As News Ltd boasts unironically of its “new era of profitability” for its clunky websites, The Guardian has just upped the pace, with the launch of its new “zeitgeist” (OK, they’re dorks) interface — a simple re-arrangement of the news site into a grid. Crude and basic at the moment, it nevertheless marks the moment at which a newspaper website goes decisively beyond the pseudo-paper form of most websites as they exist.

It’s only an option at the moment, but eventually something like zeitgeist will replace the newspaper website form altogether — with the old “classic” view retained as an option for a couple of years before being switched off altogether.

Indeed it’s amazing it hasn’t happened earlier. Fifteen years ago, when newspapers launched their websites, they aspired to do no more than replicate the broadsheet layout onscreen. But broadsheet layout is suited to, well, broadsheets — the crazy paving style of newspaper layout made possible by offset printing creating a maximum exposure of as many stories as possible in a single sweep of the eye. It was always ungainly for screens, and with the rise of the iPhone as a reading device obliged news sites to resort to a simple list form.

Zeitgeist is clearly designed to maximise the opportunity to “scope” stories with a single glance — especially with the rise of “touch and tap” screens.

Presumably the zeitgeist form will develope rapidly — in five years the grid will look as crude as the pre-Google search engines look now. The next stage is presumably a sort of pseudo 3-D form in which dozens of stories hang suspended in a space one glides through by various types of touch.

For poor old Rupe and his struggle with the e-nerds, it’s all a terrible nightmare. He wants to live to a 100, but he wants to keep publishing newspapers like wot they used to be done. Yet his hold on the global market is being hurt by the sclerotic progress of his online development. Whether a paywall is put up or not, News titles look terrible on the web and the old cash cows — his UK and US tabloids — have derisory readerships online. In the past decade, The Guardian has leapt from having the second lowest circulation of all UK dailies, to being the de facto UK news website. The only fly in the ointment is that they’re losing £60 million a year doing it, a figure beyond even the broad resources of the Scott Trust, which has always underwritten the losses of the paper Grauniad.

Zeitgeist in its current form is no oil painting either — more a Warhol screenprint — but eventually you’ll click onto it, and never click back to the old version. It is clear that not only is media change accelerating, but, now, the acceleration is accelerating. True. I read it in zeitgeist, bottom left in orange.