Nora Paul has some good reading at OJR with ‘New News’ retrospective: Is online news reaching its potential?.
Yes, 10 years ago — and even recently — the selling point was “Web as bottomless newshole” which turns out to be exactly what people don’t need.
And newspaper news sites still don’t provide the convenience and utilitarian features that readers want. It may be that services like Google News and Findory do provide that utilitarian usefulness while using the content from mainstream media.
What a lost opportunity: Aggregators become primary news sources because mainstream news media sites failed to provide the tools readers wanted.
New forms of story telling haven’t moved far from “gee-whiz that looks cool” — yet. Hopefully, we’ll learn!
Nora nails the state of online news. Hopefully, in Boom 2.0 our promises will better match our readers’ wants and the reality will be a little closer to the promise. They had better.