i think society needs more than the short-term transaction-based web “delivery” of news. we also need to preserve reporting so that we can reliably go back and see what happened in the past and how it was reported. this is important for accountability. but it is also a form of shared, collective memory.

the web is great at providing short-term convenient access. but that is not the same as long-term memory.

we can’t do this by hoping that things will get preserved by their creators. (they may go out of business or change their priorities or intentionally or unintentionally delete things.) we can’t rely on random preservation here and there by individuals. we need an institution that does this systematically, professionally, consistently, and comprehensively.

so, what we need is 3 things:

1) an instantiation of news. newspapers did this in paper and ink, but what we need today is a digital instantiation, perhaps in xml, of every story written. this involves thinking of the stories as things we want to preserve, not just as fleeting stories.

2) a reliable list, feed, catalog of those stories. (one thing i find frustrating about reading the news online is that i don’t know what i’ve missed. i know what stories i see based on my browsing and searching, but i often wonder, ‘have i missed something?’) Every newspaper or news-organization needs to produce a canonical list of what stories it has created. it could be delivered as an rss feed or any number of other ways.

3) institutions that would systematically capture, download, and preserve all stories for long-term access. in the past, we called those “libraries” and i think this is the role libraries should play now and in the future, too. we have lots of digital libraries, but they are hobbled by DRM and copyright and licensing restrictions. society needs to enable them to collect and preserve and provide access.

note that newspapers and news organizations and publishers (or whatever we choose to call them) do the first two things above, but we need separate organizations that are publicly supported and publicly accountable that have as their first priority and mission to preserve information and make it publicly accessible and usable. this is very different from relying on publishers, content-creators, search-engines, etc. who may or may not have preservation and access as a secondary by-product of some other mission (today’s news, making a profit, etc.)

There is something calming and relaxing, dare I say it, even civilised, about settling into a chair or sofa, or sprawling out on the floor on a lazy Sunday, with a cup of tea or coffee and bikkies close to hand, and reading a newspaper.

The smell of the ink, the rustle of the paper as a page is turned, the slight smudge on fingers – “Ha! You’ve been reading a newspaper!”, the time to think about and absorb the written word.

These things just can’t be replicated online.

Newspapers are not only “news storage devices”, they are also “time for me” devices.

You expect, even anticipate being interrupted when you’re online reading, scanning, grabbing headlines and bites, IMs, tweets, pokes, emails, phones, all competing for your attention, and your brain knows it.

But when you choose a newspaper, well, it’s another world isn’t it? It’s downtime, away from all the other stuff.

Being interrupted when you’re reading a newspaper (or to a lesser extent, a magazine) is annoying. How dare they – it had better be good.

I wonder if the plugged in 24/7 to everything.instantly.now. generation realise what they’re missing?

And I wonder if/when Rupert and Co. will get it and stop stressing over SE traffic to their online content?