With the tap of my finger the motion sensing mouse clicks away to the closest search engine available. I search the word USA TODAY to view and compare the sights and the experience of viewing a newspaper online that I had previously viewed in it’s materialized state on paper. The online USA TODAY is featured in full HTML format with both 1’s and 0’s coding a publication that I had recently held in my hands. With my prints still blacked and smudged I begin typing away to search for the website. It is featured at the top of the search engine with various other links which can renew your subscription or take you to various parts, like the sports page which I was so eagerly awaiting to find. So it is relatively easy how quickly you can shift your focus in this online paper. Alot quicker then just reading it backwards like I do my Bristol Press.
The tab itself displays the words News,Travel,Wealth…(this was added to the categories list along with Travel and Tech) Usually these categories would be displayed but on the website itself it would have to justify and make their own separate categories.In the upper left-hand corner as opposed to the news on the New York Yankees is a built in search engine with the words Stories,photos,graphics and more listed. Immediately I flash back to my last piece where I wanted to find out how well Matt Cassel had done the night before so I enter his name into the search engine(powered by Yahoo). And their is a picture of Matt and various articles written by AP (associated press) and dates next to each headline. A mere minute faster then the previous search which had me thumbing though the paper by page while scanning each corner for the correct path.
While clicking through various pages to return home I notice that the advertisements are brought to the foreground. With looming pictures and graphics of Dell computers almost reaching out to grab my attention as I move from page to page. Advertisements also fill into corners of the page as little eye-grabbing-animations displaying the newest Verizon plans. Next to the search engine is three links asking to subscribe to the newspaper,subscribe to the rss(web feeds), or make usatoday.com your homepage.
A similarity glaring back at me is the young starlet Keira Knightly in the upper right hand corner. How bizarre, maybe that placement of her is a mere coincidence or maybe that format really worked for both the online and materialized publication. Underneath her picture is perhaps a slide show of various other news articles that can be displayed besides hers. Will leave her up for now. Another similarity is the headline itself which discussed the stocks closing higher. And the picture displayed is that of a women sifting through her damaged goods in Texas.
There is no direct smell coming from this particular page. Perhaps smell-o-vision of the future will induce the aroma and nostalgia of a newspaper.On my laptop I have a fixed lighting which helps to view the online publication. In the materialized state it is best to view the paper next to a good source of lighting. Contextually typing is in fact similar to thumbing I believe and rather tedious, although you wont have to go typing your way through various news articles just clicking on the links will do.
One of the most significant changes is the fact that mere common subscribers can actually chime in on the comments page to discuss the various articles. Leading me to believe that the future will be driven by wiki-like news written by the common man for the common man. That’s not to say that writers aren’t common people. But what value will a doctrine in journalism get you when Joe Blow can witness and event and post it on a website before the AP? People sifting through the online news will be updated in streaming real-time or as the events happen the writer is the common man sifting through the news he/she only wants to view specific topics pertinent to his/her life. Will the media itself be swarmed by this emergence of the local newswriter who is the everyday witness to local life?
With the digital emergence come a certain responsibility to report and write about the things we are capable of with a certain understanding. Will filtering out mass media allow for a more honest reporting? Or will it bring about scrutiny and a prevailing sense that this information is in fact unreliable, similar to Wikipedia being an unreliable source information due to the fact that it could be doctored by the everyday man. Will these changes in new media help define a broader sense of grittier more hard-nosed journalism uncompromising to the mass media? Will we sit at the breakfast table with news streaming through are collective iris as we spoon-fed both relevant news and our cornflakes? Truly that is the Breakfast of Champions in the Kurt Vonnegut sense.
Is the dawn of the digital age the death of print, or perhaps the beginning of digital printing in media? Why settle for a small scrolled logo when you can access and entire page worth of advertisements that move and pulse toward the consumer. Only in this realm of the news, digital flow of information is key to comprising the ultimate digital experience in telling the news which is unparalleled to the outdated newsprint.
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