News is not news anymore—at least not in an unqualified way. Like so many other things, it now depends on which team you follow. On the day of the wedding in Westminster Abbey of Prince William and Kate Middleton, who were subsequently to be known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the hometown Guardian provided a toggle on its Home Page marked “Royalists Click Here.” Clicking would take you to the sort of extensive wedding coverage that all the other British papers featured, but it would also bring up a “Republicans [N.B.: that’s republicans with a lower-case r] Click Here” button that would take you to an alternative home page without anything on it to do with the Royal Wedding. It seemed to me to be an amusing bit of self-satire by the unashamedly left-wing paper, a public recognition that its readership was likely to be divided (as that of most other British papers would not have been to anything like the same extent) between those who fancied themselves offended by the royal hoopla and those who would have been equally offended by its absence.

But it was also an indication of the new attitude to news emerging from the roiling seas of the new media—an attitude of which the traditional media are more and more likely to have to take account. As the Slate columnist Jack Shafer wrote in congratulating The Guardian on its “brilliant” move, “maybe the NYTimesshould add a ‘Republicans [upper case]