A minor insight that fell out of a conversation yesterday. Pre-digital, newspapers performed two news reporting functions: news as necessity and news as luxury. Post-digital, news websites have managed to replicate only the former.
I've quoted before from Michael Bywater's excellent Big Babies:
"It may even be that distraction is the
primary discretionary need. Once we have filled our bellies and got
warm, after all, what do we do next?...the boundary, it seemed to me,
blurred between work and distraction: both exist to keep our minds off
the central existential problem facing intelligent life on this planet
which is, once again, that once we've filled our bellies and got warm
there's absolutely nothing else to do."
Newspapers provide not just news and analysis but distraction - for their readers, they are (and consider for a moment what the word means) a pastime. Online, there are so many distractions, from captioned cats to immersive gameworlds to immersive worlds that are not games to email and IM and the conversation, not content, that online is king. And so...perhaps "news" - by which for the sake of argument I mean here "the things that go/went into newspapers" - has moved online and carried only half of its value.
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