Slashdot Mirror
Newspapers Are Dying, Blog At 11
The New Yorker is running a long and thoughtful piece by Eric Alterman on the death and life of the American newspaper. It's not news that newspapers are dying, but the acceleration of the process in the last few years is startling: "Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years... The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies' solution to their problem was to make 'our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.'" The article goes on to profile The Huffington Post as exemplar of what is replacing paper and ink. "The Huffington Post's editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the 'mullet strategy.' ('Business up front, party in the back' is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) 'User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,' Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to 'argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp.
Good riddance to a slow, biased, anachronistic medium run by unethical America-hating propagandists. We'll find out how America is to blame for everything a lot faster from Slashdot and CNN.com from now on.
Thanks to craigslist, blogs, and YouTube for putting the news back in the hands of ordinary people. It may still be biased, but it's now biased every different way instead of just one.
Newspapers seem intent on feeding people bullshit created by the government and other parties. They would rather tell people what Britney or Paris is doing lately than what is really going on in the world.
They bury news that is unfavourable to the current government/advertisers/backers and rarely tell the whole truth any more.
Uhm.. you do realize that the U.S. is in practically every country in the world, throwing its weight around, killing off brown people at a horrendous rate, destabilizing governments and economies, and threatening nuclear war with its biggest peers?
I'd say that maybe America is to blame for a lot more than it'd like to admit.
...Steve
The papers in my area in California are at least 50% ads. In fact, on Tuesdays, they include this ad flyer in addition to the paper. On that day, the paper is about 70% ads then.
So, to make up for their lack of "real" content, the companies are sticking ads in there. Sad really.........I remember in the 80s that the newspaper had extremely few ads.......
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
The major papers are wimps. They don't have the balls to bring up the real issues that matter. Then again, they really can't. For their very survival they need the expensive, full-page ads bought by the large, multinational corporations that are often partaking in the activities that need to be examined out in the open.
Then again, they need readers to look at those ads. But anyone with a tenth of a brain knows that what they read in the newspapers is crap, so they don't bother.
Looks like the papers are fucked no matter what they do.
The problem is, most of the Newspapers just no longer try to report news, so much as sell it, and they have all merged (thanks to Murdoch, I suspect) into one single venue, just written towards different levels.
Right now the only papers I read in the morning are the Financial Times (which does not count as an American Paper for reports like this, right?) And once a week I get the Sunday Times from a newspaper importer. While I feel the Times has fallen harder then all the others, it still has my crossword, and gives me the Murdoch point of view for the world.
I mainly get my news from reading the BBC website daily, and 20 minutes on Slashdot.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
no media ever dies
television was supposed to kill both radio and the movies. well, we don't see movie news reels anymore, and we don't see radio serials either, but you can't watch tv while driving to work, and no one wants to see indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull in your parent's basement by yourself on a 19 inch monitor
what new media does do is dramatically alter the audience and purpose of old media. so newspapers will come to see the point where their income from online content will eclipse their income from print content. so then what is the purpose of newspapers without the actual newspaper?
one answer: trust
like the story summary suggests, user generated content sucks. in terms of quality and in terms of partisanship. so newspaper sites will still be the place people go for breaking news and truthful reporting. you can't beat a salaried professional news gathering organzation in terms of trust. nothing the internet can spew forth threatens that
the internet has merely created lots of partisan fiefdoms with an agenda and user venting. much of it rambling, illiterate, unhinged, and mostly useless. usless to readers, not those who vent: that's the psychological value of catharsis. that is, user generated content is usually more useful for whomever is commenting than anyone who reads the comment. this form of online content obviously isn't a threat to anything newspaper's do, merely a weird ecological tweak to how they fit into the media universe. the internet makes newspapers part of a loud room of noisy feedback, rather than the lonely ivory towers they used to be
and so the newspaper will morph into a less prestigious role in society, but it will never die, and will still be vital in a modified way
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As wonderful as it is that the power is returning to the people, that you no longer have to be a media titan to get the news out, I wonder if it really is going to help us any.
Big Media - hardly anyone pays attention because so much is filtered to only provide what isn't really important or that will help keep us fat dumb and happy.
Internet Media - hardly anyone pays attention because so much is produced by people who are fat dumb and happy and it becomes virtually impossible to sort out the crap.
The internet has given everyone a voice, unfortunately we have no real way to stop the most vocal idiots from using it or to sort out their crap. Before ANYONE even attempts to debunk this as stupid things are easy to squash...let me remind you of such popular ideas as Creationism, the 6000yr old earth, and the frighteningly stupid idea that the sun moves around the earth. All of those have reasonably large followings and continue to spread.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
We have a new name for 'long tail'. Good riddance!
-1 not first post
The percentage of the total content of a newspaper that is ads has long been a measure of the vitality of a region's economy. During a strong economy, there are fewer newspaper ads. This is because people have more wealth to spend on goods, including newspapers themselves. The newspapers can charge more for each paper sold, thus reducing their dependence on funding from advertisers. Likewise, advertisers do not need to advertise as much, as people are often more willing to make purchases when the economy is strong, thus leading to suitable levels of sales without much advertising.
On the other hand, when the economy is poor, people aren't as willing to consume. So companies need to advertise more to incite people to buy more. People aren't willing to pay as much for newspapers, so the newspapers must look to advertisers as an extra revenue stream.
Look at American newspapers from the 1950s, when the economy was very strong. There are extremely few ads. Then skip ahead to the mid-1970s, and today. In terms of the page area used for advertising, it's typically around 70% to 80%. It's often higher for magazines, where it has become difficult to distinguish articles from ads.
It sounds just like slashdot...
only with professional editing.
Having professional editors is great, but there has to be talent to create the content that the bloggers inevitably rip to shreds. The Guardian Unlimited has had bloggers eviscerating their talent for well over a year now http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/ and it's been interesting to see how the writers react to the bloggers comments, this type of journalism will require thicker skin than the walls of the editor's office or down at the bar where such criticism might previously have been leveled. I can just see the former path of the newspaper delivery boy in the worst part of town becoming a page one writer changing to the poor just out of journalism school guy being told to moderate the blogs until something better opens up. 5 moderation points is quite enough pain at one time for me :)
I honestly wasn't aware that there were any newspapers in America.
I thought that they were all tabloids.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
"The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars."
If you ever have seen the documentary Spin or just really paid attention you know the mainstream media including the newspaper is as far away as you can get from "objective." It annoys me that they and the nightly news toot their own horn with that BS every chance they get -- and unfortunately they are fooling a few others.
If they want to pretend that they don't shape the news, fine, but I think that's a big reason why people are leaving in droves to get better news online.
Has netcraft confirmed this?
The ugly truth about the "newspapers are dying" meme is that blogs mostly get their material from newspapers. Then repeat is enauseum.
Of course nobody is reading newspapers any more. There's so little news in them.
In the SF area papers, the "Food and Wine" section is thicker than the "News" section, and the "Cars" section is thicker than both together. What's the point? Especially since, if that's what you want, there are better sources for information about food, wine, cars, sports, and classified advertising.
The whole point of newspapers is that they send people out to dig up stories, and you pay to read the results. That's fine. As advertising-delivery vehicles, they're obsolete.
