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The economic challenges of publishing in the digital age are well understood — and, the Lord knows, depressing — so let’s not belabor them. The technical challenges are absorbing to the professionals, but their solutions are tediously complex to outsiders. Pass over them. For me, the biggest challenge of publishing and doing good journalism in the digital age is a personal one. If, as I wrote on the occasion of announcing Technology Review’s new electronic strategy, “Digital first is a mode of being that promotes innovation and excellence,” the trick is how to think usefully in that mode.

If publishers needed only to shrug off the habits of the last 150 years (as if they were an outmoded suit of clothes), it would be easy enough. But there are many traditional things that publishing will want in the new century, which, while so far rare on the Web, must somehow be translated into their new medium. (To give just two examples: the long history of graphic design and typography, and the narrative techniques of long-form journalism.) So, to be usefully digital in this transitional period, it is necessary to be amphibian: at once fully alive to the new medium and heartlessly ready to dispense with what no longer works, and at the same time, sensitive to the history of one’s craft and reverentially eager to use what can be saved. It’s not an easy trick.