The Internet has accelerated a long-established cultural trend: more and more people are getting their news from electronic sources rather than the newspaper. Television and radio have made steady inroads; the trend really accelerated with as cable TV crept into a majority of American households and all those specialty channels became available to the populace. The noisiest, if not most successful cable channels are the news feeds that can be found in multiple formats and languages.
Now, the Internet has made further incursions into what was once the kingdom of Hearst, Wrigley and the Big Apple’s Grey Lady: The New York Times. The once mighty Times is down to a quarter of a million in daily circulation and most of that is in the suburbs. It is also true that the Times is changin’ however, as are most dailies and many community newspapers. Some papers, like the New York Times, have developed a number of features that are designed to maximize the internet’s ability to target.
The NY Times and the Washington Post are two prominent examples of papers that publish daily online versions of their papers, which are updated several times daily. Moreover,...