Archive: Opinions

As the editor of an online newspaper I naturally find myself in conversations about the future of newspapers.  Obviously I think the future is in online newspapers.  In fact when we first started talking about creating The Lansing Star five and a half years ago we seriously considered a paper publication.  But while paper newspapers are not dead yet, I do believe that they are fading fast, and will soon be a piece of history.

One of the top reasons I believe this is the advent of the iPad.  Instead of reading a paper newspaper each morning, I crank up 'Early Edition,' an iPad application that is actually an RSS newsreader.  It gets the news from the various news feeds I have entered into it (including the Lansing Star), and arranges them attractively in the format of.. well... a newspaper.  Stories are pulled from the New York Times, mixed with The Lansing Star, CNN, Associated Press, and BBC News and collated onto the iPad's high-definition screen.

I love reading on the iPad, and that is something that most people do not say about their computers.  Even with the improvement of screen technology people seem to prefer paper.  In my case I still like paper, but I actually prefer the iPad.  As more work is done to improve screens like the iPad's and as traditional newspapers become thinner and less local I believe that electronic newspapers are going to be even more popular than they are today.  Eventually when people say 'the newspaper' they'll mean collations of news like the one on my iPad.


As we redesigned the Lansing Star this summer one of the most important features was the ability to create multiple RSS feeds.  'RSS' stands for 'Really Simple Syndication.'  In geek-speak it's an XML file that is formatted for news readers to parse the articles it contains so they can display them in useful and attractive formats.

In English, they are 'feeds' that show a list of articles (and the first few paragraphs and sometimes pictures) that you can view in news reader software.  If you want to read the whole story you can click (or touch it on the iPad) to see the original.

For example, if you saw the beginning of my tax story in this week's Star and decided it is something you want to read you can click on it and the whole story is displayed on the Lansing Star site in a browser.  When you are done you click something that takes you back to the reader and you can then click on a New York Times story about the BP oil spill and it will show you the whole story on their site.

It's handy, easy, and provides a la carte news from multiple sources.  We set up eight RSS feeds so you can choose to get our stories from the front page, the news page, sports, 'Around Town', entertainment, business, opinions, and obituaries.  We also have a feed from IthaCalendar.com so you can get Tompkins County events on a news reader.

Of course you can always look at the Star the old fashioned way -- by going to our Web site and navigating the newspaper sections for the stories you want to read.  We actually want you to do that.  But one of the great things about Internet newspapers is that they allow you to get your news in multiple ways.  I even set up the Lansing Star front page headlines to display on my iGoogle page, which is a personalized search page that Google offers for free.

I used to like television news, but the commercials have become so pervasive and the opinions are so outnumbering the hard facts that I got disgusted and gave up.  My news reader gets me the news I want whenever I want it, and while I can see the ads on the Lansing Star and the other papers I get stories from, they're just there.  They don't make me wait to get my news.  I love that.

The key is going to be readability, the quality of the screens, and ease of use.  I think that devices like the iPad combine all those things, and that's why I think paper papers days are even more numbered than they were a few years ago when the Christian Science Monitor made such a splash by going almost entirely online.  Hey, we beat them to the punch.  Online is the future of newspapers.

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