Monday, 16 June 2003

The newspaper of the future

OxBlog’s Patrick Belton links to an interesting Weekly Standard piece on how the newspaper of the future should be designed—primarily, that it should be online, and take advantage of the medium.

It’s a somewhat novel approach, but I think people are always going to want tactile feedback when reading large amounts of text. “Digital paper” will probably be the closest we ever get to being truly paperless. This is one thing I think Babylon 5 got right about the future; even in the 23rd century, people will still want a newspaper: it may be custom-built for them, but otherwise it won’t look much different from the newspaper of 2001 or 1801.