This week, Slate performed "a highly unscientific experiment" to determine who is better informed: those who get their news only from newspapers, or those who rely solely on the Internet. For three days, the four volunteer subjects were forced to consume as much news as they could in one hour from their assigned medium, then report back on their findings.

Slate recruited Timothy Egan, a New York Times columnist and blogger, and Sam Howe Verhovek, who once worked at NYT and the Los Angeles Times, for the two print-only subjects. On the web side, there were Slate online reporters Emily Yoffe and Seth Stevenson. The print people were confined to four newspapers available in their respective geographic locations (in this case, Seattle), while the "webbies" had to stay clear of newspaper websites and all online news aggregators (from Google News to the Huffington Post).

The online journalists' first impressions were that they missed something by not having access to newspaper columnists, but they felt on top of breaking news stories that the print people wouldn't see until the next morning. Yoffe also complained of a lack of direction without a newspaper or aggregator to point towards the most important stories. Overall, the print journalists felt sufficiently informed of the day's news - minus an update on a false post on the Drudge Report that the US government spent $1.19 million on two pounds of ham.

Wednesday's assignment was to name the top three stories of the day for each medium. Three out of four named Henry Louis Gates Jr., the African-American Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and continuing coverage of Obama's health care overhaul.

This overall consensus contradicts a recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that reviewed the top 10 news stories across different mediums for the week of July 13-17. PEJ found the only common story among traditional news outlets, blogs and Twitter was US health care.

Back on Slate, Stevenson picked another TMZ Michael Jackson scoop (the investigation of the late star's doctor) for his third choice. Yoffe zeroed in on a story that newspapers had been staying away from - speculation that Obama's birth certificate was forged and he was actually born in Kenya. Both represent an advantage of the Internet over print, in the sense that web sites can update stories more quickly and don't have the space restrictions of newspapers so can include more stories.

Interestingly, both Egan and Vervohek picked up on a Seattle Times story about another delay in the launch of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner aircraft. While the news is a local issue for Seattle in that Boeing is based in Washington, it has national implications for what it says about the state of US industry. The "webbies" later reported seeing little if anything about this in the blogosphere. Score one point for newspapers.

After three days of the experiment, the group came up with several conclusions. The general consensus was that newspapers lacked the extensive and insightful commentary offered by the web, particularly in the case of the Gates story. At the same time, Egan affirmed that online sources for the most part rely on traditional media to do quality investigative reporting, which one can assume is the kind of article that incites a lot of commentary. Stevenson further conceded that with a newspaper like NYT or the Washington Post the reader is assured of quality, while the same cannot be said for everything on the web.

The participants also pointed to flaws in the way the "highly unscientific" experiment was set up. Yoffe attested that constricting the online journalists to just an hour each day was not realistic, since that is not how Internet users get their news. The ability to receive up-to-the-second reports on news events is one of the things that makes the Internet so powerful.

Experiment moderators Michael Kinsley and Michael Newman both mentioned at some point that the research question should have been about organization of news, rather than its ability to inform. But then which is better? It depends.

Which brings the group to its overall conclusion: why choose one medium over the other when one can have both? Readers are best informed when they use newspapers in conjunction with online sources to first find out which are the most important news stories and then search for updates and commentary. (For some, throwing the Kindle reader into the mix only adds to the news experience.)

As Vervohek points out, however, the real issue isn't what this group of journalists believes but what habits the next generation of newsreaders put into practice. Even 35-year-old Stevenson admits he can see a completely digital world: "Don't get me wrong. I would hate to lose the newspapers. But I'm pretty sure I could live a full and happy life without them."

Yet, just because it's possible for the physical paper product to disappear does not mean "newspapers" will cease to exist. Vervohek swears in a few years time we'll all be going "back to the future," with all our news coming from high-tech gadgets that present an ad-supported, interactive, newspaper format to blend the best of both worlds. That doesn't sound like a bad idea.

Source: Slate, Broadcasting & Cable