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Print News Fading, Still Source of Much News
CNet's Dan Farber took a look, not only at the popular news of how print media is dying a slow death, but also what contribution to the news print journalists are still making. According to research quoted, while the physical publications are quickly becoming a thing of the past much of the news that makes its way into circulation via blogs and other means still originates from the hard work of those print journalists. (We discussed a similar perspective on the news a week back.) "While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn't catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content--the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers--comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets. [...] As the financial pressures mount--the outlook for 2009 is dismal--and the cost cutting continues, we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty."
You know it's very important to be the frist one to break the news.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
Perhaps they need to change their toner cartridge if their news is fading.
*rimshot*
People don't like to get newspaper ink on their hands. The internet has just been a very elaborate solution to that problem.
The quick and the easy = AP, Reuters
The long and difficult = Local Reportage
When the metro newspapers finally figure out that a lot of folks actually like non-national stories again, they may be able to save themselves. Uniqueness and specialization are the drivers of everything online. Just running AP feeds will NOT bring in quality revenue.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
How do you make what you do pay when the distribution medium changes? While we like to celebrate the Internet for it's ability to disseminate information, the fact is that gathering that information has to be done by someone. Bloggers have done quite a bit in terms of gathering news, or breaking it, but the problem is that most of it is scattered, and tends to be narrowly focused. The other stories, coverage, and news is still done by the traditional media. It's going to be that way for quite a while - we need people who have expertise (and get paid for that) to dig into the complex stories, we need organizations who are going to aggregate it and check it. The actual functions of newspapers and television reporting are needed, but the distribution channel changed. The question for them is can they hold on long enough to make what they do pay in a new medium.
That's the seed, I guess. However, the story is in the blogosphere (ugh) refuting their biased (and wrong) stories with facts.
Last week, the New York Times published a front page, in depth, story blaming the mortgage meltdown on ... (drumroll!) George Bush. Now, 10 minutes of research would reveal it was due to 1) the Bush admihistration 2) the Clinton administration 3) Congress 4) The federal reserve 5) Mortgage/banking companies 6) deadbeat lendees. Yet the New York Times ignores 5 of the parties and calls it news.
Good riddance.
Not to be pedantic, but rendered webpages containing news are also physical publications.
Easy solution is for media giants to pair up with ISPs and charge for ALL content. ( and shutoff/sue anyone that tries to get around it )
Not that i want to them to of course.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty"
Is this the Onion or something? The above statement is a joke, right? Maybe part of the reason print media is taking such a downturn is both the internet AND the inability of many of the "top-flight journalists" to do anything that remotely resembles objective reporting. The internet is too accessible, cheap, and more or less admits its bias. Journalists - particularly those at the top - seem to believe that their training and expertise and degrees somehow give them license to disguise their personal beliefs and views as objective reporting.
Or, as Sledge Hammer said when asked, "Don't you read the newspapers?"
"No ma'am, I prefer to get my information from reliable sources, like rumor, and small children."
Why are we still talking about newspapers as we're still amazed at their losses, or as if there's a hope of recovery? AIDS patients and cancer victims have a better chance of survival than newspapers. Stick a fork in 'em, they're done. I haven't read a newspaper in years. Mainly, I get them when I stay in hotels and it's left for me in the morning in front of the room. But I've already read most of the articles they are reporting on because it was on the Internet the night before. If not, it will be available on their web site for free. Newspapers are irrelevant, and people who think there's any glimmer of hope is like an astronaut flying towards a black hole, and hoping that instead of being crushed to death he will instead of transported into another dimension. It's inevitable, newspapers are dead. So is the 6pm news hour. People my age and younger do not get their news from newspapers or the tv anymore. The only thing propping up viewership are older people, and as they die off, viewership will plummet. They will most likely not switch over to using the net, and that's fine, but they also don't benefit advertisers as much, so pretty soon, the entire industry will be dead.
This issue scares me. We need more, not fewer, journalists to watch over our government and businesses.
Hopefully, people will eventually realize that one way or another, we need to pay for reporting to get done.
My fear is that we won't realize that, and figure out a way to pay for it, until too late. That is, until legions of seasoned investigative journalists have left for greener pastures, and many good journalism schools have been shut down.