Well, when people graduate from journalism school, and the reason that they became journalists is to "change the world", then that's a pretty different idea from just reporting the news as it happens, yah? When the idea is to use your position to change the world, your readers will figure out your biases sooner or later. And I'm not even getting into the monoculture of ideas and poverty of thought so prevalent in the modern newsroom. Have a try at this newsroom game and see if you make the right decisions. If you fail at the game, then you'll understand why newspapers are failing today.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Newspapers provide an illusion of trust, but too much of the time that's all it is. An illusion. The people working for the newspapers aren't all that different from the people writing blogs.
There aren't as many total lunatics in newsrooms, maybe, but reporters and editors all have their agendas no matter how much they want to hide it, and the veneer of objectivity washes away as soon as you see a story in the paper where you actually know some of the facts, where you know enough to tell if they're objective or accurate.
The biggest difference between the Internet and the papers is that here you get to see all the political sausage-making out in the open... not hidden in the editor's office and the story room.
Every Sunday I get both the New York Times and LA Times delivered. I like to sit and drink coffee and read a newspaper on Sunday morning. Now, I could do that on my laptop, or desktop, or a Kindle, but here's the important quality of dead-tree based newspapers: Once I'm done reading them, their combined size is perfect to line the bottom of my rabbit's cage, and for the next week, he gets to crap on All the News That's Fit to Print.
Until my bunny can defecate on the internets, I'll keep on subscribing to old fashioned newspapers.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
First, let me say that I realize there is much media bias.
However, it seems to me that people in the U.S. are increasingly divided. We want our viewpoints affirmed - not challenged. When was the last time you heard someone say or write "That makes sense. Maybe I'm wrong."
When I worked as a reporter, I always judged my job on controversial issues by the number of complaints I got from both sides. If they were nearly evenly divided, I knew I did well. Those I offended used almost exactly the same wording except for changing x for y in their complaints.
Maybe people are giving up newspaper for blogs because they want to hear the digested version of a story. Skip the thinking and just go to the umbrage.
...not sure what other hair style could represent "party all over." The reduction in the quality of the major newspapers in India over the last decade is startling. I don't know whose fault it is though - maybe sports, fashion, lifestyle nonsense and celebrity gossip is all people actually _want_ to read in a newspaper. The Times of India, which used to be pretty good, is truly shameful.
The consolidation of Big Media over the last few decades put newspapers on this path. Americans bitch and moan about how the media is either too liberal or too conservative, but that misses the point. Americans may have allowed our government to loosen ownership rules, but we're mistrustful of a handful of companies controlling access to all news and opinions. When the mass-market Internet arrived, people realized they could find news and opinions that weren't being provided by the news oligarchs.
People want to hear independent voices, even though those voices are often screwed-up, looney, and unprofessional. We've all grown used to sifting the wheat from the chaff online.mThe really good newspapers that are providing high-quality reporting and are well-managed will still survive. The rest of them won't, but new forms of news will continue to germinate on the Internet.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The Newspaper has a cute little 1995 style website, but it is less comprehensive than the paper.
That said, I rarely care what is going on around here, and therefore buy the paper nearly never. Although I do scan the headlines at the convenience store.
The web allows me to read the NYTimes, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, The BBC and a thousand blogs a week. I love new media, but Ii still respect the old guild.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
1. be responsible
:-(
2. shed light on public interests
3. be independent
4. strive for truth and accuracy
5. be impartial
6. engage in fair play and respect
- as it is today, the media, print and broadcast, have not followed these principles... with the EXCEPTION, IMHO, of one print outlet:
The Christian Science Monitor
- what we are seeing is a loss of trust and respect on the part of readers and viewers...
- and i also agree with other posters lamenting the lack of good, solid local reporting...
What will I line the parakeet cage with?
misperception #1:
;-P
once upon a time, all media was unbiased and neutral. then fox news came along and made it into propaganda. really? go into wikipedia and type "yellow journalism". read up on the uss maine and why the usa went to war with spain in 1898. you think the manipulating of facts to start a war is a new invention? please! story as old as time. every regime that has ever existed has engaged in this. go further back in history, all the way to the printing press, and earlier: there never has been, and never will be, such a thing as fair and balanced media (pun intended). ever. in any country. in any era. that ever was or ever will be
why?
that gets us to misperception #2:
that a neutral unbiased media is even possible. it is impossible. the media is made by human beings. all human beings are biased in one way or another. everyone has an agenda. those who claim they are not biased, or actually fervently believe they are not biased, are in fact probably the most biased of all: blind to one's own nature
so what does one do in a world with bias everywhere? answer: they develop a good bullshit detector
and making peace with this fact of biased media is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. do you honestly believe it is a better world where everyone just took something written by a media mouthpiece as solid gold truth, and never questioned it? isn't it better to have a well-read populace who disbelieves and doubts everything? and how do you train such a populace? you throw bias at them from every monitor and printed word, and you train their mind like a muscle to develop an extremely strong and sophisticated bullshit detector
those who argue for censorship do so in the name of preventing the spreading of lies, from the right or the left. but when they do this, they actually show little faith in the general populace. they don't save the populace from themselves this way, they merely breed zombies and sheep. in the name of preventing lies, they create the environment for more lies. this is the true value of free speech: a darwinian competition of ideas. to let out all of it, all the bullshit, let it all be spoken. even the biggest lies and the most vile words. in this way, the general populace can decide for themselves, and you get a general populace that values critical thought. you never get critical thought in a society where unbiased media existed. in fact there is societies today where "unbiased" media exists: iran, china, russia, etc.: the places where freedoms are the least. and the people there, unfortunately, have very weakly developed bullshit detectors, and are therefore prone to the kind of pies manipulation and propaganda that makes your concerns over fox news look quaint. just look at china's one sided coverage of tibet: all they show is ethnic colonial han getting attacked. as if that is all that is going on and the tibetans aren't being attacked! propaganda. half-truth. beijing understands the idea very well
a world of biased media everywhere is actually SUPERIOR: it trains the minds of the general public to have a healthy bullshit meter. so while some people lament things like fox news, i, as a liberal in the deepest sense of the word liberal, am thankful for fox news. because fox news serves as a cautionary tale, an innoculation device. it weans people off propaganda, by being propaganda. fox news is a training device fro stronger minds to overcome. and for all those who believe fox news 100% and look no further for the "truth": do you honestly believe that in a world of "unbiased" media they would be flower children? no. a right winger is not made. it's like being gay. their minds are just made that way
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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I read 4 newspapers on a regular basis because my university has this program where students get free papers. I suppose it is to try to get them in the habit of reading them but none of my students seems to be doing so. I get the school paper, the NY Times, USA Today, and the local newspaper. First off, large percentages of their contend are the same. Same wire stories. Same sports scores, same stock prices. That same content that is already online and available for free.
Then there is all the crap that I personally don't care about. Sports, horoscopes, Dear Abby, comic strips whose creators died decades ago, and other stuff.
So what does that leave? local news, editorials, letters to the editor, original reporting.
It takes me about 20 minutes to go through all of those papers. If they weren't free there is no way I would ever subscribe to a newspaper. It simply isn't worth it.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
My father was laid off on Thursday from an 18000 regional circulation daily newspaper published in a town of 30,000 residents. Mid six figure losses and a need to tighten the financial belt were the true reasons for the action, but in a shameless attempt to prevent my father from drawing unemployment, the official reason is lack of necessary skills to operate the newspaper press. Indeed, the entire industry is circling the drain. Some even seem to be running down it as quickly as possible.
