NP: A Perfect Circle, Mer de Noms

I wrote about the new Kindle a couple of days ago when the pre-release hype was building, but now that it formally exists, I've been thinking about it a bit more. And I think that it might work, especially if this idea of selling the hardware at a discount with a newspaper subscription has legs. The important thing is going to be how the newspaper is presented on the device, though. If it's just one page per article, with "related links" and whatnot, it's not going to save newspapers, because that's not what makes newspapers work. At least the way it's coming together in my head.

Andrew Sullivan takes an Ezra Klein piece about big stories and little stories -- basically mainstream and niche stories -- and doesn't see much of a connection. I'm not entirely sure Klein does, either, as he describes it as the niche story riding the coattails of the mainstream story, in order to reach the niche market. But it's not really about the niche story reaching the niche market, or the tenacity of niche reporting on blogs reaching that target. The value and the efficacy of investigative reporting or relentless coverage on blogs is, I think, a separate matter. I'm not talking specifically about what the content is, but more about how it's being presented.

In that regard, I think it's really about the gestalt of reading the newspaper, rather than about reading news. On the surface, it seems like it's somewhat of an arbitrary delivery mechanism, but it's not. If you're reading a newspaper, you're not only seeing stories that you care about, you're seeing a bunch of other items that may or may not pique your interest. It's the periphery that makes the experience of paging through the paper valuable. You're not supposed to go in knowing what you want to read -- and that's the vacuum-inducing effect that blogs have had. Aggregators are destroying the juxtaposition of stories by presenting them in a more categorical fashion, at least when it comes to opinion-based reporting of the news. Which, in turn, happens to be where things seem headed.

This does force me to revise my opinion on Phil Bronstein's comments from a while back, in that the newspaper business isn't actually in the news business. It's in the news delivery business, and the challenge is to optimize that delivery system -- whether it's via paper, electronic device, or RSS reader -- to better allow news consumers to "discover" things that aren't just relevant to them based on their profile, but are relevant to them if they don't actually know it. You might actually draw a stronger parallel to the record business in that light, in that the "record" business is really the "music delivery" business, and part of that delivery has to be aimed at keeping the consumer interested in new content, whether that's news or music.

(As an aside, this is exactly why The Daily Show and The Colbert Report serve as effective news sources, because the news content is presented clearly, even if it's surrounded with the trappings of comedy and parody, respectively.)

Does this mean that the atomization of news is moving things in the wrong direction? I don't think so. And I think various web interfaces have tried to replicate the tangential aspects of news consumption, but I don't know that they've gotten it right just yet.