Breaking national and international news up front, local news next, stories broken up and jumping inside. Culture, features, TV, listings, recipes, and advice columns in the back. Stentorian voices on the editorial page. Take it or leave it, and if you don't like it, write us a letter. But the growing millions of people sending and receiving news and their opinions of it to one another via modem is another story.
Digital news differs radically from other media.
No other medium has ever given individual people such an engaged role in the movement of information and opinion or such a proprietary interest in the medium itself. The computer news culture fosters a sense of kinship, ownership, and participation that has never existed in commercial media. When in January 1994 a Prodigy subscriber used his wireless modem to flash news of the LA earthquake to the Net well before CNN or the Associated Press could report it, a new news medium was born. No information structure has ever been able to do anything remotely like it. Meanwhile, after years of newspapers' ignoring computers or relegating them to the far corners of the business sections, you can't pick up a paper any longer without reading the words e-mail , Internet , or cyberspace .