Me Fans Are Stupid Pigs

Of course you aren’t. I would never really say anything like that about my reader(s). But the fact I can offend you in the post title shows how solid our relationship is. We joke, we have fun, we’re striving for a better future. It’s as if we’re characters in a New Radicals song.

What I’m trying to say is that August marks three years of this blog. That equals 40 posts of me trying to put into words how I feel about the internet and digital culture in general. How was it for you? I thought it was okay, and am rather surprised I’m still at it. Granted, during the three years there have not necessarily been three years’ worth of posts (2012 is devoid except for an excited mid-winter three post flurry) but there’s hopefully been something that you enjoyed, or at least read past the first sentence before spending six hours on Buzzfeed instead.

So, three years, and what do I have to show for it? Well, according to the ever-reliable Blogger stats, during that time the blog has had 4,147 pageviews. I was going to look up the Alexa ranking for this but apparently they don’t have enough data to rank the site, which is fairly telling in itself. Also keep in mind that the reality is probably bleaker than that: for some reason there are page hits from May 2007 (i.e. three years before I started the blog) and there would be many times when, despite me checking the ‘don’t record your own pageviews’ box, I have definitely inadvertently inflated my own numbers (logging in from other computers etc.) Don’t feel bad for me though, this is the life I chose.

It was a little cringeworthy reading through the old stuff. Partly because most of my writing back then makes me sound like a pretentious wanker, but mostly because it reminds me that in three years I’ll be looking back on this post and concluding that I’m a pretentious wanker. In any case, the archives are open. Go for a browse if you need more proof.

Before I let you go, let me just have an attempt at explaining the name. ‘The Digital Printing Press’ is meant to refer to the internet itself, rather than my blog. I don’t see my blog as the defining disseminator of information in the digital age (4,147 pageviews), but obviously the internet is going to have incredibly long-term social, cultural and even political implications. That’s what I’m trying to get at. I’m not much of a fan of the name anymore, but since I can’t think of anything else to change it to, for now it stays. I at least hope you enjoy the new banner photo. Maybe one day I’ll go all Kentucky Fried Chicken and change it to ‘DPP’ and hide my shameful beginnings under the soothing power of the acronym.

Fun Facts

Most popular post: Macquarie and Me – I would never have thought a shoddily composed ‘scientific’ dictionary test would be so engaging.

Least popular post: Let’s just say it only had five views. Try and guess. That’s a fun game for you.

Most popular tags: ‘internet’, ‘social’, ‘Facebook’

General highlights

-I used the word ‘conformance’ exactly once, with devastating effect.

-I implied the headquarters of ‘Powerband’ were in a dilapidated Quonset hut.

-I wrote a love letter to my Blackberry and have since dropped it in the toilet (it still works)

-I pretended I was William Randolph Hearst and didn’t get sued by him or Orson Welles

-I edited/vandalised television actor John Howard’s Wikipedia page to make a point.

-I didn’t make a single typo.

Three more years! Three more years!

Pen Licence

For the first time since high school I’ve tried to start regularly handwriting again. I like the way it feels more pure and direct, with no chance to backspace and rewrite. The action of handwriting is smoother and less mechanical than typing. I like the way that it’s an uninterrupted conduit between my head, my arm and the page: the act of writing becomes a real, physical thing. Feeding words into a computer can feel formless and inconsequential—a 2000 word document takes up virtually the same amount of space as a 200 word one—whereas the exercise book I’m writing in is slowly being filled by words, by ink. The words I handwrite have weight and texture; I can run my hand over the page and feel the indentations of the pen marks.

And the words are unmistakeably mine—my handwriting may be messy but generally it’s legible (at least to me). And the pen itself and the type of book aren’t important—there’s actually something kind of satisfying about using inexpensive implements to create something that has more worth (well, hopefully) than what was used to bring it into existence.

I presume that I type faster than I handwrite, but my thoughts don’t really lose pace with my hand as I thought they might when handwriting. Rather the words seem to be stored in my head and as I write they form on the page while my brain remains a couple of words in front. A bit like breathing, it becomes difficult if you over think this process; you sort of just have to let it happen. I learned yesterday that the eye actually skims ahead while reading, so that if the light was suddenly switched off the brain knows the next couple of words ahead of the one that it is ostensibly ‘focused’ on. I presume something similar occurs when writing.

