The Serendipity Defense

Matthew Ingram talks about the "serendipity defense" of newspapers. Basically, he says that newspapers collect all sorts of stories because they have to appeal to a wide range of readers. With all that different content in one place, it's more likely that you'll stumble upon something that you would never have sought out on your own. The Web doesn't provide that sort of aggregation as effectively, he says.

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.

There is something to this. It's certainly not news that the Web narrows people's views of the world. The glut of information available forces us to filter it so that we can make sense of it. We tend to filter according to our interests or prejudices, almost guaranteeing that we'll never see things that don't align with our ways of thinking.

It's a good defense of newspapers, and it's a feature of physical bundling that Web sites will have a hard time reproducing.

Related posts:

1. The Wiki Defense
2. The Best Defense…
3. Rumor has it