"Aged" News Indeed

David Kurtz in political blog Talking Points Memo makes a very good point:

If you read only the print edition of the New York Times, you would still not know anything about the Mark Sanford saga, according to my search of the paper's archives. Yet, right now it's the lead story on the paper's website, and has been, for better or worse, the dominant news story this week since The State first broke news late Monday afternoon that the governor was missing. Presumably, The Times will have a story in tomorrow's print edition, by which time the story will have bubbled, built, arced, and be on its way to fading out. That's not a criticism per se of The Times' news judgment. By the old standards, the story was arguably too undeveloped to warrant inclusion in The Times. But it points up the difficulty of keeping an old-line newspaper relevant to its better-informed readers.

I've written about this before: News happens—and is covered in online and electronic media—much faster than it can be printed. As a result, print newspapers feel increasingly out of date. Former newspaper editor John Temple, whose blog is just rocking these days, makes a similar point, noting that several papers led Wednesday's editions with President Obama's tougher stance on Iran—which actually was announced midday Tuesday:

This "news" in Wednesday's editions comes from a midday (Eastern Time) news conference on Tuesday. I heard it through the day on the radio and TV and read many updates on the Web, including on some of these papers' sites. Yet, still, this is what editors decide to deliver the next morning.

This is precisely what the Daily Show was saying when it did its devastating riff the other night on "aged" news in The New York Times. With more and more people getting their news online and from TV, in real time (or close to it), print newspapers are looking very "aged" indeed. As Temple says, this cries out for newspapers to really reinvent themselves. They have to find a way to provide deep context and analysis, or spin a story forward, or find stories (hint: local) that just aren't available anywhere else. Being 18 hours or more behind just doesn't cut it anymore.