PHONING IT IN, mid-afternoon - An ambulance service has praised a five-year-old boy after he successfully called 999 to report that his mother had collapsed and was unconscious in their home.
In other news, a pet wears a seatbelt, alleged scientists have yet again discovered a formula for the perfect attractive woman (it apparently involves being short with long legs and large breasts), there's a piece on ancient Roman bikinis, how to make the perfect cup of tea and lots of pictures of sunburnt, drug-addled women in bikini tops at a summer rock festival, including ones that aren't Amy Winehouse.
Crop circles have fallen out of favour in recent years. How the A-levels these days aren't as good as proper A-levels were back in my day, you mark my words, remains a perennial favourite. With pictures of students in bikini tops.
"We're holding out hope of the first skateboarding duck of the season," said one of the few reporters still left in the office. "In the meantime, I'm researching a story about a long, short-breasted, large-legged sunburnt woman in a Roman bikini top making me the perfect cup of tea."
Remember: it's the Watchdog of the Press that protects our democracy.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Way before TV, radio, film and even the internet, the most efficient means to distribute news was for each population area to have its own publisher of news print. Cities, towns, burroughs etc. all had their own news papers. Larger areas, such as states, did not. It was not efficient to print a newspaper and deliver it through out the entire state all on the same day.
However, things changed and soon publishers adapted and you could buy the New York times throughout the State and throughout the country. Theater owners started showing news reels, radio started giving out news, and so did TV stations. But newspapers survived all of those because newspapers offered more stories with more depth.
However, the internet has changed the efficiencies for news distribution. Nowadays the internet offers more depth and is updated immediately, plus it offers video and audio, and yet another plus, it offers up to the minute commentary. It's simply asinine for each city/population center to physically publish news on paper and then deliver those papers via gas burning trucks to individuals, to read news articles that were published the day before on the net.
The answer is not to shut down news on the net, it's to accept the fate that newsprint is dead.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
both services have in their contract a "republish" clause on all of their clients' content. with The AP, it means a little more, as The AP is a cooperative owned by the newspapers and broadcasters itself (broadcasters are a subclass of ownership.)
any local stories you have on AP and UPI come from local news outlets, unless there is major statewide interest. the wire services have already been stripped down heavily, and fee cuts The AP will be making for the 2009 and 2010 years, as reported, mean the service has to cut its size AGAIN, by about a third.
and since 90-plus percent of their income comes from local outfits' budgets, you can see the fallacy of the argument by phorest.
As the locals go bust, the whole infrastructure is going to go down with them.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I enjoy reading a newspaper but the news has gotten slanted so far left that it just makes me mad.
We get to little local government and to many puppy in a tree stories. We get to much Hollyweird freak is doing X stories and not enough international news.
Take the recent election in the US, McCain was the golden boy until nominated then they piled on with the negatives. Obama got very little coverage on his past voting record. Now I have a preference (none of the above this year) but I still want to KNOW the facts and the news has gone further and further from that.
Then add in that they want to avoid bias so they habitually quote terrorists as fact and the US (or other government) as an addendum.
So they are failing at least one customer for that reason.
The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper!
In my city, like many others, the major newspaper has made serious cuts to the news department and some top reporters were let go. Some of those reporters have moved to an online only newspaper which has become an excellent source of news.
Our newspaper, again like many others, has always had an agenda and an involvement in local politics that prevented honest reporting on certain topics. The reporters that moved now have more freedom to tell it like it is.
For the first time ordinary citizens have the opportunity to learn what goes on behind the scenes in local government. We learn about the conflicts between developers and the need for city services- water, sewer, traffic management, schools, etc. We also learn about the conflicts between officials who would cut labor costs and union workers who need a living wage. We are finally aware of personal conflicts between government officials and others who hold our future in their hands.
I have no idea how these reporters get paid. The new online newspaper is a non-profit, dependent upon donations. I hope it is getting the support that has been earned, but I suspect this may not be a sustainable model.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Not surprising really. The old media print newspapers have the staff and research people to go out and do real reporting/news gathering in the real world. Online sources pick up this basis of real news reporting and become a distribution and commentary outlet for the work done by the traditional reporters.
