What’s a ‘newspaper’ when random Twitter feeds build the contents?

(This item was originally misleadingly headlined, “What’s a ‘newspaper,’ division?”
The Newspaper Division name-change discussion is elsewhere. )

So does “a newspaper” now mean any page of glowing bits that has frequently changed information organized into sections, with headlines and short summaries linked to more detail?

That appears to be the definition over at Paper.li, whose motto is “read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper.”

So today I “founded” two newspapers. All I had to do was login using my Twitter I.D. (“bobstep”) and type the feed names into a box.

 

Well, maybe I just “found,” not “founded,” the first one. I went through the Paper.li form to create it, but it may have been there already.

In both cases, the page is built of headlines and summaries from the Twitter feeds subscribed to by the owner of a feed — “AEJMC” for the first one, and “BobStep” for the second.

This may be important: Note that the contents of our “newspapers” aren’t items that the group or person named on top wrote — or even read; they are just the latest Twitterings from sources we thought might have something interesting to say once in a while. Perhaps we haven’t been watching closely enough to see that they really don’t. Nothing like running their stuff under your name to make you sit up and take notice.

Selections from the owners’ own posts are in a sidebar off to the right of those screen images, where the feed owner is called “curator” of the page.

Anyhow, if those are “newspapers” then the name "Newspaper Division" is broader than some of us thought!

Meanwhile, I can’t help wondering what The New York Times thinks about having a page at paper.li headed “The New York Times Daily” with “as shared by nytimes + 199 followed people on Twitter” in smaller type beneath.

More on this over on my personal blog.