The above is a pic of the first draft of this post as it appears in my exercise book. It’s kind of strange to stop and think about the huge difference between those words appearing on a page in a notebook, which is personal and private, and then seeing those words (or at least a version of those words) up on the most public and pervasive sphere in existence—not that the fact it appears now online necessarily means that it will be read by any greater number of people. But the fact I post this means I am accepting of the possibility that someone may read these words, whereas when I’m handwriting there is a fairly implicit knowledge that nobody will see it (when I was writing initially I didn’t have the idea to put the picture online, thus I was certain that the words on the page would remain private). In some ways it’s a shame that novels etc. are not presented as handwritten manuscripts, because while fonts can be wonderfully emotive they are a barrier between the writer and reader—an extra layer that must be navigated and interpreted.

This may be why I find it so intriguing to see an author’s handwritten notes on pages—it is as if I’ve been invited to a greater level of intimacy with that writer. Indeed, handwritten notes are intimate even if not from ‘famous’ people, e.g. birthday cards or postcards. Handwritten words approximate something much closer to ‘thought’ rather than writing: most people’s handwriting is scrawling and imperfect, arguably like the nature of thought itself. It retains an ‘immediate’ or ‘fresh’ quality, direct from the source. Furthermore, handwriting is always unique—typed letters rob individual writers and their thoughts of their personal nature. Is this loss of personality in handwriting something we don’t miss anymore simply because we’re so used to typed characters? Style and voice still count for a lot, of course—good writers have personality and presence even when working in Courier. But the barrier remains, and perhaps deprives us of a deeper, more biological (even biomechanical?) connection with the writer that only handwriting can provide. 

Macquarie and Me

Disclaimer: If you’re not into extreme things like dictionaries, obscure words and timed challenges then I suggest you stop reading now.

For those of you that have decided to stick around, you’re in for a treat. I was recently forced to buy a physical copy of the Macquarie Concise Dictionary for a university subject I’m taking. You can imagine how unhappy I was to be spending money on what I viewed as an unnecessary lump of pulp, since all the information contained within (and much, much more) is available (for free) online. I was even more unhappy when I realised that dictionaries come in editions (because language evolves, forsooth!) and so the book I bought was only going to be unnecessary for a couple of years before it became unnecessary and outdated.  Combine all this with the inevitable crushed vertebrae that I’m guaranteed to sustain from carrying it in my backpack to class and you’ll understand that my new dictionary and I were off to a shaky start.

Partly in the interest of science—but mostly in a petty attempt to validate my theories on the pointlessness of paper dictionaries—I decided to conduct a quick test to see how much quicker using an online dictionary really was, and if there were any benefits of using a paper dictionary at all. I used a generator to create two lists of ten random words, one set of which I would look up via the Macquarie Online dictionary, the other via my new Macquarie Concise.

I’d highly recommend not stopping to think too long about the fact that I actually spent ten minutes of my life in a dimly lit room conducting this test, because frankly the whole thing is kind of weird and pathetic, and if you overthink it then you’ll feel sad for me, and the last thing weird pathetic people like me need is your pity, thank you very much.

On to the science. I vaguely recall learning how to structure a proper report in Year 8 and so I will proceed with the time honoured scientific tradition of winging things based on half-remembered facts.

Aim: To see if using an online dictionary is quicker, more efficient, and generally better than a paper dictionary.

Hypothesis: The online dictionary will be significantly quicker.

Method: I already outlined the method above, but for posterity’s sake here are the two sets of words:

Online: tiara, meal, ova, tidied, nab, kilogram, splint, began, laser, award

Paper: bomb, outcrop, smoke, era, noble, muscle, luncheon, ape, clean, finance

Results:

Online: 1 minute 26 seconds
Paper: 3 minutes 18 seconds

Using the online version was therefore more than twice as fast as using the paper version.

Discussion: At first I thought a minute or two didn’t seem like much of a difference, but it’s the relative difference between the two that count. If I were to extrapolate these results over the course of a lifetime I would end up spending extra years looking things up in a paper dictionary as opposed to online. You may think this wouldn't matter to somebody who went to the trouble of conducting this test in the first place, but even I have to draw the line somewhere.

It’s worth mentioning that using the paper dictionary quickly highlighted how unfamiliar I am with the order of the English alphabet. I actually had to quickly sing the song in my head every time I got to certain tricky spots such as ‘l-m-n-o-p’ and ‘q-r-s-t-u-v’. If somebody would like to comment and reassure me that they have a similar experience when using a dictionary that would be great, because otherwise I am genuinely worried that I have a learning disability which was never properly addressed when I was a child and has since been shoddily covered up with more impressive—but frankly less fundamentally important—topics like the Russian revolution and Kuhn’s paradigm theory.

