Good news for news

I seem to be posting a lot about the newspaper industry, but I've found something I think is very encouraging for those who love journalism and want to keep viable news sources alive. Note that I'm saying "news sources," not newspapers. (I was sitting by the Charles River near Harvard yesterday and had my broadsheet blown into a tissue paper-like ball of messy ink, and thus my distaste for the massive, hard-to-read medium grows, although I love the source.)

One of the hardest things for me to swallow as newspapers fall is not only that these great institutions are failing but that the presentation of news on the Web is mediocre. It's harder to read, comes at you more frequently and is often shorter. That's just the way it is with the Internet; no one is going to read a 5,000-word Vanity Fair profile online just for sport.

So, I laud any journalistic enterprises that can find a way to take the presentation of information as we know it right now, in newspapers and magazines, and get it — in full design glory — onto the Web.

Several magazines are putting their actual layouts online, and they flip like a real magazine. I think this is awesome. You get the full presentation, complete with great layouts and colors, and don't have to read it as a standard Web piece. The superior design also helps you sit through the longer articles, even though it's still a pain to read a lot from a screen.

The other alternative is the waves the Detroit Free Press is making with its online newspaper, an e-edition now available, since the paper version isn't printed a couple days a week anymore. People said this signaled the path toward death for the newspaper, but readership has actually increased, and the online version has attracted more people, according to Poynter. Even better, the Detroit people are uploading whole broadsheets for viewing fun, which means, once again, that the design is preserved.

(With newspapers, the layout is especially important, because this is where these great news organizations show their editorial prowess. A front page story is still a front page story, and where they place the articles as you go through an edition shows you how they rank news value. This role — of the news source setting the tone and importance of news as well as giving "just the facts" (we hope) — is one that the Internet is taking away. While the democratization is good on some levels (meaning people get to pick their own news), a lot of us still want to know what the New York Times thinks is the most important story of the day.)

I'm encouraged by these online versions, meaning that although we may have to ditch newsprint, we can still keep the art form alive. I've even heard rumblings that we may be going back to multi-edition days, like in the early 20th century, as e-editions are easier to produce and news changes throughout the day.

But hardly any newspapers or magazines are doing this. The Kindle2 was released this week, and everyone went crazy about how it was going to be great for newspapers — but all it the new Kindle does is give people a larger screen to read the same stuff. Some new forms to disseminate news are under way at the New York Times and the Boston Globe, but newspapers have yet to take control of a device like the Kindle and make it an essential for getting their news.

My suggestion? Use the Kindle, or another device, but make news packages that are way superior to what you can get on the regular Internet, whether it is from your organizations' Web site or the blogging cess pools. Hand out some of these free devices, or get people to buy them (whatever), but make the news packages only available on these devices. Make them so cutting edge that they'll be a go-to place for all your business, a step up from a newspaper you can pack in your bag and the Blackberry you tuck in your pocket. (This is a brief sketch. I have the entire plan under lock and key.)

It sounds expensive, but news organizations need to start the move toward being multi-serving news sources, or it's all going to be over soon.