Yes, that’s a little too short a formulation. I meant to take the attitude that it’s “A cause for concern but not for panic” rhethorically looks good, as they seem to acknowledge the problem, and as it looks good it seems true. But the rhethoric is so strong that it leads to wrong conclusions and misconceptions of the state of newspapers.

Of course it’s never good to panic. The misconception that “not to panic” leads to is this attitude: “We don’t need to act right away. We are still fine.”

Yet newspapers are not fine as they are.

1. If you look at the traffic of newspapers online one clearly sees that newspapers need to act now. Not in panic, but thoughtfully, intelligently and decisively.

2. The strong point of newspapers against blogs used to be: Better writing, profound research and the pleasure of reading nice sharp print. But the writing that can be found on the web is pretty good, the ability for users to comment and to crosscheck online information quickly competes journalistic research, and good information design outperforms the often annoying paragraphshort badly structured unscannable mass of text in print. Newspapers need to reinvent themselves now.

“I’d even say that the Economist’s approach to the problem, to call the current downtrend of printmedia “A cause for concern but not for panic” a rhetoric misconception.”

Time for a semantic checker?

Micheal, I am really glad to you have highlighted USA Today’s new web features and their commitment to buidling a user community. I have been a long-time user of usatoday.com, and I am thrilled with the fact that users can now post comments and that articles are ranked by popularity. I think their adoption of Ajax is also very cool!

Sounds natural ja nai?

I experimented with full justification quite a bit and I feel that it kind of works – in English. It doesn’t work in German, as the words are too long and the whitespace between the words gets too big. I am still in checking mode though. Does it bother you?

What about light between words? We can control that in web so – IMO – we shouldn’t use full justification. What do you think?

Well, this “brand strategy” is dubious in print – and extremely self destructive on the web. Self destruction and brand strategy usually don’t go a long way…