Some friends of mine were discussing the demise of the newspaper as we know it. It’s a complicated issue. Journalists must be paid by someone to get the news and report it. Newspapers have to make money. They cannot continue to give away their inventory. One of the solutions is the micro payment technology that keeps promising but fails to deliver. The survival of news appears to be at stake. Would you be willing to pay 1 cent per hit of a page? What if that hit lasted a week so you could revisit the story for 7 days without any additional charge?
One of the comments that was also made is that newspapers provide a graphical representation of the news, at least from the perspective of the editor. A newspaper page is laid out i a particular manner and one’s eyes naturally drift from one story to another placing a value on stories based on their position or size. This is lost on the computer screen where the main story is front and center, and other stories are links on the side with no particualr importance placed on any of the stories. On one hand, this is cool, since the reader is left to make their own judgement. On the other hand, the news becomes a large morass of information that is hard to wade through.
A few years ago, a company called Marumushi came out with the concept of creating a graphical representation of the news. The project was launched in 2004, with details outlined on their project page.
The newsmap site is now my home page:
