Web-journalism vs print journalism

Is one intrinsically better? I am a fan of the web, and news on the web. I am not a fan of newspapers, at least in the UK as the main papers are IMHO too sensationalist, biased & often inaccurate.

However, I am a big fan of journalism in its best sense: investigative, unbiased, accurate, wide-ranging.

John Gruber quoted the CEO of Flipboard talking in December about the decline of journalism on the web. Notably McClure made two key points:

The problem with journalism on the Web today is that it’s being contaminated by the Web form factor.

and

what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize. And it’s also hard to present that longer stuff to the reader because no one wants to wait four seconds for every page to load.

This is interesting stuff from someone in McClure's position because his app, Flipboard, is widely hailed as one of the best news aggregators on the iPad, which in turn is meant to be the saviour of news/books/TV, you name it.

Flipboard has the ability to bring in news from traditional sources (edited sites like BBC News, The NY Times etc) but it also allows very simple aggregation of the news & links that one's friends flag up (or write about) on Facebook and Twitter. Check out this video for a better understanding.

As such McClure's livelihood and professional reputation depend on people finding interesting journalism on the web and using his app to read it. If the web is just flighty, light-weight and insignificant gossip-mongering then his app, by association, is insubstantial and irrelevant. Not what a man wants to think when he toils & invests daily to promote it.

In particular he criticises the use of "slideshows" on the web where a longer story by a journalist is deliberately split over many pages so that the viewer has to click through it and each page reload counts as another set of ad impressions (the metric by which the web site gets paid by those advertising on it). This 'stuttered' delivery makes the consumption of the article harder, reduces enjoyment and is infuriating (I'm thinking particularly of you CEPro).

Anyway, the reason that Gruber's post is particularly piquant is his final comment:

By the way, have you heard that AOL bought the Huffington Post?

The Huffington Post is an exclusively online news organisation noted for its ability to deliver quality, hard-hitting and 'grown-up' journalism even though it is web-based. AOL is best known in internet history for not having a clue what to do with media assets. Gruber is suggesting that AOL will devalue the valuable HuffPo journalism through ad saturation of its webpages and just these sort of slideshow tricks - and I believe he may be right.

As such there is an interesting contradiction: digital delivery of news is widely seen as the future (therefore the broken business models of newspapers, magazines, book publishers, TV) but at the same time the best news on the web is being deliberately devalued by the web business model & presentation.