I don’t thumb through the newspaper.

My generation discovers news in much different ways than previous ones. We don’t stumble upon random stories in a dead tree publication. We share news.

No one ever says to me, “did you see that story in the paper yesterday?” No, if someone wants me to read a story, he or she will send me it. And then we’ll discuss it.

My friends e-mail me stories, send me instant messages, shouts on Digg, Twitter direct messages, Facebook messages, etc. And I do the same. I send my friends stories I think would interest them, and they send me stories they think would interest me.

News is a communal event for us. It’s not the solitary experience that many previous generations had, where it was just a person and a paper. Thumbing through the news might make sense if it were a solitary event, but it doesn’t work in a social world.

We experience news together. We talk about news. My two greatest sources of news have nothing to do with front pages or homepages.

I get news from my friends and colleagues, and I subscribe to RSS feeds that matter to me (I have Google Reader open all day long). I’m not alone. When one considers this reality, the concept of a front page or a homepage makes little sense.

The traditional funnel of news was the front page, where people started their news experiences for the day. That’s quickly becoming obsolete. The concept of the news homepage never had time to become obsolete — it never stuck.

Users rejected poorly laid out homepages. In fact, the concept of mimicking a newspaper front page in digital form is insulting to the very concept of the Web. The Web is organic and social — it literally is a interconnected Web of information.

Armed with this knowledge, news companies need to completely rethink how they disseminate news. People often talk about making pages more sticky, but it’s more than just talk. News organizations need their sub pages to be sticky.

Many Web sites get the majority of their traffic from referrals. People don’t get referred to a homepage. They get referred to individual story pages, and it’s those individual story pages that are usually the least sticky.

News organizations have done a good job in recent years of making their homepages more sticky by listing the most popular stories, most e-mailed, etc, but those same concepts need to be better applied to sub pages. The individual story pages need to be treated like a landing page, a launching point for someone’s Web experience.

News organizations need to start offering full RSS feeds, because many users refuse to view and subscribe to partial feeds. This means monetizing RSS feeds, which most users don’t have a problem with.  RSS is not a side show or a way to get people to a Web site — it is often the main event for many people.
Many old timers (mostly print veterans) lament how it’s not possible to thumb through the news on the Web. But that’s the point. The Web doesn’t make information a solitary event.

When news becomes more social, it becomes more powerful. People are more involved in a social product. If news companies want to thrive in the 21st-century (and make a difference in the world) they’ll have to harness the social abilities of the Web for news.