“Ten out of ten trees prefer Nettavisen”. That was our half-official slogan. If you called and had to wait on the line, the tune we played was this:

“Who wants yesterdays papers

Nobody in the world”

Another good marketing gimmick for a 1996 start-up news website without a paper parent was to claim that the printed newspaper would be gone by circa 2010. Our good print colleagues would protest furiously and give us more publicity, but I don’t think even the internet evangelists among us grasped what was about to happen. Do we now?

The history of the media and the web is a tale of permanent undervaluation, permanent lack of imagination. Wishful thinking on the part of newspaper executives (“there’s no way to earn money from the web”, “people will always want their printed paper on the morning breakfast table”) mixed with flawed analysis (“don’t link to other websites, it sends “eyeballs” away from our ads”). Now the Economist sums up the latest twist in the saga of yesterday’s papers: Rupert Murdoch’s speech to US newspaper editors. It’s been said that our lives in the information-saturated world stand completely still at a furious pace, but that must be wrong. The pace is furious, but the news is new. In just a few years, the metaphors and concepts of “citizen/grassroots journalism” and “news as conversation” have raced all the way up to the boardrooms of News Corp. This is Murdoch about today’s youth: “They don’lt want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’ls important. (…) They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.” Dan Gillmor left his job to work on a grassroots journalism project, and four months later Murdoch talks like him.

If something could be gained from Murdochs examining grassroots, then let it be that we talk more about journalism and less about paper or not paper. Journalism flourished sometimes under Gutenberg, and so it can under Berners-Lee.