Updated Journal writes its future

It will be time well spent, even if you can't tell a futures contract from a hedge fund and keep your savings under the mattress. At 118 years of age and with more than 2 million demanding readers to consider, the Journal, with its designers and editors, has done a lot more than spiff up with color and graphics and all the usual bells and whistles that people will call "updated" for the next five minutes.

What Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz, Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger and their colleagues have done is give us a good first look at what a rational division of labor will look like as newspapers move toward a future in which they simultaneously connect with their readers online and in print. (Full disclosure: Steiger and I were friendly colleagues when we worked together here at The Times some years ago.)

New media triumphalists and old media traditionalists have for too long insisted that newspaper journalism's future has to belong almost entirely to one or the other. What the redesigned Journal strongly suggests is that newspapers will be of greatest service to their readers by taking a simultaneous and complementary stance in both venues. That means delivering on a daily basis an online newspaper that is mostly -- but not entirely -- given over to breaking news and up-to-date factual content freshened on a continuing basis, and a print newspaper that is essentially -- but not totally -- devoted to analysis, context and an exploration of the important back story.

This balanced, and rather convincing, notion of how to proceed through this era of wrenching journalistic transition is like a breath of adult sobriety in an ongoing discussion of the journalistic future that usually seems to demand that we all choose between amnesia and panic.

There was a bit of a demonstration over the last week on how this two-track future may work itself out. The story of Saddam Hussein's execution was, to a large extent, a perfect new media event. Some of the most gripping images were surreptitiously recorded with camera phones. (One man's citizen journalist is another's spy, it seems.) In any event, those images ricocheted across the Web and onto cable television news in the middle of the night, North American time, hours after the next morning's print newspapers had gone to bed. By the next day, those grim photos and video were everywhere, somber testament to the fact that a condemned man, even an unquestionably evil one, always looks better than his executioners.