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Already Chewed NewsWhat my beloved newspaper has been reduced to serving.

By Jack ShaferPosted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007, at 7:21 PM ET

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Jack Shafer sang the praises of the Times Reader. He examined the newspaper gestalt through the pages of the Washington Examiner. He reviewed the "electronic" editions of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times in 2004, as well as e-editions at Florida Today and the Guardian.

Obviously newspapers are dying, but—as I've written before—they've been dying their long Spenglerian death since the 1920s, what with the advent of radio, talkies, TV, FM, cable, videocassette, satellite radio, and all the rest. But they always reinvent a place for themselves in the media ecology. So, what are newspapers to do? Newspapers aren't dying because people aren't interested in news and reporting any longer. They're dying because people are hungrier for news than ever and are spending more time consuming it elsewhere.

As my friend William Powers puts it in his recent study, "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal" (PDF), "digital reading has become a part of everyday life, yet for most people it hasn't replaced reading on paper." Paper allows what one researcher calls "flow-style reading," which is worlds apart from the intense foraging we do on our computers. The Web is a great place to look for things we're interested in, but it's still not the best place to have found them.

As good as the Web is at keeping apace with the current, it isn't very good at telling me when my news tank is full. The final editions of well-edited newspapers still do a better job of conveying the most vital news than does a browsing of the Web. It gives readers a yardstick with which to measure the news before they dive in. If I had just 10 minutes to catch up on what's happening, I'd rather fan through the paper pages of the Times and Post than click my favorite sites. For decades, the Wall Street Journal has kept its busy readers abreast of the day's most important stories with its Page One "What's News" column. The idea is ripe for adaptation by other newspapers. (Sidebar: I really like the way the Times Reader measures news consumption.)

Following Powers' logic, I'd like to see newspapers do a better job signaling via text or layout whether pieces contain new news, terrific insight and interpretation, or just more of the same old bollocks that I can get elsewhere, presumably the Web. The Financial Times imposes rigid discipline in reporters by prohibiting any stories—even those on Page One—to jump to another page. The paper assumes that you're up to speed on the news and don't require the complete back story every time it publishes a story. It's a perfect use of print.

In the Web era, I find myself spending more time with the inside pages of newspapers, probably because I've not tainted my consciousness by previewing many of them on the Web. Those inside pages tend to have a magazine feel to them because of their greater independence from breaking news. In recent months, I've noticed the Washington Post place heavier emphasis on graphics to illustrate the inside news, taking advantage of big pages whose acreage dwarves that of the average computer monitor. All to the good.

Powers writes that "the public exodus from newspapers is not a rejection of paper, but an objection to using it for hard news and other utilitarian, quick-read content … that gains little or nothing from arriving in that format." Ceding supremacy to the Web has been an important first step in the daily newspaper's evolution to its next state. The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper.

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The Web is dead, too, but that's the subject of a future column. Send birth, death, and bar mitzvah announcements to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)