The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.

Blogger: Mathew Ingram

Position: Blogger and communities editor at Toronto’s The Globe and Mail

Blog name: Mathew Ingram

Backstory: Online news aggregators continue to proliferate and draw attention, while print newspapers continue to suffer. This week, the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations report showed that top daily newspapers lost a staggering 10.6 percent of their circulation over the last six months.

Blog post: So what might be keeping some of the other 89.4 percent of newspaper readers around? In a blog post, Ingram argues that print newspapers serve a unique function as aggregators that hasn’t been replicated online—yet. “Maybe I’ve just been trained as a newspaper reader for my whole life, but I like the serendipity of tripping over fascinating articles about things I would never have known even existed were it not for a newspaper. To take the Saturday Globe and Mail as an example, I read about an up-and-coming Muslim hockey player, a profile of Paul Shaffer, a review of the punk band Gossip, an article about contentious city council politics in Aurora, and a great feature on retirees and their vanishing pensions.

Could links to those stories show up in my RSS reader? Possibly, but I doubt it. The mix is just too eclectic. And I would never have sought out the article about the Muslim hockey player, because I don’t particularly care about hockey and therefore I would likely never have come across it. Would the retirement piece ever make it to Techmeme or some similar aggregator? I doubt it. But it was still worth reading. And so were the half-dozen or so articles I can’t recall right now, which I tripped across as I read the paper. I would never have deliberately sought them out either.”

Post-script: I asked Ingram why newspapers can’t just recreate this serendipity but online instead of in print. He answered: “I think the kind of serendipity that is offered by print newspapers is very difficult to replicate online, since articles that appear on the same page in the paper might not appear next to each other online. I think one of the things papers can do to enhance the serendipity effect is to use features such as “most read,” “most commented” and so on—which might expose someone to an article that they would never otherwise see.”

From his post: “I realize that there is far more content — from a vast diversity of sources — available on the web than there is in a newspaper. But who will filter and condense and aggregate it for me the way a newspaper does? I still haven’t found something that does the job quite as well. Perhaps someday I will, but until then I will keep reading newspapers.”

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