Deconstructing news

Tech eminence Chris Anderson says there are two main problems with newspapers: The news and the paper. In town to promote his best-selling book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," he appeared this morning at the Aloud Business Forum downtown. Mostly, he was laying out the premise of his book - that sometimes businesses are better off giving things away than charging for them. Still, interviewer Kai Ryssdal got him to engage in the sorry state of newspapers. "The first problem is news," he says. "What's news? Well, we don't really know anymore. The news that my daughter scraped her knee on the playground is news, right? More important to me than that there's been another car bombing in Iraq." Under this thinking, we're mostly interested in stuff that happens a mile from our homes, and then perhaps 10,000 miles from our homes. Anything in between is iffy.

So I'm interested in Berkeley and Baghdad. I live in the Bay area but I couldn't give a crap about San Jose. San jose could just as well be San Juan. But newspapers are built around the notion of the metropolitan area and that I have an interest in the metropolitan area, where in fact my interest is granular."

This fits into the current thinking about where papers are headed - that you'll still have the mega-weights like the NYT, WSJ and USA Today, and you'll still have the small community dailies that offer super-local information. Most other publications become vulnerable (he mentioned the SF Chronicle as an obvious example).