How will we find the news nuggets?

Newspapers don't have a lot of advantages against the new media. They used to have portability ("When you can take a computer into the bathroom with you, then newspapers should worry," a newspaper designer remarked decades ago.). But with iPhones, Blackberrys, Mobile Web and Kindles, it seems newspapers have lost the portability battle.

But there's still the issue of nuggets. How many times do you find yourself just flipping through the paper and coming across a story that you would never have thought of reading. But the photos grab you or you stop to read the graphic and before you know it, you're smack in the middle of a good story. That's the beauty of the newspaper with its emphasis on photography and graphics, packaging and design.

It's ironic that the multimedia digital words dilutes the impact of images, graphics and design and puts the emphasis firmly on the words first. In a way, that takes us back to the days when newspaper design was 9 columns of dense type - every headline the same size, every story given the same weight. Now with RSS feeds and Twitter and Facebook links, it is the words and not the music that attract us into a story.

But the joy of the "unexpected nugget" - what a former editor of mine used to call the "Hey, Martha" story, may be being lost. Yes, once you are into a story, you may find a plethora of multimedia - video, photos, audio files, interactive maps and graphics. But you have to get into the story first.

This puts a new burden on journalists who will have to learn how to write headlines that stand alone and leads that actually tell the story - rather than the real people anecdotes that have come to define most current journalism. Scrolling through a list of headlines - all the same font and weight - is not the same as leafing through the pages of a newspaper. Rarely do you find the unique tidbit in the RSS feed - probably because your attention span fails after the first four or five screens scroll by.

In the Internet world, you can find anything you're looking for, but you have to know you're looking for it. This I fear can add another nail in the coffin of human inquisitiveness, quest for knowledge and understanding and learning for the sake of education yourself not with a specific monetary goal in mind.

Those things may be qualities from the past anyway, but it is a sad commentary on our society and our future that our individual vision is narrowing to a laser point - focused fully on our goals and area of interest, not wavering enough to see the nuggets all around us. The demise of a printed paper will likely only further this dissolution.

Does this mean we'll be less educated or less knowledgeable despite having the sum total of centuries of information, art, literature and history just a few keystrokes away? I guess that depends on your definition of an education person. As a professor once told me: "Education is knowing what you don't know."