Now, for the unexpected shock, which will no doubt have people writing angry emails to me demanding I retract my words (actually, I’m not going to pretend I get emails about this blog, because nobody has ever emailed me about it. I really appreciate you reading it though, and that means more to me than a thousand angry emails ever could). Despite my initial hatred for it, and the fact that it’s really inefficient, I found that I enjoyed using the paper dictionary. Before you accuse me of being a Luddite (I think I accuse myself of being a Luddite much more than anybody ever has or ever will. I have a blog called ‘the Digital Printing Press’, for god’s sake) I’d like you to hear me out.

First of all, there is something to be said for the actual physical presence of the dictionary. Stephen King observed that words have weight and my Macquarie—containing all the words—naturally has a lot of weight, both figuratively and literally.* As mentioned, this is a hindrance when toting it around (which is why ‘toting a dictionary’ is a verb-noun combination used about as often as ‘milking a gnat’) but kind of satisfying when it’s sitting on your desk. The thing just appears definitive and authoritative.

Speaking of authoritative, another nice thing about owning a dictionary is that you know, to a reasonable extent, that the information contained within it is reliable and consistent. I shudder to think how much work must go in to actually writing/editing a dictionary, and because of this I’m sure that the information contained within is taken very seriously by serious people in tweed jackets and plaid skirts. Contrast this with the compilers of online dictionaries, whom I imagine to be croc-wearing, Hackey sack-kicking layabouts much more interested in gaining revenue from ad click-throughs than the accuracy of their lexicography. 

The issue of consistency and accuracy is particularly important when you’re talking about words used in a particular region, like Australian English. I personally would not have a clue if ‘dictionary.com’ or ‘thefreedictionary.com’ is better for Australian users, and trying to find out this information on their websites was tricky and seemed to defeat the whole purpose of quick and easy service. Granted, the Macquarie dictionary is available at a price online (I conducted the test under a free trial subscription) and it has the benefit of being updated constantly, but if you’re the sort of person who pays for an online dictionary subscription then I imagine you’re also the sort of person who likes to have a dictionary sitting on your bookshelf anyway. In short, I suppose online dictionaries are generally good for quick, casual use, but if you’re serious about words then it’s hard to go past the authority and consistency of an actual book.

Another reason I liked the paper format was that it had great hidden benefits. The nature of flipping through pages when you’re using the dictionary means that you often stumble across great words accidentally. During the course of the challenge the word ‘feneckapants’ caught my eye. According to the Macquarie, it is ‘a colloquial term of endearment, used especially with children’, but I would imagine that if you try and call a child a ‘feneckapants’ you’re in for some distressed looks from the children’s parents, not to mention the child itself. I actually don’t think the meaning of feneckapants is as important as just seeing the actual combination of letters that make up the word so close together. It’s as if all the cool, edgy letters of the English alphabet (like f, a, k and p) have gotten together and formed a sort of supergroup. These are the sort of opportunistic discoveries that online dictionaries just can't provide.

I’m surprised (no doubt you are too) that I’ve been able to wring a thousand words out of dictionary usage so I will wrap things up here, and leave you with the thought that anybody who uses a paper dictionary may feel good doing it, but they ultimately risk being called an antiquated pretentious idiot. Personally I think this is a little unfair, as I take umbrage at being called ‘antiquated’.

*Okay, so maybe not all the words because I actually have the ‘concise’ version, but the title is really just an in-joke by lexicographers who no doubt think it is hilarious to label a 1,500 page tome ‘concise’. 

How come I'm not rich and famous yet?

We live in an age where creative types have unprecedented potential for self-promotion. Blogs, online galleries, Myspace profiles – we have at our fingertips the resources that creative souls of past generations could only dream about. Musicians such as the Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom personify the potential of the internet: overnight sensations that made their big breakthrough online. But are these artists the exception to the rule? Can anybody ‘make it big’ with the help of the internet? Does the internet foster and cultivate creative success, or hamper it?

You could argue that the internet presents the 21^st century version of the ‘American Dream’, summed up below by American author James Truslow Adams (who, I’m sure, would have had a blog if such a thing existed in 1931):

         “A dream...in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

Do Adams’ words also describe the wealth of opportunity created by the internet?  The biggest limitation is that internet success is not actually available to ‘each man and each woman,’ but rather is limited to those who have access to the web, which eliminates a large chunk of the world’s population. However, one could argue that the American Dream applies only to those who make it to America in the first place, so perhaps our comparison is still valid if we limit it to those who have internet access.

