I was probably not alone in being startled by the headline at dn.se, the website for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, on 15 October: ”Swinging is our new hobby.” That’s right – couples who have sex with other couples.

My first reaction was a feeling of absurdity mixed with distaste. Absurdity because the article is such an obvious result of the paper’s investment in its on-line edition, where material that is purely tabloid in nature – sex, gossip and celebrities – is beginning to gain ground. Distaste because it runs the risk of paving the way for journalism that clashes with the traditions of Dagens Nyheter. Not because DN has ever been prudish – quite the opposite. For many years, the newspaper has championed an open-minded approach to sexuality. But in the past, the article would have been well substantiated, probing and – above all – predicated on an actual social phenomenon.

Everyone who reads Matilde Sköld’s certainly well-written text realises that these claims lack support. Nowhere is there evidence for the headline or the slightly gushing conclusion: ”Swinging has become the new people’s sport, the new study circle.”

Then it begins to dawn on me. Sköld’s article was published in DN’s book review section and takes as its starting point the British journalist Ashley Lister’s books about the swinging scene in Britain. The titles are mentioned but the books are neither examined nor reviewed in DN. Readers are instead supposed to be tempted by a juicy headline and sly wording. Above all, it’s not supposed to be taken seriously.

But what should they be tempted to do? Not, in fact, buy books about swingers and not embark on some exciting, erotic game. The aim instead seems to be to gradually accustom readers to another kind of journalism than Dagens Nyheter has represented up until now. Note that the article was only available on-line. By posting certain kinds of texts on-line, the paper can test their value based on how many people read them. Then they can be gradually phased in to, or kept out of, the print edition. According to information from Matilde Sköld, her text had 88,491 hits between 15 October and 18 November. Thus, content and format are part of an interplay that differs from previous journalism, now that it is web-based. Creating a symbiosis between on-line and print editions is seen as the obvious solution to publishing and economic challenges.

The problem for Dagens Nyheter is that quality, investigative reporting, foreign correspondents and broad cultural coverage are expensive and yield only long-term benefits that are difficult to quantify, in the form of a good reputation. DN’s tabloidisation has meant concessions in the form of shorter texts and larger pictures but on whole no major decline in quality. Yet it has not given the newspaper any journalistic boost. Circulation is falling slightly and, while the paper has returned to profitability in recent years, it is difficult to predict the trend over the long term.

Nor can anyone know whether the investment in on-line journalism, as is hoped, means attracting a new and younger generation of readers to the print edition. The risk is rather the opposite. Not only is this because people have to pay for a newspaper subscription whereas reading on-line is free. At least as important, probably more important, is that young people have become accustomed to another way of reading on-line that risks creating permanent, insurmountable resistance to traditional newspapers. The tabloid, which is supposed to simplify and encourage reading, despite its shorter texts, still places completely different demands on readers than does the Internet. So Nicholas Carr’s argument that the Internet undermines people’s ability concentrate and read long texts is very much applicable to newspaper journalism: from the broadsheet format, with its richness in variation and possibilities of both rapid and deep reading, to the tabloid, with its quick, concise texts that generally invite skim-reading, and finally to the Internet, where readers can jump around by grabbing at different words and phrases. And as a result, it’s no longer a question of reading in the original sense of the word but rather more like cruising from article to article, with readers assaulted with new information that grabs their attention. The act of reading now controls us instead of us controlling it. We are passive subjects while the Internet is the agent – the one that acts.

Nor is anything else possible. As Carr writes here in Axess: ”When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image.” Its content is surrounded with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. As a result, our actual thinking process is affected. Processing the information is determined by how it is distributed on-line ”in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”

In other words, reading on-line is completely different from reading a newspaper, which means that on-line journalism is completely different from newspaper journalism. This in turn has consequences for principles and working methods in journalism. Here are a few examples taken from conversations with colleagues:

”Assessing the news on-line is different than with a newspaper. The most recent news often ends up at the top of the newspaper’s website, but just for a short period. That makes readers think that whatever is highest up is also the most important thing that happened, regardless of whether it involves a new foreign minister or Beyoncé. It’s often difficult to distinguish between material written by the newspaper and texts taken from news bureaus or other papers.”

