Times Skimmer

This week the New York Times announced the impending change in their web site: You will have to pay to read the Times online. Indeed, most online sites based on content will have to go this route, to one degree or another. And I am okay with that. In the main, I prefer the paper Times. And for those who need it "free" there is always a copy at the public library.

To be truthful, I read more and more online, even the Times. Today I see a feature I had not notice before, called Times Skimmer. It is really a dandy addition to their site, making on-line browsing much more convenient and clear. You choose a section, page through thumbnails of headlines (often with a photo) and click when you see one you want to read.

It occurs to me, however, that there is an unforeseen side effect of the movement to on-line news: the Archives. True enough, the digitized archives of articles is far easier to search and retrieve today than the old card catalogs and microfilm. But microfilm provided something that digital retrieval does not: context.

Quick, go the the library and look at the microfilm of a newspaper from the nineteen fifties or sixties. I say quick, because I bet the microfilm readers will disappear soon. When you view the paper this way you have context: of the stories are arranged on the page, what has prominence, indicates what readers felt was important at the time (at least in the editors' view). The advertisements indicated what people used and bought, how their lives looked.

To contrast, retrieve articles from a newspaper or magazine online, through their website. By and large, you get a single article at a time, with no sense of its importance in the original page layout. The advertisement you see will be contextual in three senses. First, to the content of the article. Second, to your previous interests purchases and browsing history. Third, temporal: the advertisements will be for things you can buy now. There is no indication of what was advertised with that article at the time it was printed.

Beware losing a sense of history and living only in the now.
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