Interactions - July/August 2009

enabled recording and reading devices, plus the proliferation of computers in the home and in offices. I can record an image or a video of an event, upload it, and within seconds it is there for the world to see. News large and small is shared this way—from events of global importance to publicly shaming and castigating men who flash women on subways. A few years back, I found out about the London subway bombings from my Flickr stream; my friends’ images came flooding in prompting me to seek out official press reports, which did not appear till sometime later.

Finally, the old business model is failing. For decades, the U.S. newspaper industry has been generating most of its revenue from advertising. The global recession and the resulting decline in advertising revenue have dealt a possibly fatal blow; the Newspaper Association of America reports that in

2008 total advertising revenue declined 16. 6 percent, to $37.85 billion, representing a $7.5 billion reduction in numbers from 2007. This is reminiscent of the roller-coaster ride the music industry has been experiencing as it struggles to modify rather than abandon its own anachronistic business model. Proposals on the table for saving the newspaper industry now include micropay-ment schemes plus bailout and/ or government subsidies.

I don’t feel qualified to assess whether micropayments or government bailouts will save the news industry. And I will not argue the obvious—securing the future of good journalistic practice. Instead I refer readers to the cogent arguments of writers such as Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Clay Shirky from NYU, and Princeton University’s Paul Starr; they eloquently cover the issues.

I am, however, screaming for a better news-reading experience on my desktop and mobile devices. Certainly I love having access to so much information, but the reading experience is just not the same as the structured, well-designed experience of newspapers. News websites are like buckets of Internet storm-drain runoff, all laid out in some distorted version of their print counterparts.

Ethan Zuckerman blogged about his experience browsing the New York Times site: “… counting possible links (using a search for anchor tags in the source HTML), there are 423 other webpages linked from the front page. A more careful count, ignoring ads, links to RSS feeds and links to account tools for online readers, gives 315 content links, possible stories or sections a reader could explore from the front page.” He’s right. I replicated his analysis with three online newspa-