Fairfax changes good for readers, not so good for community

The Internet will weight the value in the news operation away from the hard assets and the production and distribution network, which will allow print news media to prosper with fewer readers, and therein lies the rub.

At the moment we have mass media which consist of broadcast and print. Broadcast does a very good job of transmitting headline versions of the news, but a very poor one in general of analysis, and only a reasonable one of fact. Print has been diminishing as a mass conduit for the facts and headlines, but still retains a mass role in analysis (even taking account that analysis is more of a niche interest).

To the extent that serious news is going online it goes off the news stands, and more importantly, off the lunch room tables. The serendipitous encounters that we all have with news in the hard copy world will diminish.

Of course they will be replaced by online encounters, but these will be less serendipitous, and more directed.

We are all on someone else's email list, even if we aren't on their Twitter feed or friends with them on Facebook. I am certainly on all three, and my experience is that it is generally the partisans who are most likely to push something through to me.

As a result, were it not for the reading I do for On Line Opinion, it would be easy for me to live in an information and analysis ghetto. Partisans know your politics, and they generally don't push stuff to you if they think you won't be sympathetic.

So, while print news media is collectively about to get closer to its readers, it is also individually about to get further away from its community.

That is a challenge for democracy, and for the media's self-imagined role as the fourth estate.