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Bagel, coffee, and the Daily Déjà Vu
It keeps happening. I pick up the paper (the messy, newsprint kind) and read a headline that makes me think, “wait, that’s old news, isn’t it?”
Here’s how it goes: on a Wednesday night, let’s say, I read a news flash online about something rumored to be happening; later the next day the story is confirmed online; and finally on Friday the headline in the Globe makes me do a double take and think, “don’t I already know that?”
So what does this mean for newspapers and news readers (and especially news junkies like me)? Surely it means we are changing the ways in which news is presented and consumed, but how much mind reading are we getting ourselves into here?
Does a newspaper assume I already know the basic details and instead focus more on the context and the back story? Even if that marginalizes those who get their news only from the printed paper (and for whom Friday’s headline is, well, news)?
Do I, on the other hand, assume that there will be nothing new in the paper and skip the story there? Not a good idea, since a good percentage of serious journalism is done by reporters who work the beats for the newspapers, and whether we read their story on a website (the paper’s own or an aggregator like Huffington Post) or in the paper is a matter only of the delivery method.
For an old-school fella like me, I can’t imagine finding anything as satisfying as thumbing through the newspaper in the morning (and often putting it down, only to pick it up later that night to finish or re-read). Others, many younger, will I hope find their own, just-as-rewarding, ways of keeping up with what’s going on in the world.
Categories Digital Media, Outside the Square
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