Heh, captcha: paperer
what greatly annoys me in belgian newspapers, is that even in what's considered our best newspaper (not most popular, but with best content, ... and very little sports ), i can hardly get through a single copy without finding math mistakes, or scientific things being reported... ... and then the article saying it's B out of A. a nice article mentioning the poisonous fumes from asbestos (you mean tiny dust particles that are dangerous?), simple math mistakes like "nearly 2 out of 3", and another newspaper then mentioning it's 69%, and worst of all, most of the times they use meaningless numbers (usually numbers relative to something unknown, or numbers without the slightest background of what's normal, or as frequently laughed with here on slashdot, numbers in the most imaginative units...)
i've seen things pass like the title saying A out of B is
how is it in other countries? are there any newspapers that are capable of presenting numbers and scientific facts in good, comprehensive, meaningful ways? or will the people of the word always be very weak at math/science, and are they too stuck up to hire someone who is good at it to verify their work to remove most of those mistakes?
and same goes for informatics ofcourse (like the site of our best newspaper announcing that "Windows launches Vista", after half an hour they fixed it to "Microsoft launches Vista"... still, how hard can it be to actually make sure you have the slightest clue what you're talking about...
unbiased neutral media is NEVER possible. it's a theoretical ideal, not an actual real world achievable. all you can do is approximate the truth, come as close as humanly possible
and so what you call an illusion of trust i would relabel as an honest attempt at trust. while meanwhile, a lot fo the free-for-all stuff you find on the internet doesn't even try to be impartial. that's a HUGE difference
you unfairly place newspapers in the same category as outright propagandizers. a newspaper TRIES to be impartial. a propagandizer purposely tries NOT to be truthful. there's a really a big difference right there. people should appreciate that difference. because, in fact, propagandizers win when no one sees a difference between a propagandizer and a genuine news oultet. so in the name of fighting propaganda, you should try to recognize the difference
don't groups newspapers with propaganda outlets simply because it is impossible to be 100% neutral. all media exists on a gradient of bias, from 90% unbiased to 10% unbiased. simply because 100% unbiased can never exist in a world of fallible humans, that is no valid reason for you to group the 90% unbiased news source in with the 10% unbiased news source
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Of course media is dying. Why? Because it sucks.
Newspapers and their websites are full of advertisement.
The news are often bad, and not-neutral or objective. Small things are often blown out of proportion while important things are left ignored.
On some of their sites like NY Times you must pay/login to read, and stupid stuff like that.
They often write about celebrities and crap like that instead of world news.
vinyl still has a following, because there will be always be audiophiles who like analog media over digital media (wax cylinder is a form of analog recording like vinyl)
;-)
8-track is a form of magnetic media. and there will always be environments where recording magnetic media will make sense because of economic or space considerations
and clay tablets are just a form of writing directly to permanent hard substances. a "clay" (or rather stone) tablet will lie above you when you rest eternally 6 feet down. so that form of media is not going away either, literally
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder how many kids on the site know that this is a reference to the old practice of the TV news saying stuff like,
"A riot explodes downtown. Film at 11."
They'd say this during their news teasers because it would take a few hours for the 16mm film they shot of the riot to be developed and transferred to video so that it could be shown on the 11 o'clock news. Yes, we're talking film.
And that's one to grow on!
I stopped reading newspapers because their extreme editorializing in news stories got out of hand. They can't even pretend to be objective. This is not a left-wing or right-wing specific problem. It is across the board.
Example, yesterday I saw headlines saying the recent attack by Iraqi forces against an extremist's militia was having problems and would probably fail. That's not telling the news. That's stating an opinion. As far as I can tell, this view was based on the Iraqi request for air support in a particularly tough spot.
Today the extremist told his followers to lay down their arms. Yeah, doomed to failure.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Let's be clear here. To the New York Times and every Internet blogger who fancies themselves the Times-killer, all American newspapers are publicly-traded, big city dailies.
Unfortunately for the Internet, this isn't even close to being true. I've personally helped start several small-town weeklies/dailies in my area (I do Websites as well, so no bias here), and although one startup over the past 5 years has folded, we've got a net gain in my county of two community newspapers over what we had in 2002. Plus one very high-end magazine aimed at folks with $100K+ annual incomes. And this is not unusual across the U.S., where small community publications are still going strong.
The real story is that the Internet, over the past decade, has failed completely as a local news/information delivery system to the average consumer. And, bear in mind that although the Internet is good at delivering on my $1,000 computer, at much higher cost and bother, what my $30.00 radio delivers every day for little cost or bother — national/international news briefs — it's next to impossible to find out what's happening in my town on the Internet in any detail or in a timely fashion. And, lo and behold, what few sources that do exist to find out are, (are you ready, now?) those put up by — you guessed it — my local community newspapers. And those sites normally only have "teaser" versions of the story. You have to subscribe to the Dead Tree Edition to get the full story. Very clever, no?
Now, this is not merely academic to me. I own a small advertising agency. I absolutely can not get my local businesses to do much advertising on the Web, other than building their own Websites (another interesting topic, but not for this post). Sorry, but they're just not interested in reaching folks in Botswana and Poland. Can you blame them? The overwhelming majority of American businesses (according to the US Dept. of Labor/Census Bureau) are small businesses, defined as having less than 100 employees. The much-glorified Huffington Post is completely useless to most all of my 300+ small-business clients, as is the New York Times. Without advertisers willing to spend on the Web, Web news sources will stay pretty much as they are now — Digg with the same rehashes of UPI/AP/Reuters feeds, repeated ad nauseum with posters trying desperately to add a sentence or two summary spin to the canned article hoping to reach the site's front page. Internet News is depressingly incestuous, sketchy, amateurish, and a couple of hours behind my local NPR radio station.
What media pundits seem to be missing out on is that the American consumer is more and more interested in what's happening in his own county/town/neighborhood and less and less interested in what is happening in The Big City or on the other side of the planet. We're getting less centralized, folks. Most of the US population has been diffusing from the big cities and spreading out into the surrounding countryside for the past few decades. I'm here to tell you that the Big City Daily has been dying since the 60's, mostly due to cable television news channels and the advent of 24-hour all-news radio. I'm in a rural county just on the edge of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Sprawloplex, and we've got no less than three 24/7 all-talk radio stations who are getting their quota of advertisers, last time I checked. Plus two 24/7 all-sports stations. Yes, they stream on the Web. No, it's not an income source for most, but a loss-leader supported by over-the-air broadcasting.
I do think that eventually, most all news will be delivered via network. In about 30-50 years. Right now, Google and the porn industry notwithstanding, nobody has really figured out how to make money off the Internet in the more localized news market, where the majority of advertisers (small business) and consumers are. We've got several itty-bitty print publications in my county that can draw enough revenue to pay for professional writers, design
But seriously folks, my local paper is a thin rag on Mondays, and actually somewhat interesting once the week's news has filtered in by Thursday/Friday. Why else do newspapers offer "weekender" subscriptions?
Do we really need to have this much newsprint sloughed off presses every single day?
There are many trends in here, user generated content is the least of the issues. Its the demise of the talk down culture and self styled experts defining the agenda on news and opinion. Mass media's ability to drive trends and opinion and manufacture consensus has been severely curtailed by the internet. There is too much accountability on the internet and people expect it with any media they consume, no more nonsense masquerading as informed opinion just because its printed or read out is some newsrooms. Thought leaders, analysts, reporters, poseurs all are threatened.
