Slashdot Mirror
The Newspaper Isn't Dead Yet
theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo had high hopes for using the Kindle DX — Amazon's new large-screen e-reader — to read newspapers. A good first effort, says Manjoo, who concludes that for now newsprint still beats the $489 Kindle. While he has issues with latency, what he really misses relates to graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list, leaving a reader to guess which pieces are most important to read. Newspapers, by contrast, opine on the importance of the day's news using easy-to-understand design conventions — important stories appear on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. Also, because of its overnight delivery model, Manjoo gripes that the Kindle suffers from a lack of timeliness, making it not even as good as a smartphone."
Do you actually understand that almost all of a newspapers revenue is derived from advertising, not from paper sales? And apparently a lot of companies haven't got the memo that newspapers are dead because they still pay exorbitant prices for advertising spots on the front pages of small hick-town newspapers. And apparently a lot of people that subscribe to newspapers haven't got the memo because they still subscribe to it.
People who read websites like Slashdot will access information from the Internet, the majority of people still read newspapers.
I actually like the newspaper format better, it has a beginning and an end, I can it over breakfast. I'd have trouble even reading the new Slashdot summaries over breakfast, not to mention the articles.
Newspapers are filled to the brim with letters to the editor complaining that a certain "important" story was buried in the back pages by incompetent/evil editors. To some extent, these letters are correct: Often, important stories (in my view) are buried whereas the latest escapades of Paris Hilton make it to the front page. However, I do not have time to go through the entire paper, and I appreciate having a professional make a sort of triage estimate as to which stories are more important. Sure, mistakes are made, but I find that, in general, the important stories do appear on the front page, and it makes my reading experience that much better.
That said, I'm not sure why Kindle can't organize the stories like Google News, if I am interested in a story, it pretty much always appears in the top headlines. If necessary, they can license the technology from google, I'm sure they would embrace the partnership.
This is going to turn into another one of those discussions where people who read Slashdot and other tech sites forget that they are amongst a minority of computer users and subsequently the consensus that is reached here won't reflect reality at all.
Now go take another look at your local paper. Maybe there's something there you should be interested in.