Scott Karp has an interesting suggestion for newspapers online. Put news first.

[L]et’s look at the New York Times. It’s homepage is arranged, like most traditional media brand sites, by what is most important.

Here’s the problem — if you visit the New York Times throughout the day, and no important news has broken, the homepage remains largely unchanged, static, like a print newspaper.

Organizing news by importance as the default makes sense when you’re only delivering the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news publishing is continuous, it’s not the best way to server frequent news consumers.

The problem remains – as it does for blogs – drawing attention to your archive material. Do you just have to leave it to search engines…