Webbed Feet

One of the problems with reading the news online is that it’s more difficult to effectively browse a newspaper’s content. Aside from the odd phenomena of online editors screwing with headlines and decks to make them shorter or hipper or whatever it is they’re trying to do, a web page just doesn’t offer the same facilities for easy browsing. We haven’t looked deeply into it, but the general paradigm seems to be this: The architecture of information online tends to be suited to search and recovery. Generally, that means the best web pages are designed to facilitate you finding something you know or suspect is already there. (Corollary: general interest, web-only “magazines” died slow, uninteresting deaths when the tech-bubble burst five years ago. Slate and Salon are the exceptions that prove the rule.)

The impression we take away from having cancelled our home subscription two years ago to the Newspaper of the Twin Cities, is a troubling one. If you only take your news from the web, you begin to have an indistinct sense of scale on news stories, a random congeries of anecdotal stories driven by momentary impulses and obsessions, a sort of roadmap of links that trace the circuits of your own prejudices, preconceived notions, and moral politics (link, incidentally, a result of browsing our way through the real-world Sunday Times, one paper that still decorates our doorstep. Still, reducing the input by one daily newspaper has saved our back considerably. Recycling is a bitch; we save the Times to start the grill.) The more or less organic structure of content, dictated mostly by chronology, creates the impression that all stories are created equal.

Like we say, online editors probably should bear some of the blame for thinking too literally about information equations. (Everything is just a link away! A shallow, instantly “drillable” website is also a flat website, with no peaks or valleys.) But there is something about the newspaper itself that encourages a general sense of purpose and direction, a heirarchy of information, a page-to-page path through the garden. Websites are not–maybe cannot be–nearly as inviting or as favorable to browsing. As a result, even a crappy paper is better than a great website. When we have more time and feel less fragmented, maybe we’ll consider this more closely. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll just keep paddling blindly around in the little backwater that results fom our own particular trickle valve.