Undercurrent

Someone should construct a “death of newspapers” inflation index. There has been a surge lately:

Michael Kinsley asks Do newspapers have a future? in Time Magazine. Arguably the funniest so far, especially about the alternative, seen from the desperate newspaper man’s perspective:

Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports.

Kinsley proceeds to kill the print, but keep the news.

Then there was The Economist asking who killed the newspaper – expertly dissected here.

I’m not forgetting the home front. Newspaper consultant Erik Wilberg recently presented scenarios for the newspaper, and they were refreshingly different in the way that none of them predicted anything else but fast and furious change for the newspapers. Superbly analyzed by Andreas (in Norwegian, the original scenario material not online…).

And from May this year, Dagbladet weighed in with a death verdict.

If that isn’t enough, you can subscribe to a relevant Technorati search. Eureka – the death of newspapers index will generate itself and be updated forever!

And I thought newspaper publishers had accepted a life in co-existence with search engines. Not so. The business through The World Newspaper Association is just as obsessed as ever with the idea of somehow reconciling their old business model with the web. The latest result is the “Automated Content Access Protocol”, whereby publishers will “teach” the search engines to index and use their “content” in specific ways:

In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.

To this Undercurrent can only say – good luck! Or maybe look to Norway. Newspaper owners can search too! (via Ben).

Newspaper design isn’t Undercurrent’s specialty, but this is interesting – a preview of the Danish freesheet Nyhedsavisen, that presumedly will turn the country’s newspaper business upside down when it launches in October.

Editor David Trads blogged the image. Online, Nyhedsavisen has launched an avalanche of blogs, while we wait for the full site.

Jan Wifstrand, soon to leave his post as editor of Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, offers some valuable and tough criticism of journalists in an interview in his own paper. His four points are easily recognisable if you’ve been in the business:

• Need a better world? Ask me!: “I am a journalist, I’m capable of improving the world” – a finer version of a besserwisser mentality, according to Wifstrand. Often it is presented as a good thing that journalists generally are reform-oriented people. But what happens when that attitude is combined with arrogance and limited knowledge?
• Desperately seeking correctness: Critical thinking, skepticism towards seemingly self-evident truths – journalist ideals, right? Not exactly, Wifstrand thinks: Journalists are very anxious to represent a “correct” views.
• Tyranny of simplification: Journalists need to simplify the complex, highlight what’s important in the stream of information. But often the simplification goes too far, and we end up being imprecise or just plain wrong.
• Thin-skinned species: Many journalists are very jumpy when readers or sources dare to criticize us. Wifstrand: “We have to come to terms with our responsibility, because what we do can influence hundreds of thousands of people. We should have a deeper understanding of our ethics and reveal more about ourselves.”

Google’s new news archive search is maybe just a start. Lots of articles are behind pay walls, and the number of sources are limited. But still, what a start! As with so many other of Google’s new, imperfect services, this one lets you just guess at the potential. Imagine the timeline with a broader selection of sources. Still, to now have gems at your fingertips like an in-depth profile of “this pudgy, stoop-shouldered, tooth-brush-mustached but magnetic little man”, published on Monday, February 6, 1933…

Time Magazine is very well represented with free articles and deserve praise. But these samples just leave you craving for more. It’s always a bit strange when old stories are presented in the same layout templates as the magazine from 2006. I know they must earn ad revenues, but what about creating a special template for this material? And, sometime, pdfs of the original magazine story…