Ps AND QsThe golden age of newsprint collides with the gilt age of internet news

seat on a United Airlines flight, I ducked for the third time as the gentleman next to me struggled to turn the page of his newspaper. While he was perusing the day’s events, I was contemplating the unfortunate juxtaposition of two iconic forms—the oversized broadsheet newspaper and the undersized airline seat—and the current state of two industries in deep financial trouble. News stories. Crosswords. Horoscopes. Book reviews. Political cartoons. Recipes. Ink-stained fingers. Papier mâché. Stuffing sodden shoes. Wrapping fish and chips. Ad hoc packing materials. Starting bonfires. These are things that I think about when I think of newspapers. And despite the fact that I could never quite physically control a broadsheet without the aid of a table, I cannot believe this everyday artifact may go away. But according to my friends here in the digiphilic environment of San Francisco, it is inevitable—you can’t walk into a coffee shop, never mind turn on a TV or the radio, without hearing someone opine about the economic crisis that newspapers are facing and the likely disappearance of the daily rag. I am as shocked and mortified by this as I was by the 2003 news story that bananas may be extinct by 2013. Broadcast radio in the 1920s was low cost, with broad distribution and timely content delivery. The newspapers responded by adding content that was not so easily represented through audio waves, providing more in-depth and visually vivid coverage of key stories. As the 1940s and 1950s came around, television appeared as the main challenger. Newspapers again responded, lifting from television the short, pithy story format. Newspapers like USA Today responded with graphics and color. More generally, news publications started diversifying their content, mixing humaninterest stories with puzzles, crosswords, book reviews, cartoons, recipes, and all the good stuff we have grown to love. Newspapers became about browsing, grazing, sharing, and surfing content that satisfied immediate information needs and longer-term general interests. And so, despite radio and television, newspapers managed to retain their position in the information value chain. Not so anymore. There are three interrelated causes for this shift in the information ecosphere: Internetrelated innovations in news dissemination; new digital devices that are changing how content is produced and consumed; and a once healthy business model that is no longer viable. Let’s quickly look at these in turn. It is obvious that the Internet has revolutionized news dissemination. Speedy transmission of information around the globe means news can reach us as events are unfolding—hot off the keyboard rather than the press, with images and video for that “being there” feeling. “Citizen journalists” give us the layman perspective on events that journalists cannot or have not yet reached. Iraqi weblogs told us more about the impact of events as they were unfolding, and in more detail, than our daily papers could have hoped to offer. For many, the first reports of various disasters—from the fires in California to the shootings in Mumbai to the plane crashes in Denver and New York City—came through Twitter, the micoblogging service. The efficiency and effectiveness of this interconnected Internet world are undeniable. Production and consumption of news has also been transformed by the explosion of lightweight, wireless, InternetP ot og ra p h by K ev in L im