When I suggested earlier that newspaper Web sites are entering a period of competing for market share, colleague Bill Dunphy in Hamilton thundered in that, well, duh, we've been doing that for decades.
I think I was echoing the State of the Media report from the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism that indicated the audience for online news might be peaking.
But Bill raises another significant point: "Information, news, is becoming, or perhaps already has become, a commodity - and the implications that has for our ability to carry out the kind of journalism we love, and our communities need, are frightening."
I think many news managers share that view, that information has long since become highly commoditized and that the rewards will only come in the years ahead to those striving for original or contextual content.
I'm interested in what people might have thought about the Montreal Gazette's venture this week into an edition of contextual and analytical content --- a simplistic description might be a newspaper without a typical frame of news. Certainly the European papers are becoming "viewspapers."