By the time Fallujah came around, many media reports would make you believe that the Marines (that were effectively squashing all enemy resistance) had met their match against hardened "militants" (I love that catchphrase), and it was doubtful they would be successful. For those of us who have dug a little deeper into military history and engagements, we realize that Fallujah turned out to literally rewrite the book on the effectiveness of operations in an urban environment amongst an enemy established for ambush... the last historical example being Hue city in Vietnam. While we were out there doing our jobs with what we had available at the time (as the military has always done, in every war of our nation), that wonderful, benevolent, caring media reporting on us and using us for their purposes, could only talk about how thin we were stretched, how poor our supplies were, how ridiculous it was to expect us to do our missions with the numbers and supplies we had. When the political pressure mounted and twenty thousand additional pairs of boots were sent to help, along with massive increases in logistics, it was immediately spun as "putting more troops in harm's way" or "the war's not working so we're throwing more resources down a hole." In reality, having extra boots on the ground and rifles pointed downrange meant greater safety for everyone. Units could take more time off between combat patrols because there were more units to cycle in. Assaults could be handled with more fire support and faster evacuations for the wounded. As much as the mainstream media hates to admit it, "the surge" worked.
Lastly, I want to talk about the thing I hate talking about the most: friends who never made it home. While the moonbats at CBS, ABC, and (MS)NBC typically would have a segment at the end of their evening broadcasts showing the photographs of those killed in Iraq, with little other explanation than to senselessly display the fallen on television to stir animosity toward the war effort, Fox sends real men like LtCol North into the field to report on our units on the ground, how they are adapting and overcoming adversity, how they are still keeping their morale high in the face of a long and costly war.
These are the kinds of things that we veterans of this war will remember. We will also remember when bloggers use that "hard reporting" provided by the "big guys," and put it through basic smell tests to see if it passes. Reuters can thank Little Green Footballs for showing what a bunch of Hamas-friendly tools they were during the Israel-Lebanon war by doctoring
Am I missing something here. I subscribe to the newspaper so I can access the archives on their website I put the actual paper in the recycling on my way out the door every morning.
This gives them the same revenue from me they would be getting if I actually read the paper. If they embrace this business model for techies and sell the dead trees to everyone else(there are still people not on the internet) they will be fine.
I also get some other extras for subscribing vs. free registration like the actual paper in PDF format and advanced data search capabilities in their archives.
Part of the problem is it is cheaper to subscribe to the paper then just pay for an account online. This points towards draconian thinking. Once setup the cost for the online service approaches zero. So they should charge less not more.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
Except that I'm not convinced that this is a replacement of traditional print media by Internet sources so much as it is simply a decline in news readership. As a librarian, I've found that I don't really compete with bookstores. The more people read from the library, the more they also tend to buy from the bookstore. It tends to be a synergistic relationship.
On a related note, Central Connecticut State University President Jack Miller put out his annual Most Literate Cities study, which looks at what literary resources are available and used.
From a USA Today article on this year's study:
The findings come at a time when newspaper circulations across the USA are declining, and online newspaper reading is increasing. Miller's analysis suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the availability of free online news is not to blame for the decline in newspapers' print circulation -- and that neither is the decline in bookstores across the country caused by the rise in online book buying.
Cities that ranked higher for having more bookstores also have a higher proportion of people buying books online, the analysis found, and cities with newspapers that have high per-capita circulation rates also have more people reading newspapers online. Likewise, cities that ranked higher for having well-used libraries also have more booksellers.
So I don't think it's necessarily that people are actually choosing to read their news online instead of subscribe to a traditional newspaper. I think more people are just not reading in general and may happen across news online as they do other things--but that isn't the point of their Internet usage.
And if we aren't reading, will that leave us with just television reporters? :O
CNET is owned by CBS, one of the major networks who's prejudiced "coverage" of the news is prompting people to cancel subscriptions and tune out. The obviously, grossly biased news on CBS even cost Dan Rather his job for the simple sake of appearances (even though he's just the talking head that reads what the producer puts on the teleprompter). Despite this, the lesson still isn't learned. So CNET has a strong interest in putting this kind of "analysis" out.
In truth, most old-media outlets get their news from the same source: The Associated Press. Watching almost any local or national newscast, or picking up nearly any newspaper in America, shows a near-perfect reprint of the AP feed. And the AP feed is exactly what people are getting from the syndicated news site of their choice, whether it has a Yahoo, MSN, Google or some other banner at the top of the page. Why watch some overpaid talking-head and suffer through bad advertising if you can just go online, read the source of the copy?
