The Ann Arbor News closes it's doors today, to be succeeded by AnnArbor.com. I'm keeping an open mind, but I remember how hard it was for any sportscaster to step into the Tiger's broadcast booth after our legendary Ernie Harwell. I'm thinking it might be a bit like that. It's hard to follow an institution.
Here are some of the things I'll miss:
- "Browsing", "scanning", and "dipping my toes in" will be replaced with "searching". If I don't know it's there, I'll never see it. If I search for it, I'll get a lot of junk with it and have to take time figuring out what I'm really looking for.
- I won't ever be able to say, "I got my picture in the paper" to my Dad.
- I won't be able to wrap soon-to-be-historic news sections in plastic hoping that they'll be valuable some day.
- I'll get nervous at noon Saturday because I won't have heard that the tornado siren was going to be tested.
- I won't be sure that my friends will have read my relative's obituary and know when the services are.
- My finely honed skills of folding the newspaper backward on itself so I can read it one-handed will have to wait for my infrequent visits with the Wall Street Journal.
- I'll have nothing to start a fire with on a wintry morning.
- I won't be able to scan the sports pages to see if I recognize the last names of highschoolers who are children of my friends.
- I won't be able to circle garage sale ads to take with me.
- I won't be able to pack a box with the Michigan-Ohio State section to add extra delight to my out-of-state son's Christmas present.
- I won't see pictures of freshmen moving in around Labor Day and be able to think "They get younger looking every year."
- I'll have nothing to chuckle over, hoping my husband will say "What?" so I can read it to him.
- I won't be able to keep track of how Geoff Larcom's picture ages over the years. And I'll miss Jo Mathis. Dreadfully.
- AnnArbor.com will never be "mine".
Roz, I think you’ve nailed it. Online versions of most news media don’t foster browsing. I could write a dissertation on the topic but let me be content to share two observations that support your perspective. The first from Farhad Manjoo’s column in Slate critiquing the Kindle but applicable to most online media.
“But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list—you're given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story. It's your job to guess, from the list, which pieces to read. This turns out to be a terrible way to navigate the news.
“Every newspaper you've ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day's stories was most important. Newspapers convey these opinions through universal, easy-to-understand design conventions—they put important stories on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. You can pick up any page of the paper and—just by reading headlines, subheads, and photo captions—quickly get the gist of several news items. Even when you do choose to read a story, you don't have to read the whole thing. Since it takes no time to switch from one story to another, you can read just a few paragraphs and then go on to something else.”
One can read the entire article here: http://www.slate.com/id/2220793/
The second is from an email exchange I had with a young AP international reporter. I had explained the failure of new digital media to foster browsing and she observed,
“…when industry watchers first started thinking about what online readers were looking for and what advantages the Internet had over traditional print media, it was customization of content. That seems in my opinion to run counter to the concept of browsing, because readers are presumed to be interested only in what they think they want to read, defined by a set of keywords describing themes, people, places, etc. I think that way of consuming the news online has become increasingly prevalent, but that there is still a sense of nostalgia for the paper medium and the joys of coming across a piece of news you didn't think you'd be interested in that surprised you.”
Precisely! How often have we stumbled on important news and information in a newspaper or magazine that we would never have looked for when navigating online?
Fortunately, there are some exciting developments with digital versions of newspapers and magazines that preserve browsing. In fact I actually pay to subscribe to two of them. (I hope they succeed.) I can get into that some other time for the news junkies out there.