The media response has been typically shortsighted, dumbing down and catering to an imagined audience who want to consume without thinking when everything suggests the opposite. The quality of talent itself is questionable and the merit of articles with gross generalizations, over reliance on PR and trend manufacturing are in equal part responsible for the current decline. There will always be a place or solid journalism, reporting, analysis and investigation but the current media just do not have the depth for this.
those are even more scarce on slashdot than thoughtful literate posts ;-)
;-P kind of like coca cola: there's no cocaine in coca cola today, but that's no reason to change the name: everyone trusts the brand. so in the future, "new york times" and "atlanta journal constitution" will merely be brand names associated with a certain level of trust, regardless of the actual media being used
replying to your numbers:
1. consolidation. it is inevitable. so while there might be 100,000 newspapers today (arbitrary) there will be 10,000 tomorrow, and 1,000 in a decade or two
2. yes: we are in the realm of the weirdness of the newspaper without the newspaper. but this is more of a semantic difference than a real world stumbling block to the evolution of newspapers. more broadly, television news and radio news are all under this kind of pressure as newspapers. i bring this up to show that today, cnn means "cable news network", but if cnn still exists in 2108, it won't be on cable. cnn in 2108 will merely mean "news brand of some trust" in the mind of listeners/ readers/ haptic esp device empathitors
3. i view it as a kind of segmentation and expansion of the mediaverse. today, our newspapers show breaking news, opinion, in depth reporting, etc. added to this function is the new one user feed back (well actually, i guess that's letters to the editor, so not so new after all). what will happen is that the single monolithic function of a newspaper will fragment into a million pieces, each piece the domain of some sort of specialist. like slashdot aggregates, perez hilton does gossip, politico does political ruminations, etc. and the all purpose newspaper will atrophy, until it is left with the one vital piece it still has a monopoly on in the emerging mediaverse: news reporting. facts on the ground, breaking events. blogs can't do that. or they can try to do that, and therefore turn into a newspaper in the process
4. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=504748&cid=22914300
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=504748&cid=22914250
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
what you call an illusion of trust i would relabel as an honest attempt at trust.
Whether they are honest or not (and you know, I hope, they aren't always honest) doesn't change the fact that the result is an illusion. I've blogged about that before... the chain from the witnesses and primary sources to the front page is often a game of telephone. The difference is that when it happens on a blog you get to see the whole thing, and can go back to find where the fellow turned "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal of visiting tourists" into "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal for visiting tourists".
Whether they're honest or not, their biases inform their idea of what impartiality means. A reporter on Fox News and a reporter at Pacifica Radio may both think they're being impartial, but they're not.
And, again, they're NOT always honest. And, again, whether they are or not... the result is the same. You shouldn't trust what you read in the newspapers any more than you should trust what you read on the Internet. The difference is that on the Internet you CAN get more of the information you need to inform your own best attempt at an unbiased opinion.
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/harlan.html (1998)
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/bunk.html (2004)
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/cringe.html (2006)
that all of the people, all of the time, have functioning bullshit detectors. or that is ever possible
random demagogues exist in every society, because they satisfy a portion of the audience. but they don't appeal to all of the audience, NOR can the audience be completely innoculated against the efforts of demagogues
so you have to make peace with the fact that a large portion of any human society is populated with people with permanently broken or nonfunctional bullshit detectors. and this will always be true, if you respect the notion of free will. which is a much greater thing to value than absolute adherence to some arbitrary bullshit detector standard
put your faith in the large, mostly silent majority of people who can sniff bullshit out when they hear it/ see it. they exist, they really do, and they are self-replicating in a society that values freedom of the press and freedom of expression. they're will is not always expressed unaltered by their government, but again, we live in an imperfect world. we can only approximate the higher standards we are discussing here. all we can do is try harder to approximate better
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is happening to radio too, which is why the big Clear Channel buyout might not close. The buyout price is 39.70 a share, yet Clear Channel has been traded as low as 25 dollars recently-38% less then the buyout price. Recently, an FM station in Los Angeles sold for 137 million dollars-113 million less then the last one did a couple of years ago-46 percent less.
Seems to me that this is right in line with the newspaper valuations you have mentioned.
It's also happening in cellular-why just look at Sprint-at the time of their merger, Sprint and Nextel were each worth about 35 billion. Today, the combined company is only valued at 25 billion.
I think the reason is stockholder greed. Stockholders expect stock to ALWAYS go up-which forces management to make choices based on short term gains-and at the expense of bigger losses in the long term. Until this "next quarter's guidance" mentality ends, you're going to see even more companies hit the skids.if you insist on using the word illusion, can we ever have any better than this illusion? you seem to be pointing to the fundamental cracks in human communication. couples often have the same goals, and wind up fighting due to miscommunication. if they can't swing it, how can you expect a human organization to do any better?
i think you need to make peace with the fundamental failings of human communication. your "illusion" is just another way to say "miscommunication exists", and always will, REGARDLESS of malicious intent
and what you attribute to malicious intent, i attribute to accident. people are not so malicious. of course malicious intent DOES exist, people DO manipulate communication. but again, can you honestly expect us to do any better? how the heck do you identify subtle malicious intent in miscommunication, and actually get rid of it? make peace with it if it is not too egregious, as just the background noise of life that will always be with us no matter what
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is starting to make the rounds around the foreign arab press, after the chronic drunk "dove hunter" left saudi arabia the local papers are reporting that the populations are being advised to make contingency plans for dealing with a mass radiation event. It will probably be in translated papers within a few days, outside the US press anyway.
They are going to be using tactical nukes against iran, bunker busters, letting that jenni out a second time. All bets are off once those neocon armageddon loving PNAC/AIPAC insane loons do that. They just canned the middle east theater commander, admiral fallon, because he refused to go along with a nuke attack on iran (no proof but widely reported and pretty much accepted by most analysts).
Do you honestly think the rest of the planet will stand around and wonder when their turn will come then? No way, they'll get together and do a preventative measure massive first strike against the US, before any credible anti missile defense shield goes operational in a big way. You can also kiss any economic recovery away as well, once they do that iranian smackdown, and bork straits of hormuz transit, global oil prices might hit 300 bucks a barrel, with rationing.
As to what is going down with the grunts, every one I have talked to, including a personal relative with three tours, who has direct combat experience, has atrocity stories in Iraq, and the mercs are worse because they *like it*, they are sadists. They aren't making any friends there, you waste an innocent in a family, you now have ten or more people *forever* against you. Just how it goes over there, they got long memories and blood feuds are a way of life. The entire deal is being run *precisely* to push a hundred years "clash of the civilizations", and is succeeding.
Of course newspapers are still relevant. Even if all they do is repackage AP stories.
Newspapers provide context, aggregation and community. They have provided a location for discussion (letters to the editor) for pretty much their entire life. They are the proto-social news organisation.
I expect newspapers to change, but they will still exist.
I expect newspapers to change to offer a service where the reader is allowed to click through to the context behind a story. Stories are grouped by subject area, providing a living timeline on the subject. This will allow the reader to explore the story, becoming more informed as they go. Additionally, since stories will have subject areas, it will be possible to track an issue as it develops.
Tracking individual story issues will allow people to create their own personal newspaper, following the subjects that most interest them.
Add to that detailed discussion (also on a per issue basis), will bring in the community aspects. Imagine what slashdot would look like if, instead of starting each discussion with a blank slate, we started with the +5 comments from the previous time this subject had been reported on?
