I see over and over how people become bewitched by a new technology and start to believe that it's completely divorced from anything that's gone before. We see it now in the hype about the "new journalism" , and it's just like the Web hype of the 90s. People wanted to believe that the Web wasn't dependent on or constrained by thousands of years of experience and custom in areas such as commerce, writing and text, graphic and page design, and on and on. We saw a lot of gratuitous creativity, the non-creativity that comes from simply looking at convention and doing the opposite. But nowadays you rarely see headache-inducing Web pages, and what rhetoric remains is thoroughly down-to-earth. Web pages for the most part exhibit classic design values, such as a top-left/lower-right axis, colors chosen to maximize legibility while minimizing eyestrain, restrained font choices, and mundane features like text in narrow columns.

Most people just assume that the layout of posts here, with the constrained column of text that seems to waste screen real estate, is just an arbitrary decision on my part. But in fact it's deliberate, based on many years of prior experience designing printed pages. Studies have confirmed that people have trouble reading very long lines of text, past 80 characters or so. The eye can only scan so far along a line of text before it begins to drift, to "jump the tracks" and start mixing in words from lines above and below the current line. The old way works.

Speaking of traditional wisdom from newspapers, nowadays professionals design Web pages keeping in mind the "fold". In this case it's the bottom edge of the browser window rather than an actual fold in a tabloid-shaped piece of paper, but it means the same thing in design terms. The things you want people to get right away go "above-the-fold" where they're visible as soon as the page loads; lesser material goes "below the fold" where people have to scroll down to see it.

I see the overreaching claim of novelty in today's hype about the blogosphere and its so-called "new journalism". Yeah, a diversity of sources is good; except that we have so many of them, and none with any assurance of accuracy, that we might be worse off than before. Left to their own devices people will choose information Balkanization, choosing the sources that agree with them or flatter their self-image; so I see a risk that the new journalism won't broaden our horizons, but instead narrow them.

I think history will repeat itself in a useful way. Back in the 1600s broadsheets became popular in England, and they were amazingly close analogs of blogs: Personal opinion, often scurrilous and libelous, of unknown provenance and accuracy and thus rarely accurate, usually distributed under psuedonyms to avoid accountability, broadcast profligately far and wide for free. I'm sure people loved the broadsheets at first, for their novelty and entertainment value; but when the novelty wore off, people must've started to want the information distributed in that format to be more reliable and useful. In response Fleet Street invented what we think of as modern journalism, with its error-correcting features such as fact-checking and multiple editorial review, corroboration from multiple sources, etc. Journalism gained necessary discipline.

The same thing will inevitably happen to "new journalism". Once the novelty of blogs wears off, people are going to demand more accountability and more assurance of accuracy. People might be entertained by false information, but it's not useful, at best; and destructive at worst. I'm very sure that the ecology of the blogosphere will produce specialists like editors, fact-checkers, information aggregators, and "Digesters", people who create digests of the news. Tom maintains that it's sufficient for bloggers to dispute each other, but I disagree--journalism requires third-party specialists with a reduced or no stake in the debate, and a reputation for honesty and objectivity, to provide assurances of reliability. Consumer products are vetted by UL and Consumer Reports; journalism's no different.

The role of Digester isn't anything novel: A newspaper printing wire service stories is a digest. Digesters aren't guaranteed to be gods of objectivity, and people will still select digests that they tend to find agreeable, just like with magazines and newspapers today. But each digest will be compiled from multiple sources and edited by somebody who is at least expected to look at the big picture and cross-check and fact-check; and whose track record and credibility is a matter of record. The new journalism will turn out to be much like the old journalism dressed in a shiny new suit.

New journalism boosters like to talk about a marketplace that will discipline bloggers, but I don't see it at the level of individual blogs. The opportunity for profit is the digests, and that's where market forces will tend to favor accuracy and credibility. The boosters are overlooking the concept of added value, and it's the filtering and fact-checking and aggregating that has economic value.

People pay for magazines and newspapers; do you know anybody who pays for a raw wire-service feed? Me neither. Case closed.