I hadn't thought about this before, but Peter Robins points out in his Daily Telegraph blog that "the form of writing most likely to die with the printed newspaper is the single-paragraph news story [because] no one is forced into that sort of concision on the web".
So, come the end of ink-on-paper, it will be farewell to news in briefs, those columns of nibs which Robins argues - quite rightly - "frequently contain the most interesting reading in the paper." To illustrate his point about the loss of an art form, he mentions a Telegraph nib headlined "The pig that flew". It's one of those little tales that would be unlikely to make it on to a news web page.
Then Robins has a second thought. Maybe Twitter, with its 140-character limit, is the new form of nib. It is, but I can't imagine urgent twitterings being widely read.
However, I do think the nib could survive in an online world. HoldtheFrontPage, the regional journalism website, regularly carries short items that resemble nibs. And, in a sense, aggregation is a new form of nib-writing, is it not? Often such items lead us on a surfing journey in which we discover all sorts of odd facts - including hundreds of flying pig stories.
