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Yesterday, I was explaining to my 7 year-old, why The New York Times, had very little coverage of the All-Star basketball game, and more information about the slam dunk contest. I can give you the abridged version - they closed the paper at deadline, before the All-Star game had concluded or very close to its conclusion. I am trying, deliberately, to show my 7 year-old the value of the newspaper, because it is text, because it is thoughtful, because it is deliberately written and designed with less haste than websites, and I found myself troubled by my own descriptions.I explained how newspapers have to stop writing stories at a certain time so they can layout the paper, print it and deliver it in time to get to our and the other millions (hundreds of thousands?) of doorsteps upon which it is received each morning. And I explained how websites can put up information, to everyone, pretty much as it happens. So yes, I resigned myself to saying, the newspaper is filled with things that happened yesterday, the day before, and the Inter-Web is filled with things happening right now. My goodness, how can they possibly compete?What if, I pondered, they caught up a day, and they stopped reporting on things that happened yesterday and reported on things happening tomorrow. Hmm, that wouldn't work very well now would it. I considered lots of re-worked time scenarios to help assist those stressed newspaper execs in thinking through the sustainability of their model; multiple editions (too expensive), later deadlines (impractical). Really, I was stuck.So then I thought OK let's accept that newspaper readers are, well, behind. They are living yesterday today. And Web readers are generally reading today's news today. And psychics, those lucky bastards, are living tomorrow's news today.Does this provide any great advantage to either of the (non-extra perception) groups?The stock market is said to be an advance barometer; it goes down when bad news is coming, up when good news is on its way. While I am not sure what this portends for the psychics, one thing became very clear in this internal debate I had while explaining the all-star predicament to my kid: in order to compete, newspapers have to exploit their advantages - the quality of their reporting and the insightfulness of their analysis put them at an advantage if they use that time to create a superior, noticeably superior product, to the tweets and blogs and flicks of the Net. Less play by play, more thought by thought, is my idea, for helping newspapers compete in an increasingly instant information world.
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