A couple days ago, The New York Times’ Web site launched a new-look Times Wire, a real-time “river of news” that’s updated throughout the day. On his blog, Dave Winer, who had previously pitched the idea to the NYT, wrote:

After years of saying that instead of emulating print newspapers, Internet-based news should present the newest stuff first. I don’t want sections, I want flow.

…

They’re now presenting their news flow as a flow. Gone is the pretense that news on the Internet works like news on paper.

I think the new Times Wire is a good feature to have, but I see it as a good thing in the sense that if there’s a decent-sized segment of your customers who want this feature, then it makes good business sense to provide it. Personally, however, I don’t see myself having a whole lot of use for the Times Wire.

During the decade I spent working in newspapers, mostly as a designer and copy editor, I looked at a river of news every night — the Associated Press wire. I went into work, turned on the wire application, and the river of news poured in, stretching back as far as a couple weeks. Every time I hit the “refresh” button, the latest items popped in. So I had the entire news flow right there in front of me, but when I needed to know what was going on in the world of sports that day (since I worked in the sports department), instead of diving into the river, I went to ESPN.com or Sportsline.com.

The reason is simple: curation. In the river, everything is given equal weight. There’s nothing to elevate a story about the NFL disbanding over a brief about a team cutting its fifth-string fullback. That’s why I go to ESPN.com or Sportsline.com, because it quickly gives me the big picture, helping me identify the important news in the sports world that day.

That’s not to say I didn’t have any use for a real-time river of news. Because it was my job to care about, or at least feign interest in, every single tidbit of sports news that happened, the wire made it easy for me to browse through everything. Later in the night, after I had pretty much browsed through most of the news items that day, planned out the section, and was now just keeping an eye out for any late-breaking news, the chronological flow of the AP wire was very useful. However, that’s a case where I had a specific aim. The latest news item was of interest to me, not because of its content, but because it was the latest news and that’s what I was looking for, and I was looking for that because it was part of my job.

As a news consumer, however, I don’t approach the news in the same way as when I’m working in news. Not every item matters to me, and those that do, it’s because of their content, not their time stamp. When I jump on a news site in the morning, I want to quickly ascertain the most important things that day, and I’ll read the ones that interest me. And then I’ll go to particular subjects (sections) that interest me and see the most recent news there. I don’t have the time, or the desire, to browse through a river of all the news items. Then, as the day goes on, I want updates, but mostly only in the subjects that interest me, and I get that mainly through RSS feeds (tributaries of news, you might say) or just by going back to a specific section of a site. I’ll make one or two occasional checks to a news site’s homepage through the day just in case something big has happened.

The one time I can see myself really following a river of news is if a 9/11-type event happens and I’m checking back constantly for updates, and even then, I just want updates on that one subject. I guess you can call this a stream of news rather than a river.

Because I consume the news in this way, I prefer the by-section curation that news sites have traditionally employed. That’s why I’m glad that the NYT has kept its site’s traditional by-section layout instead of replacing it with just the river. Having only the chronological flow of news, without curation, is akin to pointing a fisherman to the Mississippi River but not telling him where the best fishing spots are.

I think most online news consumers want to know where those fishing spots are, unless they have nothing to do during the day except consume news. That’s partly why I deployed a new theme on this blog. I had a traditional, top-down, chronological layout. This … umm … rindle of content just didn’t provide enough, if any, curation. I knew there were good posts that people were interested in that got bumped off the first page after just a couple days, and mediocre posts sometimes stayed on the first page for much longer simply because of gaps in my blogging. With the new theme, I’m better able to make the good posts stick to the home page longer, provide quick access to categories that generally get the most clicks, and still present a list of the most recent posts for those who are looking for that. As a consumer, that’s the kind of curation I want from a news site. You can effectively curate and divide online news into sections without destroying the sense of news flow, and you can convey the idea that news is a continuous flow without having to actually do this visually, which destroys the curation. And isn’t curation supposed to be one of the things that journalists can do that has value in this age of information overload?