Sweet Hierarchy

Digital technology has done beautiful things for us news consumers. Flip open your screen, and a raft of fresh headlines is always there waiting. The Net has taken that ancient saw of newspaper culture, "The Daily Miracle," and made it literal. The new world of news is miraculous, not just daily but all the time.

Still, there's one old-media habit I sometimes miss when I'm online. Newspapers and other predigital organs organized and presented the news in an intensely hierarchical fashion: Story X mattered more than story Z, they told you, using an elaborate system of signals. Which page was the story on? Where precisely on the page was it? How much space did it get? How big was the headline? Was there a photo?

The code, which will undoubtedly live on as long as the paper media do, can get downright medieval in its distinctions. Did you know that the right-hand column of a broadsheet newspaper is immensely more important than the left-hand one—but only on the front page, above the fold?

This ancient system is so routinized and formal, it can seem silly. Besides, who cares what a bunch of inch-deep, self-important journalists think is important?

Online media are, in a way, the culture's answer to this question. For reasons both practical and philosophical, they present the news in a much less hierarchical fashion. On the practical level, a computer screen is just a two-dimensional surface, with far fewer potentially symbolic nooks and crannies than a thick sheaf of pages printed on both sides. True, there are virtual Web pages "behind" the front page of any Web site, and you can have multiple pages open at the same time. But because they are not literally attached to each other, not part of the same fixed structure, the whole machine is inherently less didactic and hierarchical. The online reader decides what matters, by clicking.

The limitless space available to digital media removes another hierarchical tool—the competition for real estate. If a newspaper lets a story run to 5,000 words, it's telling you the story matters. When an online outlet does the same thing, it's not necessarily telling you anything, except that you're reading a long story.

The digital world is far from hierarchy-free. It has lead stories, and huge screaming headlines. But in a studied way, the design of many digital sites' news leans away from telling you what matters most, often opting for simple lists of headlines and other anti-hierarchical features. On the classic blog, the only obvious hierarchy is chronology—items appear according to when they were posted, with the most recent items at the top. This turns the old notion of "play" into something more like anti-play, hinting that the blogger is just a passive conduit. Which is a bit of a canard: When and how content appears in any outlet is always a decision.

Earlier this week, my hard copy of The New York Times arrived with the headline, "Politics Stalls Plan to Bolster Flood Insurance," in the primo position, top right corner of the front page. If I had seen that deadly dull headline listed on a Web site, without the cachet attached to this special spot in The Times, I'd probably have ignored it. But The Times, which is nothing if not hierarchical, wanted me to know that this was its premier hard-news story of the day. Not because it had won a popularity contest, which is effectively what happens on sites such as Google News, which tracks how broadly stories are playing across the Web and posts them accordingly. Nor was The Times pretending that this was an item that passively fell in its lap. "Look at THIS," the paper was saying, and thus revealing something about itself. Hierarchy can be more transparent than its opposite.

I put the paper down and called up Google News on my screen. At the top left was a CNN story about the president sending troops to the Mexican border—the big news of the moment everywhere. And just to the right, perched atop one of the most important news sites on Earth, was this headline: "AstraZeneca in Talks to Acquire Cambridge Antibody Technology."

Sometimes randomness is just random.