Will the definition of news change because of the Web?Working on a philosophy minor has some damaging effects. When I first read the question, a flurry of semantic problems scrabbled my thoughts.
Aren't we able to change word definitions at will? Or, alternatively, once a definition is made and something new comes along, shouldn't we just give it another name? Dictionaries have more than two definitions for news anyway!
This was just the surface of the semantic soup bubbling in my mind. But that's all this really is; semantics.
News will remain exactly the same. What we, the audience, will receive or actively seek is what the Web will change.
When radio came about, news didn't change. But how it was presented and who could get it changed vastly. When television came about, the same phenomena happened. News was still news, but what could be covered and received by the audience shifted.
When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the worldwide public marveled at their television screens and the TV camera enhanced the experience of a man on the moon. If, for some reason, TV cameras hadn't been around when Armstrong took those first steps, the newspapers still would have covered it.
So what is new about news isn't a definition. It is the sheer volume of news that gathers on the infinite pages of the Web. John Doe's new puppy barking for the first time can be shared just as easily as the latest death toll in Iraq. While Doe's barking puppy rates low on most editors' newsworthiness scale, it is news nonetheless. The only difference is that now that news is published somewhere. That somewhere is the Web.
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