So, I finally get quoted in Romenesko, everybody’s favorite old-school journalism blog — and it’s something I’m pretty sure I didn’t say:
Newspaper pages of the future will look like web pages
Investor’s Business Daily
That’s Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr’s prediction. “What a newspaper might come to look like is a printed digest of what’s online,” he says. The American Press Institute’s Vickey Williams tells Doug Tsuruoka: “The newsrooms that are successful in the future will move faster and be more outwardly focused on news consumer preferences and less risk-adverse than they are today. The successful newsroom will anticipate rather than react to change.”
I went back and talked to the reporter, and it appears he was asking about design and I was talking about content. Of course, newspapers are going to seem less fresh to anyone who’s been on the Web in the last 24 hours. But I don’t think they’re going to take their design cues from the Web. Newspaper websites already take too many design queues from the print edition, and they need to diverge from print.
We’re in for a period of innovation as newspapers try to figure out what they should look like when all the news they print is already (or should be) online. Multiple changes in ownership, cost-cutting, declining circulation and ad pages are going to force newspaper editors and designers to rethink what a newspaper is. And they’re going to come up with more than one answer. I’m not prepared to say right now what the results will be, but I’m willing to bet it won’t look like a Web page.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.