Finally, newspapers will still be able to excel at providing context (local/national/international), providing the reader with the information surrounding the events that might be missed if they just received the facts.
if it's hard to relate to an "anecdote" you are in good company with everyone else who disregards the mistakes of history and their lessons
read up on the uss maine. if that doesn't strike you as eerily similar to WMDs in iraq, you are being intellectually dishonest
your "anecdotes" are perhaps better written as "antidotes". that many fail to take
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The difference is supposedly real. BUT... as digital media improves with higher sample rates, this gap should close. Here is a which should tell you that digital media 'samples' audio data so many times a second. Because it is not a continuous stream of the source audio - but periodic samples of the original source - quality is lost. I'm sure you'd need a damn good vinyl player to enjoy it, but on paper, vinyl is potentially better than CDs. Of course, I'm perfectly content with my MP3s though...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
So have newspapers. I was reading an editorial in the WSJ about the how successful "the surge" allegedly is, and found it to stretch things and manipulate quotes. I decided to abandon it out of frustration. While moving my eyes away, I happened to glance at the author: "Karl Rove". R. Murdoch has Foxitized it, as feared.
The New York Times, LA Times, and many other newspapers were "Foxitized" well before Fox. Most of Fox News's popularity comes from people who were sick of the rest of media being so ridiculously biased in one direction.
You know it is bad when Hillary Clinton is complaining about the general bias in media towards candidates. And somehow I don't think she is apart of the "Right Wing Attack Machine". Of course, you only complain when you are not benefiting from the bias...
You also have to consider the effects of the out and out lies---Stephen Glass, the doctored photos from Adnan Hajj, the recent admission the LA times made that they were duped on FBI records on the death of rap murders, etc. The argument against blogs is that they are amateurs who cannot be believed, yet they seem to be the ones doing the best fact checking against the so-called professionals!
We are lacking a maturity in our analysis abilities that allows us to identify bias both FOR and AGAINST our positions. People who lack this maturity think that everything that agrees with their point of view is somehow "in the middle" and everything else is "to the left and right". This two dimensional egotistical thinking is causing deep divisions in our country that really scare me. It's like this is some sort of sporting competition with teams and a winner and a loser. You are not allowed to have any beliefs of the "other side", not allowed to compromise or cooperate for solutions. Not allowed to understand that you have a point of view, and it may be reflected in a newspaper or TV programs, but it is not the only point of view and it is equally valuable to listen to both sides. Or to have a newspaper or news show report with a neutral point of view, to use a wikipedia term. But the media today wants to push an agenda and "tell a story" (aka "Narrative") rather than report facts. So people vote with their dollars and abandon those newspapers, because they aren't providing them with news!
Brian EllenbergerThis is not about bloggers v professional journalists. This is just about words on a computer screen vs a words on a piece of paper.
but i will completely alter your perception of me by saying i don't see them as quite as threatening as many do. they provide social stability and wealth, and for all of their abuses, they are manageable entities that consolidate a lot of control that would otherwise be difficult to control
in other words, a lot of corporate abuses are really just magnifications and distortions of essential human failures that would still be with us, even if all the corporations magically disappeared. a corporation to me is human lust and greed packaged into nice discrete packages for us to wield a stick at. and it's easier to manage a box full of rats than a bunch of rats scampering around on their own. that's how i view corporations: not creators of evil, but amalgamations of evil that would exist with or without corporations
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The old, mainstream media destroyed their credibility and authority by doing five things:
1. Dumbed down their content by turning to celebrity gossip, etc. and cutting investigative reporting.
2. Turned to publishing corporate press releases almost verbatim
3. Began regurgitating Reuters/AP feeds for national/international stories instead of doing original reporting
4. Slashed local reporting in favor of the economies of scale of publishing the same news across multiple markets.
5. The owners and editors began spinning everything from a partisan perspective.
All of these things were done, of course, to maximize profits by cutting costs or pumping up mindshare through sensationalism.
Online sources of news/information, however, are evolving to a quality that's much greater than what the old media ever had. Let me explain:
What's happening with information online is happening to the process that we here on Slashdot already know works with similar public goods like Science and FOSS and Security. Let's call it "Peer Review." Yes, there's a lot of dross, but what's good quickly floats to the top.
And there might not be a single online site where you can get top-quality information on all topics, but that's fine. "jack of all trades, master of none" and all that. But there are at least several I know of that are worth the time: Slashdot for general geek news (I love reading an article about, say, cryogenics and then seeing posts from professionals who actually work in that field); Tom's Hardware; Stratfor for political/international/international relations. There is a lot of aggregation/regurgitation from the MSM, but increasingly from the primary sources journalists wouldn't bother to check or feign to understand as well as original research.
And if anything puff-piece-ish shows up on those sites, it almost always gets shot down in flames almost immediately. That wouldn't happen in the MSM, where the echo chamber picks up and repeats errors 10 million times so that when the real information does come out, it gets ignored because everyone's sick of hearing about it.
If the MSM were to sit down collectively and send all their reporters, journalists, and editors to re-education at the BBC, which was and still is the best that the old media had/has to offer, then they might have a shot at relevance. But they won't, and they'll vanish, and good riddance.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
No need to wait. I'm sure there's already a fetish site for that.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Well, if you've ever seen the comments on youtube videos, you know it's definitely possible to, as you put it, defecate, on the internet.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Newspapers face the difficult situation of being the best medium for sustained, in-depth examination of some issues, while suffering from the curse of people being unwilling to pay for content that can be cut-and-pasted with one click these days.
The act of writing a story naturally takes some intellectual talent and prolonged effort, and I would say that newspaper journalists (and even blog writers who actually do a fair bit of their own writing) are more dedicated to unearthing real stories, than most any TV "journalist" is. The TV medium, with its emphasis on good sound and video clips (tending to emphasize short-term catastrophe), with just anyone being able to say something without thought, is so transitory and gossip-like, and without any permanent record, that anyone can break a story on TV and not have to do any real work to follow it up. Look at how many bullshit headlines pass for news on the 24 hour news channels. They're so desperate to fill the day that just about anything is put on the air.
Compare this to one of the reputable newspapers, where you have one chance per day to publish something, so that the contributors make active decisions about what to write on for the next day, and refine their stories, get things right before putting it on paper. How many times have you heard of a TV station making an apology because it was incorrect on some detail (which isn't uncommon), or made a mistake? Newspapers on the other hand, have this kind of responsibility. I'm not saying newspapers are without fault, but compared to TV, they're the people who keep us honest. Their news doesn't evaporate into thin air after it's finished.
I *pay* for a subscription to the WSJ, because I know that it takes money to produce good news reporting, I don't want just regurgitated/duplicated AP feeds. I encourage you to read it for once (the WSJ news is not the same as the WSJ opinion page), and see how refreshing good content is. I'm glad that they (hopefully at least for a little while longer, depending on R. Murdoch) are restricting their services to paid subscribers so a unique product can be maintained, and good journalists encouraged to do this kind of work.
...I just don't understand it.
As near as I can tell, the argument is this: The media is biased, say the believers, but it doesn't admit it. This is proof that media companies are either dupes or willing participants in The Great Media Conspiracy, whose aim is to keep the People ignorant. Therefore what the People need to do is to seek out media with a clear and obvious bias -- because that media is at least honest.
In other words, the media is biased, therefore to fix the problem we need to seek out the most biased media we can find. Huh?? Seriously -- why would a Wookiee want to live on Endor, anyway?
You say people are going online "to get better news." But what you really mean is more biased news -- because I have never heard of a blog, or aggregator, or so-called alternative news source whose mission statement is to correct the problem of bias in the media. If you can point to one, please do. But the vast majority that I've ever heard of strive instead to add more bias to the news -- either to the left or the right.
