Mathew Ingram points to some interesting "River of News" work that Dave Winer has been doing, and wonders why the papers themselves haven't been trying anything similar:

I don’t understand why the Times -- or other newspapers, for that matter -- don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.

I think the answer is simple inertia. Newsapers are an old business - they have fairly set ways of doing things, and geting changes to take place is hard. Heck, never mind newspapers - look at technology companies. Most of the "old" ones are 30-40 years old at most, and you would think that technology companies would be open to change - but you would be largely wrong.

Look at Microsoft now, or IBM back in the 80s. Look at how much difficulty established vendors have with things like Open Source. The news media is being forced to deal with a huge change in a very accelerated fashion - it's just the "old think" of the established players that stands in their way. The thing is though, it's not any different elsewhere in the business world - media is just being forced to adjust more quickly.

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