Will Google's Fast Flip change your news reading habits?

The experience of reading news online is something that tends to split the generations. For those people who’ve grown up alongside the net and and the home computing phenomenon, reading the headlines on news sites is a perfectly natural thing to do. It’s quick, it’s got the added advantages of multi-media, and you can skip right around the globe in a matter of seconds, checking out Kanye West making a plonker of himself at the MTV awards and then coming back to our own Gordon Brown. (See what I did there?) There are even mutterings now of US journalism students who’ve taken their entire course without once picking up a hard copy paper.

For the older among us, the web’s news coverage can be found lacking compared with flipping through a copy of the Daily Telegraph. A newspaper allows you to turn pages at your own speed, read what you wish, discard those stories that don’t attract your attention – and do all of this while slumped over the breakfast table  consuming poached eggs and coffee and listening to Planet Rock…or perhaps that’s just me. A paper presents you with the news – albeit an editor’s choice of it; a website can only present you with a limited amount of current affairs, the rest you must seek out by clicking links and searching through navigation bars.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I enjoy online news and find the immediacy and range of coverage a big step forward. If there’s a significant event in the world, the web is the first place I go to find out about it. And today, newspapers can take an awfully long time to get around to covering a story – particularly an international one – that was on the web the previous evening.

But now word reaches us that web giant and all-round do-gooder Google is trying to address the problem. Today, it’s launched a new way of reading the news online called Fast Flip – a different type of interface designed to mimic more of the experience of flicking through piles and magazines and newspapers Fast Flip also promises more revenue for newspaper publishers by running advertising against their content, something the hard-pressed publishers have been crying out for.

If you’d like to take a look at Google Fast Flip, take  a look here. Personally, having gotten used to the new experience of online news consumption, I’m not sure I want to take a retrograde step. And if you want to read the news over your bacon and eggs, try buying  a cheap netbook and using that.

Written by Adrian Beeby