”Internet staff have started developing a life of their own at the paper and are no longer part of the general production. The print and Internet editions have different bosses and reporters with different offices. They do work together but hunting for news and writing commentary and analyses are usually done in different places. The trend is that on-line staff are becoming more powerful.”

”For the newspapers, bloggers are becoming an increasingly important target group. But by appealing to the blog world, that is, to many of their own readers, in order to increase the circulation of their articles, there is a risk of undermining independent journalism. It’s easy to imagine a sports journalist or editorial writer adapting in the hope of being read and noticed by the ‘right’ bloggers.”

In his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (2008), Nicholas Carr notes that one of the critical differences between print newspapers and on-line newspapers is the difference between the whole and the parts. Of course, a print newspaper consists of a quantity of texts and images on different pages, but they are gathered together in one place and in one product. It is edited under the conviction that readers, who clearly hold different interests, want to be part of a whole. That’s why they flip through the paper page by page, through the editorials, culture, sports, foreign news and so on in order to choose but also to develop a broader understanding. The whole is what matters and is greater than the sum of its parts.

An on-line newspaper, on the other hand, is by definition diffuse, splintered and lacking cohesion. People look for and read mostly what they’re interested in, ignoring all the other material – flipping through one is neither necessary nor possible. In many cases, it is not even certain that their reading is the result of navigating to the newspaper’s website. Search engines, feed readers (programs for reading summaries, or feeds, of the content on a website) and news aggregators (which retrieve and display summaries and headlines from sources on-line that are chosen by the user) are considered to be simpler and better because they automatically provide reading and information that are personally customised.

After all, it’s good to get what you want, right?

That’s naturally what advertisers, marketers and other economic players on the Internet think. They shape and guide the process with the aim of capturing the maximum number of readers, and that’s why on-line newspapers are so splintered and made up of parts. Every article is a special product on its own that can be assessed based on its specific commercial value. But a text that attracts many readers is not attractive on its own; it must also attract advertisements. Because some articles have a greater advertisement value than others, inducing more income-generating clicks, an on-line newspaper can be tempted to provide journalism that is adapted to a calculated income stream. Serious topics like politics, economics and so on thus have a harder time holding their own. They rarely have large reader interest, few advertisers want to be associated with them and they don’t get many clicks.

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Another aspect of on-line newspapers that is shaped based on reader demands, their ”profile,” is that they help shrink the public debate. This phenomenon can be seen just in the sentences exchanged in the blog world, where the dividing line between ”them” and ”us” is usually fiercely irreconcilable. More and more people are visiting sites where their social views are confirmed, not challenged or supplemented with alternative perspectives. This phenomenon is in direct opposition to the journalism principle of letting more than one opinion be heard. As a result of their format, on-line newspapers – no matter how good, well-informed and balanced they are – foster content and reading habits that divide, not unite, people.

In The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr exemplifies this with research by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Thomas Schelling, who shows that people, despite the best intentions and conditions to bring about a housing environment marked by diversity, tend very easily to seek out others who are like-minded (in this case, people with the same skin colour).

The Internet, with its infinite possibilities for communicating, should, as Carr writes, promote broadmindedness, openness and reduced political and social tensions. But in actuality, the same kind of polarisation occurs there as in Schelling’s experiment. The difference is just that things go much faster in the virtual world than in the real one. With a few clicks, we create an identity, friends and networks for ourselves, thus engendering an even more splintered society divided into niches.

As print newspapers are read less and less, as print journalism but also its treatment of language and style are reshaped in the particle-governed image of the Net – as is our own ability then to read, concentrate and explore in depth – more than a sense of the whole is lost. The conviction that we as citizens – not despite but because of our differences – need places where we can all meet is also weakened.

This is a challenge that John Lloyd hopes can be met with the creation of more, especially Internet-based, niches for serious journalism. But a change in that direction will also have the likely consequence that journalism which appeals to broad groups of readers will necessarily become trivial and dumbed down. I see no solution for how this challenge to democracy can be met.