People are attracted to the bias they agree with most. Therefore what you end up with is a self-selecting media, where people only expose themselves to the stories told in the manner that they feel comfortable with. This is a Very Bad Thing.
You mention a documentary, Spin. This is an example of media with a bias. Its bias is that the media is biased. Meanwhile the bias of every reporter and journalist that I've ever met is that their profession strives in every way to be as unbiased and objective as possible. You've chosen which bias you choose to believe.
I, on the other hand, choose to believe the journalists. They strive, at least, to be objective and unbiased. Admittedly they may not always succeed. But I for one would much prefer to read a news source that at least tries to be objective, rather than one that has made a conscious decision to chuck objectivity out the window.
Breakfast served all day!
but the damage done by blackwater international would still be done if blackwater didn't exist. it would in an alterate universe without corporations be done by a bunch of random self-motivated asshole soldiers of fortune. all blackwater international does it takes all those rats and puts them on one single more easily controllable and identifiable payroll
corporations are not a creator of evil in my mind. they are packagers of evil. which has some benefits in terms of control. some people believe that if we did away with corporations, a lot of the evil corporations do would disappear too. hardly! the evil you see corporations do is a reflection of simple human evil, not some magical aspect of human nature that exists solely when corporations are involved
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
[signature]
I'd consider the BBC to be very close to unbiased, as it has nobody to answer to. It's not perfect, but there are no US news outlets I'd consider to be remotely close.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One of the last things "news" papers seem to be reporting is their personal bad news. This trend is definitely NOT news if a software engineer could point it out almost a year ago
anyone have a guess why NY Times dropped its "Select" subscription? I thought it could be turned into a decent on-line paper. Maybe stealing news comes as naturally to web users as stealing music and the Times just weren't making any sales at the measly $49 they charged.
Did everyone forget that reporters and writers need to be paid for what they do? Are we willing to just take press releases from our government officials as the whole story and forget about reporting as it once was done? [ok, that last one is a bit of a troll...we do have Judith Miller and her ilk in the print MSM]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Location really plays a key roll in where the newspapers die out in. Like some comments have pointed out, some small towns rely on newspapers for news, but in other areas, television and the internet are a much larger medium for getting news. print is dead in most places, and is too slow to get the word out. By the time the paper comes out, we've already heard the story at least a dozen times on the 6 oclock and 11 oclock news, read it online and 4 different sites, and heard it from 3 friends who also saw it. The newspaper may be losing it's popularity, but it's not really going anywhere anytime soon. It's still going to be a common site on trains and buses in big cities for years to come, but as a defining news source, it's fallen off the wagon, and there's really no getting back on. It's time has come and gone, and it was inevitably going to happen with changing technology.
... they said it would... but they failed to mention it'd take about 30 years.
It is no accident that as newspapers turn more and more liberal in their slant, people find them less and less trustworthy as an unbiased source. If you want biased reporting, you go to moveon.org. If you don't, where can you go? The Manchester Union Leader? No, the newspapers got down into the same pig trough as broadcast news, and none of them really understand that people do not like to read shit.
"This is NEWS! We are a NEWSPAPER! We are supposed to PRINT THE NEWS!"
Newspapers did indeed once print the news. The Pentagon Papers (NY TIMES) and the Woodward/Bernstein investigations into the Watergate Affair (Washington POST), for example.
Now it's Tom Tomorrow outing Trent Lott as a racist, not the TIMES.
When even a cartoonist using his website does a better job of investigative reporting and disseminating the news than does the NY TIMES, I think that says more about the TIMES than the "disruptive" power of the Web and the Internet.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Chris Anderson recently posted an interesting analysis of the industry's revenues.
compare news from a blog versus news from a newspaper. peg the amount of trust you should put the newspaper at in your mind. now peg the amount of trust you should put in the blog. i think you'll find you'll put more trust in the newspaper than the blog. now try to find a way to get news to you in a way more trustworthy than the newspaper. it doesn't exist
therefore, no matter how untrustworthy you find newspapers, for all the games of telephone you illustrate, you also have to agree there is no more trustworthy way of getting the news
so go ahead and poke holes in the trustworthiness of newspapers. in the end, you'll still be turning to them as the most trustworrhy source of information in the pile of untrustworthy sources before you
your criticism of the trustworthiness of newsreporting would have more validity if there were some magical method of newsreporting that was superior. such a method doesn't exist, so your criticism in the end is empty
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Where is the troll here? Please point it out to me I am not seeing it.
there was a time once when conservatives talked about the liberal media. this was in the clinton years when the liberals had a hold on the agenda. a conservative in 1994 would say pretty much exactly what you are saying. flashforward to 2004, and when conservatives have a hold on the agenda, the party line with liberals was the great evil of the conservative media
so its all bullshit, blaming the media. blaming the media is a scape goat. certainly there are liberal biased media sources. certainly there are conservaivte biased media sources. the point is, both biases in the media exist ALL THE TIME. but every one of us picks and chooses their bogeyman of choice in the media out there, and shapes a perception of some media "other" out there with some nebulous agenda manipulating impressionable minds. bullshit. look at the guy twiddling his moustache behind the curtain! this is paranoid schizophrenic bullshit
blaming the media for the conservative and liberal swings in the country gets cause and effect wrong. the body politic experiences an ideological sea change, and begins to choose the media sources that suits its purposes, not the other way around. i am saying the dominant media sources of the time is driven by the audience. it is NOT true that the media source feeds an ideology to an audience, the audience is simply given a menu of liberal and conservative media sources, and chooses the media bias it likes. the cause and effect is the reverse of what you are proposing
it is simply intellectual laziness and intellectual dishonesty to talk about the way the country is one way or the other is because of the media. it allows a scape goat for when an ideologue, conservative or liberal, sees the general population have an opinion different than their own, and rather than blame the general populace, which is distressing, they blame the media, because the media is a universal whipping boy and scape goat, and allows the ideologue to believe that deep down, the general populace is still with them
unfortunately blaming the media is simply not understanding how things really work. blame the general populace itself. it swings left, it swings right. and that fact scares the hell out of conservatives and liberals firmly entrenched on their particular side of the divide
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let's consider a high quality paper. If I go to their website, it's difficult or impossible to find my favorite columnists or sections that I like. What the papers are missing is that while it's true that all the public blogs are low quality drivel, the big paper websites are pretty poor compared to a lot of websites. They are squandering their name and strengths by failing to adapt to "electronic print".
I use google news every day. Unfortunately the local news capability stinks. This is a huge opportunity for the local papers to change format, but they are so stunned by their decline they have lost the ability to adapt.
If they could work together to create a medium between ebay and craigslist for classified (ebay is too heavyweight, craigslist is too hippy) they could move forward.
Having their archives searchable and online would be a big plus.
It's like watching a frog get boiled.
1. that the baseline human mind is satisfied with just one source of info. certainly, such people exist, but not all, or even most. most people want to hear a few sources. it's a healthy simple instinct most people develop as they grow up in various social settings with varying descriptions of the same events. its a simple human truth to learn: that not all people see the same things
2. that someone is hermetically sealed in a room with only one source of info. even in authoritarian countries, word gets around with text messages, gossip, etc
3. that someone thinks exactly what is presented to them. certainly it serves as a starting point, but you would be amazed at the various conclusions people deduce from the same facts
so i agree with you: there are people who believe everything they see, from only one source, and think exactly what is presented to them
but that's a tiny minority, in even the most authoritarian states with the most censored media
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I recently subscribed to the NY Times. Paper. It has what most if not all online outlets lack - care in writing and researching.
