The Fourth Age of Sand

So here's a report that the internet has surpassed print sources for Europeans in search of news. On average, internet use has doubled (from 2 to 4 hours a week) since 2003 in Europe, although it also looks like there are some significant discrepancies on a country to country basis. They are online for 4 hours a week now, but they only spend 3 hours a week with print sources. I didn't read the original report, but I'd like to know how they distinguished news internet usage from just normal (or even deviant) usage.

But let's accept that more people are using the internet for their news now. Let's further assume that they are using the internet more AND using paper sources left. This assumption is necessary since its very possible that the people who are reading the internet were never print news readers to begin with, so overall print consumption isn't really decreasing. But there are real indicators that this is happening, so we continue.

In July, Bob Cringely commented on the observation that it takes about 36 hours for half the readers of an internet news story to read it versus less than 24 hours for a newspaper, which is to say that internet news lives longer (not to mention is much more accessible, both in terms of audience and archives). Here's what he had to say, in fact.

More and more of us are getting our news from the Internet and that's hurting newspapers and ultimately hurting us, too, because we are getting less news overall.

Newspapers, because they are printed daily, have a lifespan of one day. And because they generally have several stories on each page, we have the opportunity to SCAN the news in parallel. These are two huge advantages of print journalism over its electronic counterpart. In newspapers, news gets out of the way at the end of each day, leaving room for more news. On the Internet, we're still talking about that safe landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery 48 hours after it happened. Okay, they're down, get on with it. So people who get their news from the Internet may know a lot about Britney Spears' attitude toward child car seats, but they don't know about many other things because of all that Britney news cluttering the ether.

Internet news also tends to be serial. The New York Times, for example, has an average of 25 stories each day in its business section and every one of those stories can be read online. But only a handful are presented as headlines in the Times web edition. So unless you are very diligent about ferreting it out, at least 75 percent of the Times' business content is invisible and unread online.

Yes, we can get our Internet news straight from Kazakhstan if we want to, but most of us don't have the language skills or the gumption. We rely, instead, on aggregators, mainly newspapers, which are again aggregated by outfits like Google News. The result is that some information gets to the web long after it gets into print.

Yes, you can beat print deadlines, but it requires EFFORT and readers generally don't like to use much of that.

So the result is that those of us who rely on the Internet for our news tend to get less of it later rather than the more of it earlier that we think we do.

This is pretty good analysis and something we all need to keep in mind. The net is great for many things, including news. But the ease of access that the net brings allows us to shift news reading to a convenient time (we don't have to read it daily as we can catch up on what we missed later). But this not only allows us to slip behind what's current, when we do get around to reading the news, we check the headlines real quick and move on. Even if we have a full list of headlines, how often do we even glance at the article contents in case something catches our eye. I know that when reading a newspaper I often skip based on a headline but then find myself reading the article when I happen to glance at it while reading the rest of the page. There's good stuff there that we aren't seeing.

Some of the problem can be reduced by using a good RSS reader. If you don't know what RSS is, take a few minutes and figure it out. Basically a RSS reader is a program that will check news and blog sites for you and provide a list of new stories, saving you the time and effort it takes to check all those sites you want to keep up on the news with. Some sites provide the full text of their news to RSS readers, others only a little snippet. Some RSS readers have a build in web browser that you can use to visit the parent site to read the whole article as well. This site should be subscribed to as well, since I don't update so often. Using RSS means that you'll be notified when I do update. It is worth the effort it takes to figure RSS out, whether you end up using a website like bloglines, a browser like Firefox or Safari, or a standalone application like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon.

But RSS isn't the whole answer since it only provides a list of headlines that most of us with scan; we won't see full articles and our eye won't be caught. And because RSS is so easy, I suspect that many of us subscribe to many more RSS feeds than we can really keep up with, which further taxes our limited attention.

If there was a solution to this, I'd say it rests with a combination of a newspaper subscription that gets read every day as well as acceptance that there is too much good information on the internets to keep up with. This means you just have to come to terms with the reality that there is going to be a lot of interesting news that you simply aren't going to read. But as long as you're getting regular, current news and are going beyond just the headlines, you'll be okay.

It's like my question: Would you rather know a little bit about a lot or a lot about a little? Most people claim that a little bit of knowledge in a variety of areas is preferable (even though I argue that narrow expertise is actually more valuable). For most cases, I agree. We need to be proactive in thought and action and make sure we adopt practices that put that philosophy into effect.