Nieman Lab’s predictions for 2015 carried a contribution by Alfred Hermida arguing that bundling was back. “The bundle is dead; long live the bundle,” it opened. “But this isn’t the familiar 20th-century package of paper and ink. It’s a bundle that lives as code, often assembled by other bits of code, and almost invariably run by people who write code, not words.”
The bundle it described was originally the paper on the doorstep: the important and the worthy alongside the amusing and the entertaining, mixed in with display ads and classifieds, and a product of the technology, audience and business of a particular moment. The internet took it apart. Readers could pick the stories that interested them and ignore the rest, and digital also cut news off from the classified, property and motoring advertising that had paid for it.
The argument was that the bundle had been more than a business model. It brought order to countless things happening every day, with readers relying on professionals to pick a handful of events and set them in the fixed format of the printed page. By packaging the world, the newspaper and later the newscast imposed a shape on the noise of the everyday. It was coming back, the piece argued, because the promise of an infinite internet had collided with finite time and attention.