If we proceed with that caveat, it seems then that yes, the internet is the sort of place where prosperity and success can be found; provided you want to find it. What sort of people could use the internet to become successful? It seems the net provides a great opportunity for a select group of what I tentatively call the creators: visual artists (including graphic designers and photographers), musicians and writers. These are the big three. Visual artists can set up their own websites and online galleries or join sites such as Flickr. Musicians have the wealth of sites like Myspace, SoundCloud and even iTunes. And writers, who perhaps have it easiest of all, have writing opportunities surrounding them: blogs; forums; comment boxes; Twitter – the list is, for all intents and purposes, endless. The internet is the world’s biggest soapbox.

Before I proceed, I should provide a working definition of ‘success’ in this context, which is difficult it is a concept which differs for all, but I would imagine that for the aforementioned creators ‘success’ would mean exposure, positive critical reception of your work and perhaps financial prosperity as well. 

With the myriad of options available for creators then it would seem that success would follow, right? It’s not quite that easy. The great thing about the internet as promoting tool – and, alas, its downfall – is the fact that it is so easy to use. Anybody with basic understanding of the internet (i.e. a lot of people) can become a self-promoter. Here are some frightening stats: there are a total of 161,754,549 blogs in existence, with 62,814 of those coming online in the last 24 hours.[1] If you’re a blogger (a mugs game, if you ask me) there is very little chance that your blog will differentiate itself from the millions of others out there. If you’re a musician, there are over 8 million other artists you have to compete with on Myspace.[2] And Flickr has over 500 billion images, with 3000 being uploaded every minute in September 2010.[3] If you’re a creator, you’ve got a lot of competition. You cannot hope that a record producer or publisher will blindly stumble upon your profile or blog. You still have to get out in the real world and work hard. Artists still have to pester small galleries for exhibitions, musicians still have to record demos and play shows, and writers constantly have to prove to Centrelink that they’re diligently looking for a real job.

The other problem with the ease of self promotion other than saturation is perhaps an even tougher one to overcome: the way society currently values internet material versus ‘real world’ material. While it is true that the internet can generate huge followings of your work, how often does internet success translate into real world success? Although it does happen it is quite rare. I would argue that a photographer getting an image published in a well respected photography magazine or a writer publishing an article or book would be greater than having 100+ followers on Flickr or Blogger, respectively. Of course, as mentioned above, it does depend on what the creator defines as success. But if the creator is looking to create legitimately critically acclaimed pieces of work (which, I believe, is the goal of most artists, writers, musicians) then the internet is a difficult place to achieve that, simply because our society still values ‘real world’ success and prosperity over its ‘virtual’ counterpart. I don’t know fully why this is: it probably has its roots in the ‘anybody can publish anything on the internet’ argument. It is possible that future societies will become more accepting of the internet as a legitimate publishing domain (especially, perhaps, for musicians and artists) but equally likely that they won’t, as people ultimately need others to tell them what’s good; and the internet subverts this by allowing anybody to become a (self)promoter.

What’s more, sometimes the success of internet sensations is a little over exaggerated: Laura Barton noted in her 2005 article on the rise of the Arctic Monkeys that the band also had mainstream radio support and airtime.[4] What this shows, perhaps, is the capacity of the internet to be a springboard to success; however it is very difficult to become successful based solely on website hits and downloads. The old maxims of hard work and talent (and a bit of luck) still ring true in any creator’s field. Which is what makes the original comparison of the internet dream with the American dream so apt: success and prosperity for all, but only if you’re prepared to work really, really hard at it. As they say in the real world: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.   

---

[1] Data taken Saturday, 14 May 2011, from blogpulse.com

[2] http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/09/social-network-stats-facebook-myspace-reunion-jan-2008/

[3] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/09/19/5000000000/

[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/25/popandrock.arcticmonkeys

All the News That's Fit to Blog

Foreword 

(yes, this might possibly be the first blog in the world that has a foreword. You are part of history. Embrace it. Take a screenshot. Tell your grandkids.)

When I was asked to write this foreword, I was somewhat shocked. I am not ashamed to tell you that when I, William Randolph Hearst, was offered the chance to once again deal in my second-favourite commodity (words), it brought a small tear to my eye. I can remember so long ago, when I first started in the newspaper game, what it was like: heavy machinery, ink everywhere, and not a computer to be found. We didn’t have spell-checker back then, but we certainly did have notoriously tricky words like ‘gubernatorial’ and ‘abstinence’! The kids of today don’t know how easy they have it.

