Jack Shafer’s piece, “Honey, They Shrunk the
Newspaper,” is generally right about a lot of things wrong with the
electronic editions (vs. the standard Web site versions) of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times and The New York Times — and what’s right about them. (Here in miniature is what an electronic
edition looks like.) He’s exactly right when he says:
E-editions preserve the information-rich typography of print by displaying
replicas of the newsprint page. An e-edition reader has a leg up on the reader of the HTML
version of the paper because the original typefaces and placement retained in PDF give the
e-edition reader clues about the intended rank and “play” of a news story (in the editors’ opinion).
Web sites suffer on this score because most stories are presented in long lists of plain
text.
But the standard, broadband Web site versions we’ve become accustomed to also have their
advantages. For instance, Rwanda: 10 years of
pain, from Newsday, is a broadband Web report not to be missed.
You can’t find it in Newsday’s print edition, and you wouldn’t find it in an electronic edition (even
if Newsday had one).
An easy prediction: The day can’t be far off when Web-based designers will meld electronic
editions and broadband Web site versions in user-friendly packages to give us the best and
worst of both worlds.
