Don’t get all unbundled.

Nicholas Carr thinks he’s describing what happens to news when it moves online:

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.

But what he’s really describing is what happens to an old media product in a new media environment.  It’s information rich, so it has value and will attract an audience.  But it’s presented in a format that doesn’t fit the way people consume media online, so it will be digested and remixed by blogs and portals and other folks who can take its information and present it in a more engaging way.

In other words, the problem isn’t the content itself.  The problem is the fact that newspapers, for the most part, are still generally bad online bundles and their individual news products are still designed for an old format.  Carr deciding that news is in crisis because when newspapers put old media products online they don’t instantly succeed would be like someone deciding in the 1950s that the news business is in crisis because radio segments don’t work on TV.

Newspapers need to stop being newspapers and start being online news organizations.

To be a successful “bundle” online means creating an ongoing narrative stream for your reporting instead of dispatching it in daily briefs.  It means creating a platform for a community to form around your content that cares about the work you’re doing and can help you with support and criticism.  It means linking to outside content that has the story before or better than you do so that your portal is as good as it can possibly be even if your reporters aren’t working that story or that angle of the story (Is it really suprising that news portals that take the best content in the world and create a front page are more interesting than just one news producer presenting its info alone?).  And yes, it also means building a network of people who link to your content so that you’re finding an audience.

In that sense, Carr is right that individual units of news no longer have to be bundled in exactly the way a publisher decides.  Readers can now get that content through a whole variety of ways.  The challenge, then, for news organizations, is to convince readers that being at your site should be one of those ways.