As print newspapers struggle and web-based newspapers grow in supremacy, I vacillate between my excitement and my fear.
Because web-based news is in real-time, there's no longer a canon of headlines and "major issues" - no history of Great White Men and their Great Wars that will dominate, forever and ever, amen, the homepages of newspapers. What runs as the major headline of the New York Times homepage will not be the major headline for even a day, even twelve hours, even, perhaps long enough for me to read the headline before it changes.
Because web-based news is in real-time, any ridiculous issue on which a journalist's written for the sole purpose of keeping the job will get more-or-less identical treatment to the outbreak of a Great White Man's war, and both will seem to have equal importance, and we will choke on the bile of our own hysteria.
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