There is no such thing as an Internet newspaper, says Nick Carr.

“The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a
business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the
Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a
different way.”

Somebody needs to tell that to many of the people working to push print newspapers further on the Web as online or Internet newspapers. They overlook that the product can’t be an Internet newspaper as Carr notes.

His post is one of several interesting ones at the Britannica Blog: Newspapers & the Net Forum. In another, Charles M. Madigan, Presidential Writer in Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago and veteran journalist, has some thoughts on how the Internet will save journalism.

I liked this part:

“We are wrong when we assume people no longer want to know what is
going on. We simply have to find a way that speaks to them, not at
them, and that joins with them as respectful observers of their lives,
most of which do not involve homicide, theft, disaster so you would
know it or bitterness. They are just lives playing out. We don’t need
Garrison Kiellor or Ann Coulter to comment on that from either the left
or right. It might be nice to hear from someone intensely local.

“Then we can have journalism again.

“I’m 58. There’s still time!”

Let’s hope so. If not for the newspaper, then for the journalism.