We're big fans of reading. We have acres of books in our house, RSS subscriptions and too many magazine subscriptions. We get the Plain Dealer on Sundays (for the comics and ads only), and the Sun News on Thursdays (for the local police blotter) and the Wall Street Journal Monday through Saturday (for the national and international news as well as the opinion pages).
Most of the articles I read from the WSJ come through my RSS feeds and a cool tool for the BlackBerry called the Mobile Reader.
I think what they've done with their RSS feeds is very usable. Their headline and an introduction paragraph show up (free) in my Google Reader along with all my other "news" and if I want to read more, I click over to the article on wsj.com (paid) to read the entire thing. Since we're paper subscribers, the online version is slightly less expensive than an electronic subscription by itself. (And eliminating both would be gain even more savings, but I digress.)
I'll frequently read the online version at the office over lunch and come home and talk about it with my wife or the kids who have read the paper version at home. Or some days, when things are too hectic, I'll just read all my news on the BlackBerry's Mobile Reader. Today was one of those days.
I had gotten up and left the house before the paper had arrived and then wasn't in touch with a WiFi connection throughout the day. By the time I left Nashville, I had read all the Opinion pages and much of the x1 pages (where "x" is Section A, B, C, etc.) on my BlackBerry.
So it was quite disconcerting to see the fellow two rows in front of me paging through his paper to see article headlines I'd started reading at 5:30 am on my handheld device. At first it was a "where did I see those words in that order before" moment and then it became a "why are those words on his newspaper" thought and then it finished as a "I wonder if there are any differences in the text from his to mine" pondering (there sometimes are as misspellings and typos get corrected).
So, no, it wasn't a case of dual realities. To find those you'd have to compare an article from the Plain Dealer and with the same story from the Wall Street Journal. It doesn't happen often but we're sometimes left shaking our heads and wondering if we're on the same planet. It's (almost) always explainable by the bias that each paper has, but it can be very disconcerting.
