nearly all websites: They are boring, as vastly
useful and dull as the computer itself. If
"America's next great newspaper" is a web-paper, it
must (nonetheless) draw your fascinated attention;
make you itch to tune in. It must be interesting to
watch-not a pint-sized bulletin board like today's
websites, where (occasionally) someone tacks up
something new, with dancing cartoon-ads thrown in
to drive you crazy; instead like a porthole you
look through to an intriguing, ever-changing scene
on the far side. It should work equally well as a
newspaper or as news radio that reads itself aloud,
following your simple voice commands. It should be
capable of slipping smoothly and naturally off the
screen into something more comfortable, the printed
page.
In technology
terms, it is all surprisingly easy.
Nothing on this
wish list detracts from the brand new, newsprint
New York Sun-long may it prosper. For all I know,
"America's next great newspaper" is the Sun-but on
the web. (It's on the web today, of course-but in
conventional antique style.)
SPACE is
newsprint's domain; time is the web's. As an
ordinary thing-in-space, the newsprint newspaper
will always be the better, more convenient object;
the web-paper is a mere slippery goldfish behind
the glass of your computer screen--you can peer at
it, and handle it by remote control. (Study a menu,
inch the cursor around, press a numb-feeling
mouse-button. Computers are obnoxiously
fussy.)
As an
object-in-time the web-paper will be king, if we
let it be-but what kind of object is that? If a
still photo is an object in space, a parade seen
from a fixed location is an object in time-its
grand marshal two hours in the past, its rear end
20 minutes into the future. And (it just so
happens) the news <I>is</I> a parade,
it is a March of Time (Time-Life's famous newsreel
series), a sequence of events--and thus perfect for
a (new style) web newspaper. How can history's
parade (or any parade) not be interesting? A proper
web-paper will be a parade of reports, each
materializing in the present and marching off into
the past.
A newsprint
paper is a slab of space (even a closed tabloid is
larger than most computer screens) 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 (Are there
lots of pages here or not many? Important news
today or nothing much?)--and you always know (as
you read) where you are, how far you've come, and
how much is left. The newsprint paper is an easy,
comfortable, unfussy object. You can turn to the
editorials, flip to the back page, or pull out the
sports section without thinking. It's light and
simple and cheap: Spread it on the breakfast table
and spill coffee on it, read it standing in a
subway or flat on your back on sofa or lawn, on the
beach or in bed. You can write on it, cut it up,
pull it apart, fold it open to an interesting
story, and stick it (folded) in your pocket to show
to someone later. These small details add up to
brilliant design.
A web-paper
could be a first-rate "object in time"--but today's
are cut-rate conventional papers instead, imitation
newsprint. Today's typical web-paper is like a
newsprint paper where you can only see one
midget-sized page at a time, and can never touch
it--someone holds it in front of your face. You
have no idea how many more pages there are, or how
the pages are arranged. Since you can never touch
the thing, you are constantly issuing finicky
little orders: Turn the page, show me the arts
section, make that damned ad stop
blinking.
Today's
web-papers offer one main advantage over newsprint:
They let you search. But how often do newsprint
readers want to search, or need to? They know where
to find what they want; anyway, they mainly browse.
They want to be distracted, enlightened,
entertained. First law of information: browsing
trumps searching. But (second law)--effective
browsing is <I>visual</I> browsing,
what you do when you pick two interesting magazines
out of thousands at a newsstand; or read a
newsprint paper and let a photo, headline, ad, or
cartoon catch your eye.
The web-papers
of tomorrow should be "objects in time," and here
is the picture. 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). Now,
something happens: Tony Blair makes a speech. A new
card materializes in front (a report on the speech)
and everyone else takes a step back--and the
farthest-away card falls off the screen and
(temporarily) disappears. So the parade is in
constant motion. New stories keep popping up in
front, and the parade streams backwards to the
rear.
Each card is a
"news item"--text or photo, or (sometimes) audio or
video. "Text" could mean an entire conventional
news story or speech or interview. But the pressure
in this medium is away from the long set-piece
story, towards the continuing series of lapidary
paragraphs. There's room on a "news card" for a
headline, a paragraph and a small photo. (If the
news item is a long story or transcript, only the
opening fits on the card--but you can read the
whole thing if you want to, by clicking the proper
mouse-buttons.)
So: a moving
parade (or flowing stream) of news items--new ones
constantly arriving in front, older ones moving
back. (Actually it's one long parade reaching back
to the newspaper's founding; you can rewind it like
videotape.) You can only see one full card at a
time; the others are partially hidden by cards in
front. But you can guess what's on the partially
hidden cards, because you can see their top edges
and left margins. And when you touch a card with
the cursor, a complete version pops up
instantaneously. The news stream uses
foreshortening to make the most of screen space:
One glance encompasses the most recent 20 or 30
postings, the latest quarter-hour to several hours
of news, depending on the world's pulse at the
moment and your preferences.