Local and insightful reporting is a dead art, and THAT is what people are turning to the internet for, because it's hard to get from anywhere but a blog in the US.
The journalistic institution with the most reporters is Bloomberg. They have more reporters than the Washington Post and The New York Times together.
Hard news is becoming the province of the weeklies. Time, Newsweek, and The Economist have real reporters out gathering news. The story quality is usually better than what's in the dailies; they're not as rushed. So nationally, we're doing OK.
As for local news, newspapers shot themselves in the foot with "fluff" sections - Food, Wine, Cars, Lifestyle, etc. that didn't require real reporting. On the advertising side, they ended up surviving on classifieds, real estate ads, car ads, and ads for local sales. The Internet does all those things better.
It's not clear who, if anybody, will pick up the slack with local news.
Some people devote their lives to a career because it's who they are, not what they do. As the newspapers die, a large pool of talent will be freed. Those who never really had the passion will find other jobs.
But, those who view journalism as their essence will somehow find a way to get paid while practicing their craft. They will invent the next journalism business. They will not quit.
Believing that the end of newspapers equals the end of journalists is like believing that once the record companies all die, there will be no more music.
Many bloggers complain that the "MSM" (that is, professional journalists) filter the news, and they want to bypass that filter. But the reality is that blogs are often a second filter on top of the first one. They take the content generated by the professionals (sometimes an article, sometimes some words taken out of context), and the blogger frames it with their own perspective and context.
Why would anyone want some random person adding yet another filter to their news? In large part, I think it's because the bloggers are willing to offer a level of info-tainment that the professionals won't: Uncorroborated rumor, conspiracy theory, unfounded amateur analysis, and outraged or outrageous opinions.
(Of course, there are many good aspects to blogs (here I am reading /.) and there are lousy professionals.)
If they can tailor the ads to geographical locations online, they can continue to generate revenue. The problem many print media have with converting to online media is that they haven't yet figured out a sufficiently good method to convert paper ad revenue sources to online sources. During the transition, they'll also have to deal with the expensive transportation/distribution channel issues. They still have to distribute to a large geographical area, but have reduced delivery. Unfortunately, that means consolidation of small papers.
I used purchase the Sunday papers to get the ad inserts. It's cheaper than driving to each store and picking up their weekly ads. I've been reading news online for several years. It's easier to "clip and save" any online article in my personal archive. Up until last year, I was subscribing to the Sunday edition to get the comics and ads. I've read comics online, but having the paper version makes it easier to take along, and cut out on the spur of the moment to post around my office. Paper ads used to have coupons. Now, many grocery stores have the stupid club cards. They made it "cheaper" for the stupid and lazy shoppers, but those of us that clipped coupons no longer get the fantastic discounts that used to be double or triple their marketted (falsified) club card discounts. That basically took away from the need of having paper ads and drove prices higher for those of us frugal enough to clip coupons. These days, stores have their weekly ads self hosted online. It would stull be nice to occassionally print them out and carry it with me, but flash media sucks and html ads are poorly formatted for print. These days, many more people could just store/view the ad on their web connected cell phone/pda. If the newspapers can figure out how to link all those localized paper ads properly and unobtrusively online, they can continue their model of generating revenue through ads.
Eventually, as the physical print ad model diminishes, the online ad model will increase. The idea of subscription to online services will take a little while to take hold as we dinosaurs of the free online services disappear and the younger generation have gotten used to more online services costing money and actually wanting to pay for it. The older online generation has been used to the internet being free because it had been a research/government network. The transition to the commercial net started during the boom and it will just take a little more time.
We used to get our paper every day. Then I noticed that we were taking the paper in in the morning and putting it into the recycle bin unread at the end of the week. We were getting all of our news from TV and the Internet. We only really used the paper for the Sunday ads (finding sales and coupons). We looked into Sunday only delivery and determined that our paper's Saturday-Sunday rate was a better deal. (I would read the paper most times on Saturday.) After awhile, we got a notice from our paper that we were being switchded to Thursday-Sunday delivery for no additional cost. Now we're basically in nearly the same boat as before. Every recycling day, 2 papers (Thursday & Friday) go into the bin unread. Saturday's is read and Sunday's is read only for the ads. If we could get the circulars/coupons online for cheaper than the cost of the paper (this would need to include ink costs to print the coupons), we would cancel our subscription entirely.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I for one welcome.