I also subscribe to several paper monthlies. These are generally funded by foundations that are somewhat immune to the vicissitudes of consumer choice. If the ads dry up, they can continue to deliver well-researched articles, albeit fewer. Or they may go to an NPR-type of model.
Most of these also have blogs, in which comments tend to be far more thoughtful than the average blog. With the immediate communication of teh internets, hot news from the higher-noise blogs can quickly find its way to every other blog. People who value their time will gravitate to those blogs with better signal-to-noise ratios.
Blogs are not going away, but neither are the well-researched papers and magazines.
Did you ever leave the 1980's?
Electing a socialist president was the first step to falling under communist influence? You mean how the UK, France, Norway, Sweden etc. all elected socialist governments at some point during the Cold War? Were they all destined to fall under Soviet influence?
And you're right the blame for Iranian autocracy doesn't solely fall to UK/US foreign policy however when you consider that they were responsible for destabilising an emerging and [b]fully functioning[/b] democracy you have to raise some objections - especially as there were no other justifications apart from oil interests, its a pretty disgusting episode in both of our nations history.
Oh and the people of Iran never became 'religious nutjobs' they overturned a blatantly unjust government (partially our fault remember) with the only alternative at the time that wouldn't splinter the country. Iran is a huge multi-ethnic country and Islam is one of the few common strands that ties all those disparate groups together.
And you realise your final paragraph is basically a restatement of 'the domino effect' which is pretty much bullshit, and the Soviet Union was never going to control the whole world. And there's no [i]perhaps[/i] about it. It is immoral to install dictators and subject people to totalitarian rule. And it was pretty much a ineffective wherever we tried it as it lead to huge resentment from the populations of those countries when they eventually freed themselves.
Which is why South America has such close relations with the UA nowadays. If we use the exact same tactics as those we label our enemies, what makes us any better then them?
A big concern I have with blogs is that many tend to perpetuate particular mindsets, and run stories so filtered that they're essentially untrue or at least, highly exaggerated. People inevitably gravitate towards like-minded individuals. Despite the fact the internet can provide a wide range of views many people end up reading only what agrees with their own beliefs.
I feel like people are getting increasingly polarized and narrow-minded and I think blogs, at least in some ways are helping to contribute to that. Get on some blogs and post even the slightest dissenting view and be prepared for a shit-storm of unimaginable proportions. They don't even want to consider an alternative.
On a fairly regular basis I'll visit some blog where the author interprets a particular news story. And of course news is cherry-picked to reinforce that author's particular messages. And as is often the case links don't direct a visitor to the original story but rather to yet another blog which essentially is saying more of the same. Most people aren't going to bother digging for both sides of the story.
I'll concede, however, that blogs are an immensely useful tool; they're a great alternative to the mainstream media. What I really look forward to is their continued use as a way to keep corporations, governments and other organizations in check.
http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/GAM.20080329.RCOVER29/GIStory/ Even so, the high euro forced the continent's biggest newsprint producer, Norske Skog, to announce on March 14 that it was closing mills in Norway and the Czech Republic, reducing its capacity by 7 per cent or 450,000 tonnes. We see your 450 and raise to 600: [Abitibi]
I suspect that bendable electronics and digital ink will soon advance to the point where your "laptop" will be indistinguishable from a think sheet of paper. Look at the ibook air for a really good example of this. I suspect that it'll be easier to use a custom device to read the news in the year 2010 but you never know considering how fast laptops are evolving.
Cheers
Ben
Why else do newspapers offer "weekender" subscriptions?
Television listings and flyers/coupons.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
compare news from a blog versus news from a newspaper.
You're comparing the wrong units. If I read the newspaper, if I were really fanatical about it, I could imagine subscribing to maybe two daily and three or four weekend papers. Most people read one. In the same time I would read a dozen or more blogs, easily, without trying.
A blogger is like a reporter, not a whole newspaper staff. Compare a newspaper to a dozen blogs, if you want to compare them.
i think you'll find you'll put more trust in the newspaper than the blog.
Not for 15 years have I been willing to trust the newspapers over the net of a million lies. Because there's truth in those lies. And over and over again newspapers have proven themselves no more worthy of my trust than the net.
now try to find a way to get news to you in a way more trustworthy than the newspaper.
I don't have to. I'm not arguing that the net is better, I'm arguing that it's no worse.
in the end, you'll still be turning to them as the most trustworrhy source of information in the pile of untrustworthy sources before you
It's been 15 years now since I've done that.
your criticism of the trustworthiness of newsreporting would have more validity if there were some magical method of newsreporting that was superior.
Straw man. You're still trying to get me to defend a position I haven't taken, and I'm not going to fall for that hoary old trick. To be able to argue that the newspapers are no more trustworthy than the blogs, I merely need to be able to argue that the blogs are at worse, no worse.
Again, I'm not criticizing the papers, I'm criticizing the people who trust them more than they should.
I use the weekly Coop grocery store flyer to line my budgie's cage, even though I subscribe to both a daily and a weekly newspaper. The surface of the flyer is rougher (lower quality newsprint) and my bird doesn't tip his ladder over as often as he does if I line his cage with a page out of the newspaper.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
The thing which annoys me the most about every single news source is.. unless the press release is concerning (insert highly political hot button issue of the month here), it is repeated verbatim with at the very best a passing and muted disclaimer.
A good example would be "in a victory for the customer against the vile plague of piracy, the RIAA established a new 'active inducement' precedent, allowing the protection of artists into the new millennium"
(Note: something similar to this was announced over national radio a couple years ago when the mgm v grokster ruling came down. While not exact, I believe i've accurately replicated the tone)
No stories are aired detailing third parties, or even better questioning why they exist.
It's not really possible to constitutionally regulate a "fairness doctrine"
but I think it is possible to make it illegal to classify yourself as a journalistic organization without proper fact checking. Specifically, it could be a civil offense with heavy statutory penalties for any publisher with a reader/listener/viewer base over X number of people.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Obligatory follow-up: xkcd #202
As a distribution method, the newspaper is only one step up from
the town crier. It is really quite overdue that this antiquated technology
be buried and forgotten.
It may be a hackneyed sentiment, but the side benefit is, of course,
less strain on the precious natural resource of paper. (When the oil
finally runs dry, we're sure going to need those extra trees.)
Everybody knows the REAL reason newspapers are dying is because they need more photos of Spider-Man. Get to work, Parker!
I am perfectly willing to grant you that the stories that you list there are vapid, poorly written, or lacking in content. If I expected anything more from those sites, I might read them on occasion. But....
Many of those items address things that are perfectly newsworthy. The proposal to grant the Federal Reserve new powers matters, even though it is as yet only a proposal, is important news. The release of new data on pharmaceuticals is news. The economic ideas of the 3 people most likely to become the leader of the world's foremost superpower is a perfectly appropriate feature story topic. Same goes for many of the other topics.
Now, I wouldn't rank the financial news as being as important as MSNBC does. And I wouldn't give the stuff that interests conservatives the importance that Fox does. But these things are news to some people, and the fact that they may not interest you probably reflects the fractionalization and targeting of news as much as it does any lack of "real news." That targeting isn't going away. The power of the internet is probably going to be that if you are interested in news of a certain type, you will be more and more able to read all about it and only about it.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Some smaller, local/regional papers are bucking the trend. While definately not a primary source for national/international news, they cover local issues and current events that impact the region. The Winsted Herald Journal (hjpub.com) is one such paper. I had a talk with the editor during this past year and, surprisingly, the paper is growing. Ad revenues, while not what they once were, are still fairly strong. This may be, in part, to the rural/exurban demographic of the area, but it is interesting nonetheless.
