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I guess I don't see what's totally different between reading printed newspapers and reading any of those same newspapers on the internet. If you subscribe to the New York Times, and I read nytimes.com, how is the news we're reading any different in terms of article quality, nice summary of the news, etc.? When I think of "getting news online", I think of basically that: the same newspapers you could buy, except now they're on the internet.

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The profile of how I read a paper newspaper and an online one is drastically different. The first bit of each story in a paper newspaper requires zero activation energy or decision-making on my part to read, so I end up reading the first bits of most of the stories on the front page until and unless I find something sufficiently interesting to warrant flailing and fighting and folding the paper back and forth until I get the rest of it.

Online, I scan headlines until I find one sufficiently interesting to click on, and then I read the whole article.

The result is that the paper newspaper is a better survey of what's going on, since reporters are good at getting the high bits of the story in the part on the front page.

That doesn't mean I'd subscribe to a paper paper, though.

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