Which brings me to the reason that I’m here today: to provide a (primarily conceptual) bridge between the old school ‘print-edition’ and the newfangled ‘online newspaper’. How has the newspaper reporting game changed as the world rapidly moves towards digitised information? It’s a fascinating question to consider. It is not a field I’m qualified to discuss, so instead I’ll hand over to Dominic Stevenson, who has had much less experience in newspaper publishing but infinitely more experience in blogging and shameless impersonation. And since I’m told this piece will take the online form of a blog, I have nothing left to do but let Stevenson get on with it.

William Randolph Hearst*

Historically, newspapers have been one of the primary ways in which the news is collated and disseminated to the masses; a cornerstone of the media. With the advent of the internet, the traditional set-up of the newspaper was challenged. Would the traditional daily become redundant under the heel of the internet with its instantaneous nature and inherent cost effectiveness? At this point in time, papers continue to circulate in physical format (and my prediction is they will continue to do so for a long time) but there is no doubt that all major newspapers are becoming equally reliant on the success of their website in order to stay relevant in the cut-throat modern media age. Join me, won’t you, as we take a stroll into the virtual newsagency and examine the beast that is the online newspaper?

Possibly the biggest feature of online newspapers is the advent of the comments section. Comments provide readers with a real time snapshot of what readers think of an issue or article. This can at times enhance the online experience – an insightful comment from another reader can indeed affirm or challenge the stance we have taken on the issue and provide a useful forum for debate. The instantaneous feedback from readers also keeps reporters and columnists on their toes, they are now publically (and instantly) at the mercy of their readers.

In the real world, however, the comments section is much more frequently used by loud-mouth dolts to express their opinions IN CAPS LOCK or with badpunctuation!!! Of course, this can be entertaining in itself and I think as an open democratic society we should be ever vigilant to ensure we never take away the basic rights for idiots to utilise their soapboxes, whether they be virtual or otherwise.

An interesting habit which I have formed with browsing newspaper websites is actually becoming bored with the article itself (damn you, internet, for reducing my atten) and scrolling down to the comments, which are often much more juicy. To be honest, the anonymous public will always have a much meatier opinion on mildly controversial legislation than any ‘qualified’ journalist will. Perhaps one day the newspaper columnists will cotton on to this and actually have the comments at the top of the webpage, and we can all stop pretending we read the article anyway and just watch Tim from Sydney and Vanessa from Parkdale slog out the climate change debate.

A related cousin which is sometimes invited to Comment family gatherings is the instant online poll, another tool which I often find much more entertaining and insightful than the actual ‘news.’ It’s great fun to try and find similar articles on news websites with vastly different readership demographics and check out the poll discrepancies (or you could use the internet to do something actually fun). However, like the comments section, the poll provides an invaluable instant gauge on how the reading public is feeling about any particular issue. It makes it that much easier to determine if you fall within the consensus on delicate subjects and if not, gives you a chance to discreetly change your opinion on controversial matters before you blurt out some politically incorrect joke and ruin a party. It’s handy little benefits like this that make me constantly wonder how society ever functioned without the internet.

Another advantage of the newspaper website is the joys of multimedia integration. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and newspapers can easily dedicate whole galleries to subjects and stories where previously one or two photos would have had to suffice in order to save space. Furthermore, the use of video can be utilised successfully on the site, although sometimes the clips are of questionable content. A couple of days ago, Hobart daily The Mercury was running with a video that showed Lady Gaga falling off a flaming piano. In the prehistoric past, we perhaps would have had to rely on the vividness of the reporters words in order to conjure the mayhem that must have ensued. But now we can view Gaga’s unrequested gravity surplus in all its glory. Of course, in the prehistoric past this probably also wouldn’t have qualified as news, but luckily the internet means that newspapers can be a lot less choosy and elitist with their reporting, which can only be a good thing.

I’ve already briefly discussed in earlier posts about the reliability of internet news. Certainly, the internet news has provided a fantastic resource which we can get instant updates on a fast breaking story. But it also adds the danger that the wrong facts will be reported in a desire to update news quickly rather than accurately. This incorrect information is then spouted through the social media sites before it can be properly reeled in, leading to vast rumours circulating much quicker than they ever could before.

