A sharp image, from David Gelernter’s essay “The Next Great American Newspaper,” in The Weekly Standard. This pointed vision describes the traditional ‘reverse pyramid’ style of journalism, but he’s more hunting the great beast that is traditional journalism. Style and bias are part of the story, but the larger point is about time vs. space. Newspapers excel as objects in space, but the web, Gelernter says, is about “objects in time.” Of course, I’m immediately drawn to ideas that build on our changing concept of time, and what its value is.
The essay mixes two ideas, one ideological and one technological. First, The New York Times (and New York) needs a cultural/political equivalent from the Right (conservatively speaking). Second, the web is the place to build this newspaper, because time is the defining part of our lifestyles today, and only the web as a medium both reflects and shapes our ongoing relationship with short, sharp snippets of time. And, like the New York Times (online and print), a web newspaper speaks to a broader audience than just New York, although place does still matter.
Instead of writing one longish piece, reporters will write (say) five short ones–will belt out little stories all the time, as things happen. They will shape their news stories to the shape of the news, of experience, of time. The string of aphorisms–prose in stanzas–is a perfect form for fresh and timely news. Perfect also for a nation where concentration spans seem to halve every year.
While this fits the blog metaphor well, I think it also speaks more to the density of our media experience, combined with the poor (if improving) quality of our computer screens. Harder to concentrate when your eyes have to work harder.
The navigational ideas he posits here (“cards” of information in streams) seem to be a return to some of the themes he’s been hitting again and again in his academic writing and professional software career. I’m just happy he’s pushing something different. Whether it works or not, it stretches the brain a bit, just as Amazoning the News did (and does). Hard to be revolutionary in this economy, or maybe I’m just missing the forest for all the branches — let alone trees, but I still hope to produce some of the ideas from the Hypergene thought piece from 2001 in the real-world of 2003 and beyond.
Let’s leave Gelernter with one more quote, a parenthetical line I loved: “Third law of information: The interface is the application. The right picture is everything.” Maybe I should know what the first two ‘laws’ of information are (I don’t… let me know), but I know that selling an idea these days most often need a picture. Words won’t do it. And I can’t draw… an exercise for the reader is whether I can write well enough to overcome that.