An adult view of our future

Have you seen Tim Rutten's excellent column about the future of newspapers in the L.A. Times? Although he's talking about the redesigned Wall Street Journal, he could be describing his own work when he calls it "a breath of adult sobriety in an ongoing discussion of the journalistic future that usually seems to demand that we all choose between amnesia and panic."

Rutten uses the Journal's redesign principles to make the point that a joined-at-the-hip symbiosis between print and online journalism could well be the recipe for success in our future. I'm convinced he's right when he talks about "how strong a role there is still to be played by newspapers willing to accept the challenge of recalibrating the balance between data and information, between knowledge and understanding."

One more taste – but you should definitely go read it all:

New media triumphalists and old media traditionalists have for too long insisted that newspaper journalism's future has to belong almost entirely to one or the other. What the redesigned Journal strongly suggests is that newspapers will be of greatest service to their readers by taking a simultaneous and complementary stance in both venues...