Speaking of social media, it has become increasingly apparent that everyday citizens are now becoming part of the news publishing cycle, with newspapers calling for reader’s photos and videos to supplement journalist’s stories. This has angered some aspects of the media community, particularly professional photographers, who feel their careers are threatened by the influx of amateurs. It’s a delicate debate. On the one hand we should embrace the opening of the news cycle to every day citizens, who can often provide unique photos and perspectives that might be missed by the time a newspaper photographer reaches the story. Of course, it’s possible that the market will take care of this debate when the public realise that their photos are worth something to the newspapers and begin charging accordingly. One must consider, however, that for many amateurs seeing their photo on the homepage of a national newspaper’s website could indeed be incentive enough to supply their images for free.

Actually, as I was researching that last paragraph (‘researching’ is a word that’s thrown around a lot these days. Please note that I use it in its loosest form) I came across this, an app from Channel Nine that provides you with a quick and easy way to send in your photos and videos to the station: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/8227617/nine-newsbreak-app-launches 

Whilst not strictly related to online newspapers, the app illustrates nicely the flourishing of amateur contributions to the media cycle. Of course the terms and conditions make it quite clear that you’re selling your soul: “In submitting Footage through the Footage Services, you grant to Nine an exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, transferable, royalty-free licence to use, copy, reproduce, edit, modify and exploit the Footage in any media, and to sublicense such rights to other” but as I mentioned before the narcissistic cravings of the avid mobile snapper know no bounds. (By the way, what do Channel 9 mean when they say they have the right to ‘exploit’ the footage? Are they planning to make it work in their salt mines for below-award rates?**) Although in this case we are dealing with television and not newspaper, the overall principal is the same: the media market is beginning to get savvy to the huge amount of free images and material that it can get from the public, and the internet is an integral part of this.

What sort of threat does the online newspaper pose to the more traditional print medium? It’s hard to find solid data. The ever reliable Melbourne tabloid Herald Sun reports that “The Herald Sun remains Australia's most popular daily newspaper, attracting 1,520,000 readers Monday to Friday.” Unfortunately, this data was collated in May 2005. As much fun as it is to reminisce (the Billboard Hot 100 number one song for May 2005 was Gwen Stefani’s hauntingly introspective classic “Hollaback Girl”) the Herald Sun isn’t exactly forthcoming in recent data.

Rival Melbourne daily The Age is a little more helpful, reporting that in Dec. 2009 (Billboard No 1. was Empire State of Mind - Jay Z ft. Alicia Keys) it had a readership of nearly 700,000. In any case, these numbers are still quite large, and it seems that people are still quite attached to their print versions. There seems to be something familiar and comforting in holding a physical copy of the news, and the print editions of newspapers are generally laid out in a very reader friendly and less “CLICK HERE” “NO, HERE!” NO, WAIT, HERE!” manner, as evidenced by the website for The Australian below:

Fun game time! Try and count the number of clickable options!

For those of you sensible enough not to play my little game, I counted 58 clickable options all up (including ads), and that’s just for the top quarter of the homepage visible in that screenshot, and doesn’t include drop down options which are available if you hover over certain links. That is a phenomenal and somewhat overwhelming amount of information for the brain to comprehend. Compare this with a typical print paper front-page (I nearly called it a homepage), which has (based on my count of the Age front-page for Saturday April 9) just under twenty front-page objects that draw your eye (including ads and photographs). Considering many people like to read the newspaper in the morning, the more mellow print paper is definitely a more attractive option than the information cluster-bomb website. However, it must be remembered that there has been over a century of print medium formatting, whereas online newspapers have been around for less than twenty years. I’m sure that the website design will become more intuitive and attractive.

I have barely tapped the surface of all the goodies that online newspaper websites have to offer. Online archives, live blogs with journalists, and more ads than you can poke a cursor at all deserve at some stage to be examined and discussed in their full glory. But for now, suffice to say that while the print newspaper will always be the grand-daddy of modern media, it’s worth keeping an eye on its insolent and hyperactive great grandchild, who in its own inimitable way ensures that we’re always up to date with the myriad of useless and depressing things that are constantly happening.

*W.R Hearst may or may not have actually agreed to contribute to this blog, but by assuming that at some stage in his life he had either written or uttered all the words used above, it was simply a matter of me editing them into a coherent and luckily, somewhat relevant paragraph.

**As far as I know Channel 9 don’t actually operate any salt mines, but wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if someone broke the news of their discovery through the Newsbreaker app?