Jason Fry at the Wall Street Journal is helping kill off one of the myths about online news — that it can’t replicate the serendipitous moments that print newspapers provide. After the you-can’t-read-it-in-the-can argument, it’s probably the most-cited pieces of Conventional Wisdom offered by the defend-print-to-the-death folks.
It’s also pretty much dead wrong. Anyone who has distracted by a surprising result in a Google search, or received one of those you’ve-got-to-read-this emails, or wasted an hour or two chasing link after link after link, realizes the web is one big serendipity machine.
Fry puts it eloquently:
Let’s break down how serendipity works in a print newspaper. In print, it’s a byproduct of page layout, of scanning past ads for watches and jewelry for articles you might not expect. And our own rituals may actually limit serendipity: If there are sections of the paper you throw away or get to only if you have time, you’re not going to find any hidden gems inside.
Where print serendipity is derived from top-down decisions, electronic serendipity is bottom-up. It comes not from editors but from readers, who “vote” by reading stories, emailing them and blogging about them.
…and…
I maintain that when presented properly, Most Popular [a featured listing at many news web sites] does a better job of delivering serendipity than scanning the print paper. Most Popular takes in the entire paper, not just stories in the sections you usually read. It offers you a second chance at intriguing stories from a day or two earlier, as well as ones that blogs and emails have made part of a larger cultural conversation. By casting a net that’s wide but not too wide, it even helps newspapers counteract one of the Internet’s inarguable downsides: the way it helps people herd themselves into little box canyons of their own ideology and interests.
The serendipity myth is going to be a hard one to kill. Columns like Fry’s will help.
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, ONLINE, SERENDIPITY
