Take a look at The New York Times' site for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/
It's clustered, it's confusing--I'm not even sure what the headline is. Contrast that with an actual copy of The New York Times newspaper, which is clear, economical, and structured perfectly so as to direct the reader's attention to the biggest stories. Currently, the layout of the newspaper so obviously outranks the layout of the newspaper website that I wonder if it's not that newspapers are being abandoned for news sites, but rather that the news is being abandoned in general.
At any rate, newspapers have not made an easy transition into the digital era. A large part of this has to do with revenue, I think. When the Internet rose up seemingly out of nowhere last decade, there emerged an almost miraculous lack of the capitalism that usually marks any sort of competing market. Or rather, perhaps, the Internet represents an ultimate, bizarro form of capitalism, in which there are so many competitors and the cost of production is so little, that in order to stay in business, a person cannot charge for access to their goods. In other words, the expectation that has been laid out for us from the Internet is that all digital content is free. Physical things still merit charges, but the intangible does not. This is why people will pay for a newspaper subscription, but become irritated or even outraged when a newspaper website wants them to pay for online access. (On a sidenote, I think this is one of the reasons music and movie piracy is so prevalent. Sure, people will pay for a CD, that's actually a thing. But an mp3? C'mon, that's just data. Data is free.)
This problem is one that faces not just newspapers, but all websites. The majority of people simply won't pay for access to a website. And while traditionally, newspapers have been able to depend on both advertisements within their papers and readers as sources of revenue, newspapers now have to adjust to a world in which virtually all of their revenue must come from advertisements. (Granted, this isn't too big a deal. 70-80% of newspaper revenue comes from ads, not subscriptions.)
But this is diverging from the original point I wanted to make and heading into territory where I'm essentially just conjecturing wildly about a field I know little to nothing about. So to veer back to where I began, newspaper websites' layouts are vastly more confusing and unnavigable than their printed equivalents'.
I thought about why printed newspapers so greatly exceeded online news for awhile and I eventually concluded that the reason lies in the infiniteness of the internet. The internet knows no spatial boundaries. Unlike a book or a magazine, a website is seemingly endless. One page leads to another, which leads to another, and then to another, in an endless spiral of web-searching. A newspaper, on the other hand, is self-contained. It has a beginning, it has an end, and a middle contained between the two, all of which I can hold in one hand. If I want to read the news from a newspaper, I need simply start on the top page at the upper-left hand corner and continue down, from page to page, and eventually, I will have imbibed that day's news.
With a news website, such an undertaking would be impossible. The main page contains an endless number of links to other pages, which in turn threaten to overwhelm the user with endless more links, each of which leads to more links, etc etc. The limitlessness of the internet is certainly one of its greatest assets, but in the case of news sites, the lack of bounds creates the feeling that one has never quite finished reading the news. It is currently a deeply unsatisfying experience to read the news online.
I imagine that in the future though, there will be a shift within the layout of news sites back toward the design of newspapers. The future news site will integrate the digital with the print not by boasting the limitlessness of the information on the website, as the news sites currently do, but rather by hiding it. The news site will come to resemble its progenitor, the newspaper. It will be self-contained and be able to be read from top to bottom, cover to cover. The ability to leap from one article to any dozen related articles will still be available, but it will be more concealed, instead of jumping out at the user. The future news site, in essence, will create the virtual experience of reading a newspaper.
