Newspapers

One of the web comics I read, Least I Could Do (an excellent strip, by the way), had a sequence recently about saving and reinvigorating newspapers. (An illustrative episode can be found here; the story arc starts here.)

I've seen some concepts like that, lately, and they're intriguing. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times, for example, offer an electronic replica of their paper; the Washington Post goes further, offering eReplica, a searchable picture image of the paper (think 'print preview' in any word processor), and something called Washington Post Reader, which (I think) is more of an RSS reader feed. Neither offers what I'd really like -- the ability to indicate an article and say 'show me just this article, beginning to end, with hyperlinks for related and historical articles'. I'd pay for that.

The solution that is presented in the strip, incidentally, to the problem is to decouple the news gathering and editing function from the news printing function, and alter the distribution from hardcopy to electronic. Flip the hardware from the Kindle (in the strip) to something like an iPhone, and I can seriously see it working. It makes sense. Couple it with the ability to pull the articles into a personal database, compressed and keyworded, and now I start to get excited. It sounds good.