Hi David,
That is an interesting article. My favorite part, predictably, is when he says there's already a model for the new style of newspaper he envisions: "In fact, there’s a rough model for this emerging already: it’s called About.com, a desperately unglamorous site that features hundreds of freelancers who can tailor their part of the site to the needs and desires of their users."
Just a few years ago, I was the producer of About's B2B sites. And even back then we knew we were on to something. And yep, even back then we knew we were "desperately unglamorous."
Hirschorn's "what if" about "microchunking" is passing out of the what-if realm into some measure of reality. We're in the first phases of a proliferation of "consumer verticals" (not nearly as snappy a microchunking, I grant you). These ventures look through "section" in newspaper parlance, or even a theme treated periodically (the weekly gardening column), and see the community of interest (the consumers) who live beyond it, and servce of tighter, deeper, on-demand resources around it.
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