Everything on
every card is indexed, everything is searchable
should you care to search--the news parade is
(equivalently) an "information beam" you can focus
as precisely as you like. Type "Tony Blair" and you
get a Tony beam--still a moving stream edging
backwards into the sunset, but all Tony, all the
time.
MOST IMPORTANT,
the news story itself is redefined. Today's
standard news story is a monolithic slab of text,
updated a few times perhaps and then plopped into
the archives.
It is an odd
bastard at best, a triumph of efficiency and
marketing over literary logic. It is radically
front-loaded; it starts with its most interesting
sentence and then tapers (line by line) to a sharp
point of boredom, losing momentum with every
paragraph--thus a spike-shaped monstrosity
perfectly formed for its mission, to be pounded
like a piton into the rock wall of a reader's
indifference.
The new style
news story is 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.
Instead of
writing one longish piece, reporters will write
(say) five short ones--will belt out little stories
all the time, as things happen. They will shape
their news stories to the shape of the news, of
experience, of time. The string of aphorisms--prose
in stanzas--is a perfect form for fresh and timely
news. Perfect also for a nation where concentration
spans seem to halve every year. Yet (on the other
hand) it is no accident that two of the three
greatest writers of modern times should have loved
writing aphorisms. (Freud didn't, but Nietzsche and
Wittgenstein did.) Not a bad way to write, not by
any means.
YOU CAN READ
this news stream, or switch it to auto-pilot and
(following your simple commands, if you're driving
a car, say, or lying around) it will read to you.
Eventually the web paper will migrate from the web
server to your own computer. The main office
e-mails you each new "card"; software on your
computer receives each new arrival, indexes it,
adds it to the moving parade. Now (by the way) you
can read many newspapers simultaneously; each sends
you its own stream of cards, and your local
software shuffles them together in time-order.
(Yes, you can already arrange to receive news
updates by e-mail--but without the right kind of
display, you have nothing. Third law of
information: The interface the application. The
right picture is everything.)
Takes up lots of
space on your computer, right? All those "news
cards"? Requires lots of computing power to operate
this fancy display? Absolutely. But the high
expense (and good performance) of the eventual
on-your-desktop version is a feature, not a bug.
The industry (after all) has a problem: Each new PC
generation arrives on your desktop equipped with
vaster and vaster, emptier and emptier closets for
information you don't own and couldn't locate if
you did; the per-bit cost of storing data is near
zero already, and the question is what to
<I>do</I> with all that storage space.
And each new PC generation arrives with faster and
faster processor chips, which spend more and more
of their time doing nothing. Eventually people are
likely to notice, and start asking questions. "Why
do I need a new computer? What's wrong with the old
one? What important thing will the new one do that
the old one can't do just as well?" At which point
the computer industry as we know it will start
falling apart. The tycoon who founds America's next
great newspaper will help save the computer
industry too.
And it would be
so damned <I>easy</I> to found, it's
almost painful.
I LIVE NORTH of
New Haven in the middle of the Great Suburb (a
global feature, like the Amazon or Sahara) that
covers the northeast and plays a big role in
setting the nation's cultural mood. Around here we
set out food for the birds, and the New York Times
sets out information for us. People nibble at it
without enjoying themselves or pondering over much.
Mostly it never occurs to them that the Times is
slanted, because the Times is the rock-solid floor
of their world, it defines horizontal. (Thus Dan
Rather's celebrated observation--which must have
cracked up Sulzberger and his editors--that the
Wall Street Journal is right-wing but the Times is
middle-of-the-road.) Of course the Times is, in
reality, too big and varied to be condemned as just
"slanted," period--there are plenty of Times
reporters whose integrity is absolute--but its
national and world news coverage is slanted and
getting slantier. Yet here in the Great Suburb, no
one will give up the Times until an attractive
alternative presents itself. I do hear more
disapproving murmurs than I used to--but only
because of the newspaper's ever more blatant
anti-Israel tone-which, however, people take for
mere bigotry; they've seen it all before. They
rarely ask themselves whether such bigotry might
not be part of a larger infection incubated on the
editorial page and now spreading up and down the
narrow airless news columns, making the whole paper
mildly feverish today--and delirious
tomorrow.
Yet things could
change for the Times as fast as they did for the
networks once cable TV started to grab. One day CBS
was on top of the world, next day it was muttering
darkly about strategies for survival. Things
happen.
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