Here in Canada our mainstream newspapers and main news TV programs are all owned by two large corporations, CTVGlobeMedia and CanWestGlobal, whose editorial stance is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.
I mean the term democratic socialist media mogul is kind of an oxymoron isn't it.
It will be interesting to see if the blogosphere ends up with any particular bias that is different than what good citizens are pablum-fed in their daily TV news broadcast.
I surely hope so.
Although I am not sure that the move from people all having one spoon-fed opinion to a state of truthy factoid bombardment from all sides leading to a catatonic equal acceptance of or non-committal to any old statement or viewpoint is really a victory.
Crowd chants:
"WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS"
"WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS"
"WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS"
Pathetic squeaky voice in background:
"umm, errr, I'm not."
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Locals aren't going to go bust. They are still solvent, and will always be because the websites that will replace their print editions are the ones run by the paper. I live in a City of 300k and an Alexa comparison shows the local papers website getting more page views than /. and to a very area specific populace.
I'd like one of these guys to define what "Print" journalism is. I work in a news room and I'm not exactly sure. Does it mean the dead tree outlet? or the AP style news story? because in our room we consider stories on our website "print." The people who think they are going to be replaced by bloggers on a soap box and news agregators are probably the same people who thought it was worth investing billions into Pets.com.
I liked the graph he used in his article: start at the spike after 9-11 and show how it declined.
So what he's saying is that the news companies are switching over from selling their car thats made out of paper to a car thats made out of electrons, but that it's of serious import that the paper cars are declining?
Of course subscription = revenue. BUT revenue does NOT mean Cover All Operating Costs.
I used to work for a software vendor writing and implementing enterprise circulation systems for medium and large newspapers. For the greatest majority of all print media (and I would be surprised if there were more than a handful of exceptions) MOST revenue is derived from advertising. (How much did it cost to buy that one full page Firefox ad in the New York Times a few years ago?) In all cases, the cost of a subscription for a direct to home subscriber (if this is offered by the newspaper), and wholesale revenue to distributors, stores, etc. only covers a part of the distribution costs. Having your own experienced reporters in key areas of the world is very expensive. While most individual newspapers do not have the financial resources field reporters on their own, their publishers who own groups of papers can combine the revenue and pay for this quality reporting.
In the U.S.A. the papers offer what is called 'Total Market Coverage'. They have extensive and verified address lists for whole regions. They know who they deliver to on the main days where advertising goes out (usually Sundays in the U.S.A... could be Saturday or Sunday in Canada). They know the addresses they deliver Sunday papers to with all those adverts. They then also know the households that don't get the adverts. The paper then snail mails the advertisements and fliers to the remaining households that do not subscribe to the paper. The work they do verifying the addresses reduces the mailing costs but still it is expensive. They also have demographic information for the areas to make sure they don't sell ads for Cadillacs to areas that can only afford Kias.
The amount they can charge for advertising is based on numbers collected for the 'Audit Bureau of Circulation' (ABC); the 'Nelson Rating' of newspaper circulation. The most important numbers are ones reflecting 'paid circulation' as it is assumed those who pay for a newspaper actually read it. The higher the ABC number for paid subscriptions, the more a newspaper can charge for advertising... just like T.V.... more people watching means better revenue. When less newspapers are sold, less money is made. Ads may be mailed out to everyone, but you know the people who read the papers are more likely to see the ads and use them (or at least see them before they throw them out!).
In 1999 one of the big publishers (it might have been the one owning USA Today) successfully pushed to get unpaid circulation numbers into the ABC audit figures as well. This was to push up their numbers to be relatively high because they are the papers that show up at every hotel door in America every morning (but are not necessarily read). This gives a sort of bragging right: "look how big our circulation is". Even though many hotel guests just step over the paper on the way out the door. This is also an indication that subscription revenue doesn't really cover much when they can give away the paper for nothing (and in these cases most of the content is light weight news feed work where they don't have their own reporters stationed around the world).
The bottom line is that if papers can't keep their revenue stream up, and it is sliding like a runaway toboggan, they won't be able to function much longer. We won't have reliable and quality reporting any more. Sorry, but I don't believe some guy with no credentials or anyone to vouch for him personally, who writes something on the internet under an assumed blogger name, is trustworthy (but why not? if you read it on the internet it must be true... right?). Yes we can try to sell advertisements on newspaper web sites and charge by how many hits the paper gets as a rating mechanism. But with adblock and mostly unreliable hit counters (unreliable for basing expensive economic models on), it is an extremely steep uphill battle that I for one, am uncertain can be overcome.
Where there is a need, yes there will be someone to sell y
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The NYT is a perfect example of why newspapers are fading. Who wants to pay to read made-up stories and outright lies? There are very few real journalists left and none of them work for the Times.
The print media have very little time left to get their act together or disappear altogether. After the atrocious job they did covering the election (the NYT was essentially Obama's press department) it may already be too late. Time will tell.
As someone who has worked in newspapers for 20 years, including several stints as a web designer, I can tell you first-hand why print is declining, and why first-hand online news sources (that's the news department side of newspapers) are fading, even while online news is attracting more eyeballs than print ever did.
But first, a few basic facts:
In the traditional newspaper model, the cost of subscriptions (and newstand sales) paid for the cost of printing and distribution; that includes paper, ink, pressmen, machines to insert the glossy ads, amortized capital cost of the presses, and other related costs.
The costs of newsgathering, writing and editing, along with headline writers, the pay of advertising sales, circulation, receptionists, and so on, was to be paid from advertising, both the big ads on the regular pages, and from classified ads.
In effect, that should've/could've meant that moving from print distribution of the news to online distribution of the news would be possible, with most of the news operation intact -- except for printing and distributing the dead trees.
In fact, however, most publishers looked with disdain and bemusement at the people who thought online news would overtake printed versions. At one paper where I was creating and staffing the website (alone, for a seven-day paper, in 1995) the publisher said he'd seen this all before, a few years earlier, when some people said the news would all be delivered to homes via fax in a few years -- and that didn't happen, so why worry about the Internet?
When I moved to a different chain, I heard much the same thing from the CEO, who said people had claimed radio, then TV, and then fax machines would be the death of newspapers -- and none of that happened, so why worry? And, why invest much in this new medium?
Then, when sites such as Craigslist came out, those same news leaders were dismissing it -- the same way they'd never really worried about the free classified papers in their communities -- because such publications didn't have the prestige of the community's daily paper(s). They were likened to garage sales, while we were Macy's.
Then they spent years trying to come up with an "online strategy" which almost always was an effort to pretend to have an online presence, but preserve print readership by forcing readers to the print edition for the full story.
Attempts to make money online have been long hampered, at almost every paper, by a combination of politics, intertia and incompetence OUTSIDE of the newsroom.
For example, the task of signing readers up for online subscriptions falls to the circulation department -- yet the circulation director's bonuses remain tied to growth in print sales.
In advertising, it's often the same way. A salesperson might be able to sell an online ad -- if they work really, really hard at it. But in the same time, they can sell three times as much print advertising by simply calling the people they've always called and selling them what they've always sold them. This could be dealt with by adjusting commissions to make selling online ads worth the time, but few places have done that, perpetuating the inability of online operations to turn a profit, much less break even or help offset the losses being incurred elsewhere.
With all that said, the reporters keep plugging away. Sure, there are lazy, incompetent reporters, and lots and lots of press releases simply being re-written (or just re-typed). But in just the past year at the paper I work at (a small one in the Midwest) we've had stories about how the federal and state government manipulate the statistics in No Child Left Behind; another discovered long-established (and forgotten) city ordinances mandating water-conservation rules when water supplies drop to a certain level; another reporter built his own rough computer models and successfully challenged the Army Corps of Engineers' longstanding estimates of how much water was really stored in a local reservoir the city depends on.
Whoa is the press and their loss of financial recompense. Still, the perfect storm here is that the internet is taking over at the same rate that professional news is getting useless.
I see the newspapers, and the media in general, as shallow. They parrot news at the same level of understanding as an immature, uninformed citizen. (And they get praise from immature, uninformed citizens for doing this.) I'd like to think they are pandering, but I bet, as a whole, they've done it so long that true immaturity fills their ranks. I get talking heads presenting undue fear or bravado at every turn. I never feel I get a balanced set of facts. And frankly, I feel at times that it is malicious.
If anybody is the keeper of language, shouldn't it be the press? I barely know what "recession" or "bail-out" (or "liberal") mean anymore.
I expect the press to make us feel a little bit bad for attacking the wrong source of a problem or for slinging mud at persons who are making the best decisions possible. Instead, they encourage and indulge in childish behavior.
The presidential campaign was a travesty. The economic crisis is well on its was as one. I'd like to see news outlets sued for breach of contract to inform, but they never actually had a contract! It was implied. And I think they take advantage of this.
When they go after companies for jets, I think about the pot calling the kettle black.
The problem with the auto industry is that no one trusts they will turn the corner because they lived with their heads in the sand for 20 years. (And BTW, how can such a long-standing, high revenue industry turn upside down in just one month?) I think the media has the same implied problem. I think they've been digging this hole for 20 years. It's not just the internet. And not everyone wants to see them survive as is. Its time for some gut-wrenching change in quality.
Well, I ramble. You get the idea...
Although it's true national newspapers are under pressure, and it's right to worry about the disappearance of Watergate style fearless reporting, there's a huge benefit from the Internet: ordinary people can instantly tap news sources outside of the U.S. Some of the best and most insightful reporting I saw in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq came from Persian Gulf new sites.
I'm IT for several newspapers and am really concerned about their future. I don't agree with the web model because it doesn't make any money, not what you can make compared to print ads.
I just wish technology would catch up and we can actually have a newspaper-like film that can wirelessly receive the newspaper every day. There are some products out there like the Kindle and e-ink, but they are far from what I'm looking for as an end product.
Way to go lamely trying to tie a leftist rant (it's all the fault of teh evil big business and capitalism and Republicans) into this thread.
The OP is not stealing, or being a pirate or whatnot. It's certainly copyright infringement, and possibly plagiarism.
A handy guide:
http://www.filesavr.com/i/piracy.png
I live in the SanFrancisco bay area (Boston transplant) but I still frequent the Boston Globe's website. Why? Because the writers for The Globe, especially the Sports section write about those teams that I still follow. While national sites like ESPN are fine, but I actually like to read the articles written by specific journalists. If a new journalist comes on board, there's a good chance that I'll read them too. However, am never going to resort to some redsox google search http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=red+sox+blogs or http://news.google.com/news?um=1&tab=wn&hl=en&nolr=1&q=red+sox&btnG=Search+News.
Yes this is all about local news, but I like how newspapers like The Boston Globe, NY Times, WallStreetJournal are in effect filters or portals to news that meets a certain criteria. A criteria set by the paper, which may or may not be your own. Go ahead use a 90s buzzword like "News Portal". While some of the content is from AP/Reuters, quite a bit of it is not.
My biggest concern with some transition from newspapers to "Joe Blog", is that in the first case the person had to be hired by the newspaper based upon their skills and credentials. I assume this to equate to a certain level of quality. I don't want to have to _mine_ blogger.com or blogspot to find someone writing about the topic. Who a) probably doesn't do independent research or b) have the connections. I can blog all day long based upon how I feel about a particular subject, but I'm not talking to athletes, coaches or general managers.
Besides, I have no real concerns if I spill some milk on my morning paper; but I'm not going to eat my cereal next to my laptop.
and it is doing its best to do just that.
Biased, right wing opinion that inevitably follows the land developer, corporate line. Petty editorialists and nasty whiners they are just like bloggers but get paid.
A weak news source it reruns WashPo, NY Times, WSJ
stories and syndicated crap to make sure we all
tow the party line and practice the two minute hate. I am not sorry to see them die.
The real work that newspapers do is REPORTING, actually calling or talking to principals in question, doing investigations etc. EVERYTHING else the newspaper does from classifieds to comics to sports scores is intended to support those tasks.
Boy the owners of many newspapers would disagree strongly. For instance the Tribune Corp, which recently bought the LA Times, and has gone through several rounds of laying off newsroom staff to increase profits (which were already at 25%), has made it very clear that the main products of a newspaper are profit and shareholder value. Everything else is just support tasks. Reporting is merely supposed to draw you into looking at the ads.
Now if the rtechie was right, and reporting was the heart and soul of the newspaper industry then maybe they wouldn't have become brainless mouthpieces of the Bush administration in the march to war. Maybe if they covered the issues that matter to the citizens of the US instead of serving up a plate of steaming BS, people would still pay attention. Maybe they would still have my respect. They don't. Not in the US anyway. It's really too bad.
-- QED
The RIAA has a legal leg to stand on in its lawsuits, in that P2P networks are distributing works that are legally owned by the MAFIAA. Independant websites that solicit classifieds and ads are anologous to independant music labels that compete legally with the RIAA labels. Just like the independant labels sign artists and distribute their music via different channels, so do Craigslist and Monster solicit ads and distribute them through different channels. Nothing illegal about that.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I work in London, England. I commute 30 miles or so daily. At the station in the morning I can pick up a Metro - free daily paper (National but with a heavy London slant). On arrival in London, as I walk to the tube (metro/subway/undegtround) - I'm generally offered at least one other freebie - not usually a daily one - there's generally a TV/Entertainments based weekly and a Sports Weekly - which I never pick up - but lots do. As I'm walking I pass a rack of free papers - huge bins with hundreds of copies - containing dailies and weeklies for foreign nationals resident in London - there's a big pick up on Polish, Lithuanian and South African in my bit of London. Also there are bins dispensing the free classified ad papers , and the free jobs advertising papers, and the specialist car selling papers. On my way home, I'll be offered (several times) - copies of London Lite; and The London Paper - both free London dailies. Lot's of people pick these up. In fact you can get on most trains and buses in the capital, and there'll be one there waiting for you - you pick it up, read it while you travel, then leave it. As for the local press - most of that's free too - I walk into McDonalds close to my work, and pick up the Camden New Journal - free of charge. All of these papers also have an internet presence - but they all seem to be shifting lots of paper copies
The day of the newsclown is numbered.
As people become fed up with the lies,distortions and misleading of a story for political reasons,the new avenue of news from the internet and citizen jounalists replaces its predecessor.
Most folks would rather be misinformed by accident than by caveat.
Now if we can just rid ourselves of the broadcast newsclowns.Oh well, their time is coming.
This reminds me of the present drawn out death of the music industry.Inevitable to all on the outside,invisible to the dinosaurs actually disappearing and necessary for the propagation of music in the future.
Just let it die.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
1991 Wolf Blitzer commenting live on CNN as a US Patriot missile launches in Israel, flies across a valley and crashes into an Israeli town. "we have just seen a low-trajectory SCUD missile attack."
No mention of it in the rest of the US media.
I knew then that all the media says is lies.
Need to look at it this way... TV/radio news is "free" so long as you don't mind enduring advertising. Newspapers you can skip over the ads, but with broadcast you can't (unless you time-shift using a DVR and fast forward) - and you're still getting the news, but without the paper. Radio and TV have been doing this for decades. Online is really no different.
I used to get the paper every day... then noticed it got thinner and thinner - with at least 75% of every column inch dedicated to advertising. The local reporting got smaller and smaller - and local newspaper layoffs became a regular event. So really I was paying around $4.00 a week to have what amounted to advertisements with a few AP/Reuters stories and some locally generated content - mostly regurgitated news releases put out by people looking for some press exposure. The AP/Reuters stuff can be found online, and the local press releases are all crap anyway (i.e., local VFW post's ladies auxiliary bake sale), or just more of the obvious ("East Bumfuck residents dig out of snow storm" - really? You mean the snow storm only happened there and no one else in the region knew about it? Well no shit.).
I used to bring the paper to work everyday so I can have something to read at lunch. Then I got a smartphone and lo and behold I could read the news on that instead. The 7-day subscription got shitcanned. Eventually, the Saturday/Sunday subscription eventually lapsed because the in-depth stuff was also available online too.
Yes - there is some local/regional/state stuff that isn't always online - but no matter your news source, you're always going to miss out on something - so you need to diversify your news portfolio so to speak. RSS feeds certainly help. Every city has their local paper and TV/cable news channels online now. PBS stations and the weekly alternative newspapers are also online.
It sounds like the sticker price of the newspaper covers printing and distribution. It's a lot of overhead. Online isn't cheap either (someone has to manage the website, pay for bandwidth, hosting, programming, etc...) but you're not sending an army of people out at 4:00 am each morning to deliver the paper either. I think when you compare dead-tree to online, you'll spend less money going online.