Dead v. live

Dead v. live

: Adrian Holovaty tears down PDF publications (I agree) but what he’s really tearing down is paper:

A print-newspaper journalist tries to guess the dozen-or-so pieces of information that people might want to know, freezing the facts into a flat, unbendable package…. But a Web-savvy journalist tries to anticipate the hundreds of ways people will want to slice, dice and use information, and creates the infrastructure that makes it happen.

It’s the difference between a flat list of marriage licenses and a searchable database that lets me type in a person’s name and corrects common misspellings.

That’s what Web news is all about. A newspaperman deals in information dictation; a Web journalist deals in information discovery.

And a citizens’ journalist deals in….