That said, their online presence is largely dreadful. There are way too many ads (the site is overstuffed with them), and navigation is wanting. Their online edition does not carry all the news items in the print edition, and they do not archive most of their story photos online. Still, they don't do too bad for a publisher serving their particular market. The paper's main offices are about one hour west of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
We all know the industry is shrinking. But...
I agree that national and international news is a problem area for newspapers. Most of it comes from news pools like AP or Reuters and you'll find the same stories and pictures on BBC, CNN or Al-Jazeera that your local paper is printing. Logistics means that TV and internet news sources can get the story to the public faster. However, in depth coverage is still the realm of the newspaper. TV news is limited to 30 second clips and the internet stories are usually very short.
Recently, The Detroit Free Press broke a local story about misconduct by the mayor of Detroit. Without a local news outlet, this story would have never seen the light of day. I'm sure a few bloggers would have printed rumors but nothing would have come of it. The prosecutor just filed 11 felony charges against the mayor as a result of the news article.
And we rule on sports coverage. Personally, I am more interested in the latest Warcraft patch then I am about sports but the people who care about such things tell me that our sports coverage is great.
Not dead yet and I doubt we will be in the near future. But changes are a coming and I don't know if there'll be room for my salary in the final structure. Time will tell.
Push the button, Max!
I'm amazed that nobody sees the obvious answer:
Formulate a group called the NIAA (Newspaper Industry Association of America) to sue everyone who doesn't buy a newspaper. They won't actually distribute this money to the newspapers, though. Instead, they'll line their pockets with it and use that as an incentive to lobby the government into taxing the public to support another dying business model before their revenue stream dries up.
I read this article last night in print form after buying the New Yorker on a newstand. It is interesting to read 'mainstream journalism' attacking the new actually interesting collaborative forms of sense-making that the Huffington Post and Slashdot use. I was in a session developing a value network map of the New News ecology and the 'mainstream' 'journalist' among us was complaining bitterly about news aggregation sites (like google news and Slashdot) saying how they took traffic away from newspaper sites - the youngins there were like those sites DRIVE traffic your way - help you increase your numbers.
This whole set of issues will be flushed out at the Jounrnalism that Matters - Silicon Valley Newstools2008.org
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-sv
What will I have to fill up my recycle bin every week? I won't feel like I'm doing my part to save the earth! Plus the empty milk jugs will get lonely in there all by themselves.
it is clear that papers like the N Y Times plan to ditch the paper version and go online, But even at that they fail miserably - a classic case of the innovators dilemma, they can't abandon the past fast enough
for instance, there is almost never a link to a report, eg in Jan 08 they did stories on the un ready state of hte national guard, all based on apdf from some comission,and none of the stories gave a link to the pdf
for instance, there blogging on the web is horrible - do they have something good like slashcode or media wiki ? no, they have some awful stuff.
they don't do a lot of original research, but they have 3,000 intelligent people in the news dept sifting through other peoples efforts...do they attmep to put this huge intelligence effort to work in an online wiki or database, no
eg, sfaik, there is no database of elected officials charged or convicted of a crime..something the times could easily start and do well on, at least at he national state level.
Sadly, I must admit that job sites are a bit of the culprit. News papers generate their income through the classifieds, but most people have recognized that job sites can provide more diverse features, hit a broader group of individuals, etc then newspapers. Also if people place their jobs online, their company becomes advertised and people can click to the company's web page instantly. I respect greatly the importance of newspaper companies in our past. Many times their investigative practices have prevented government problems at all levels. Yes, they do many negative things just for hype, but in the long run of their existence, they have provided an important public service. I hope this public service also manages to be transformed to the internet better. Right now, I see too much about stars and unimportant things, and little on true issues that our country (and others) need to deal with. How many articles really push for the current situation of our country's health? How many people know we are spending 8% of our taxes on interest every year because of our national debt? Sadly, after all of the huge other bills, 8% is most of what is left. Most people don't know this, but they know if Britney had a bad nail day. Sad how poor media coverage can change what people think about. It is very important that quality investigative news reporters remain strong whether through the newspaper or online media.
JohnE
jobbank.com - Search jobs, post resume,
According to you, nearly everything in the news is either fearmongering or propoganda, not news. But that argument is silly. If a newspaper reports that X number of people are losing their homes because of subprime loans, is that fearmongering? Al Sadr announces a ceasefire, and that's "nearly propoganda"? While I have lots of criticism of the modern media, your criticism goes totally over the cliff. Its rank with paranoia.
What the hell counts as news to you then? The black helicopters hovering over your house?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
PAY for news? That's crazy.
Of course it is (again, trivially) true that all human institutions are reflections of human characteristics. What matters for the human impact of those human characteristics is the force-multiplier that the form of institution provides. Individual Huns were little nomads whose particular species of bloody-minded clannishness was not particularly unique or scary. But when pushed out of their grounds by the economics of famine and overpopulation, and organized as shock cavalry under the leadership of Attila, they committed mass murders in Europe on a scale that only the 20th century could equal.
I honestly have no idea what you mean about corporations offering major advantages in terms of control vs. non-corporate forms of organization. Major corporations can get just as out of control as a criminal gang. Jeremy Scahill has already documented how Blackwater Int uses the corporate veil and not-so-secret political connections to operate essentially outside the law. No organ of law-enforcement or other government institution seems able or willing to take them on; after all, they are a legitimate corporation! Are you going to suggest that a billion-dollar private army, operating in the United States and controllable by no authority other than its mostly secret board of directors, is doing no more damage to the nation than, say, some gang of SOF-reading vets robbing a few banks in Idaho? David Korten and many, many others -- from Ralph Nader to Naomi Klein -- have documented how the Supreme Court's Buckley decision, giving corporations the same privileges as individuals in making political contributions, has had enormous deleterious impacts on American democracy for over 30 years. Every attempt to pass legislation to control this influence has ended up doing essentially nothing. Why? Do you really doubt for even a moment that this lack of success has any other cause than the influence of corporate money?
My friend, what's missing from your discussion (and perhaps your thinking) in this area is any consideration of the public interest. I consider that an essential entity. It's the very foundation of my country. It was the first item on the "To Do" list for the Framers of the US Constitution, which is all about defining the public interest, and separating activities supporting that interest (like the press) from all the many legitimate private interests (like other forms of commerce) the constitution also protects.
Please don't mistake me: I don't hate corporations. They represent human art and industry, as well as evil and greed, and as you say, create wealth. There are many good ones who take the public interest seriously and do their bit to promote it in addition to making a profit (I believe I work for one). What I despise, and fear, are contemporary politicians, and the media reporting on them, who seem to take as an article of faith that there actually is no such thing as the public interest -- only competing private interests, which can be organized or not, and supported or not. Your comments above suggest that you (I don't say that you actually do) think the same way. If so, then I really am very surprised indeed, and would invite you to consider more seriously, or at all, the point I'm making. Because if that really is your opinion, and lots of other Americans think the same way, then I'm afraid that a lot more than just the newspaper is dying.
Its a political opinion site. Obviously they talk about the news, and thus you can get news from it, but breaking news is not their primary purpose. Discussing it in a certain political vein is. The Huffington Post is more like National Review or The New Republic. Newspapers should at least attempt to be non-partisan in their reporting, and that's the big difference.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel