What does spatial and temporal even mean?
Paper is something that you touch and feel. It takes up space. It’s something you carry with you. That’s a spatial medium. Paper is wonderful and has served for hundreds of years. But it has limitations. It takes a lot of effort to prepare to print on paper. So you usually only can print one run of the news a day. It’s also expensive to distribute and cannot be changed or corrected once it’s printed. The web is not a physical medium at all. Like television, it exists over time — like a stream of thought. This is what we mean by temporal medium. For printed newspapers, journalism is a cycle of gathering, writing, typesetting and printing that repeats every day. For online newspapers, journalism is a stream of gathering, writing and publishing that rolls constantly on without deadlines or press runs.
