Postmortem for a Dead Newspaper

Techdirt points out a great postmortem for the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that ended up shutting down because they couldn't adapt to a world beyond print. While long, the talk (in both video and print) is incredibly candid coming from someone who lived through it and shares at least some portion of the blame. "It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset. ... The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with."

Comments

BS

[p51d007]

The demise of the print newspaper has a few causes. 1. We live in a 24/7 news cycle, with 24 hour news on tv, cellphones etc. 2. By the time a newspaper is printed & delivered, the "news" isn't new anymore. 3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers. 4. You could learn VOLUMES by the stuff they DON'T put in a newspaper.

Re:BS

[nomadic]

3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.

That's a myth concocted by the right to explain why they don't win every election even though they claim they represent a majority of Americans. The only explanation would be someone was "deceiving" all those red-blooded Americans into voting socialist. Journalists, as a class, tend to slant slightly liberal on a personal level (as do people with college educations in general, and I believe in this day and age most journalists have one), but 95% of news, especially local news, doesn't really have much to do with politics, and a lot of the the other 5% they manage more or less to keep their biases out of it. On the national level there are plenty of conservative-leaning newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times.

Re:BS

[Tobor the Eighth Man]

Honestly, I disagree with most of these reasons.

Most of the news on a 24 hour news cycle is old, too. The same stories get endlessly rehashed. Despite the fact that there's more frequent updates and coverage, there's usually not even enough NEWS to fill a 24 hour news cycle. Watch any cable news network for more than an hour and you're liable to hear the same stuff over and over again.

The point about liberal slants may be true for the editorial sections of a few specific, national newspapers, but most small-town newspapers - the ones that are really suffering - are and have always been fairly conservative, particularly in more rural and conservative areas. Admittedly, this may not be the case with the Rocky Mountain News (I'm not familiar enough with it specifically to comment). But for most local newspapers, the people doing the reporting are just that: local, not so-called "mainstream media elite" from the big city, or what-have-you.

The reason newspapers are failing is because advertising revenue has fallen in print media, while the price of advertising online is simply too low to sustain the sort of large organizations traditional newspapers have required. That's it. It's not people defecting from dying traditional media to seek the new golden horizon of genius online reporting or sad dinosaurs who can't keep up with the new times, it is a business issue and little else. It's also the fact that the internet is inherently an international medium, and people want national and international news online. And there's simply no way the Bupkisville Free Chronicler can compete with the NY Times, WaPo, and The Times of London on that front.

Re:BS

[aristotle-dude]

By "very liberal" you must mean "not foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing reactionary douchebag."

No, he means "foaming at the mouth" pseudo-left wing reactionary douche bag. If you Americans are going to use the term left or right wing, please use it properly. Democrats are right of center. They are only slightly more to the center than Republicans but there is no popular "left" in the US.

Re:BS

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.

Actually, I'd argue just the opposite. The success of Fox News from a large number of viewers who watch nothing else speaks more to the fact that people will go out of their way and become loyal consumers of "news" that has a distinct slant that confirms the viewers' already conceived ideals. People like news that doesn't give them facts so much as comfortable facts. People like Websites where they can talk to people who don't challenge their ideas and don't make them put in any effort to determine the truth.

Fox News is the epitome of this and is far more focuses on entertainment than journalistic integrity. Heck, they went to court and argued they have no legal obligation to not fire people for refusing to lie on TV and for refusing to kill a story about a health danger to the public. They're legally right too, they have no obligation not to lie to their viewers, but any organization that makes that argument in court is not "news" any more than a Frootloops commercial is. That's not to say some programs on the network don't have some integrity, of course, but the corporation does not.

At one time I thought the internet might open up the world. People would be able to hear views from around the world and directly communicate with those people inexpensively. People could thus gain a wider perspective and understanding. In truth, human nature is such that it has allowed us to self segregate more. People don't even have to talk to so diverse a range of people as live in their neighborhood because they can find an online forum that fits exactly with their beliefs and preconceived ideas and spend all their time talking to people without the discomfort of disagreement. It's much easier to complain about one's favorite villainized segment of our society when one does not actually have to hear them and can just attack strawman arguments one poses on their behalf. There are forums for people who thing the earth is flat or is literally 6000 years old and the people there can safely discuss their nonsense knowing the moderators will ban and remove posts from anyone who challenges it with facts or controversy. People don't want unbiased opinion and Fox is another example of the consumer getting what they want and not what they might need.

Re:BS

[UnknownSoldier]

s/Fox/Faux/
or
s/News/Propaganda/

Fixed it for you.

Re:BS

[Geoffrey.landis]

3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.

That's a myth concocted by the right to explain why they don't win every election even though they claim they represent a majority of Americans.

Yep. It's a self-serving myth that's been pretty thoroughly debunked.

(And, correspondingly, the far left claims that the news has a significant conservative bias. Both are very self-serving myths for the fringe, since they justifies their telling people to ignore the news, and only listen to their carefully shaped and trimmed news, without those inconvenient facts that might disturb the ideology.)

In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)

Many of the large newspapers that people point to in the US stem from big cities, which have multiple newspapers-- for the most part, these newspapers split the political spectrum, with one newspaper favored by the more conservative readers, and the other favored by the more liberal (e.g., the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald).

Re:BS

[wcrowe]

3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.

I think the conclusion which is being drawn here is incorrect. Yes, Fox News and online bloggers, etc, are successful, but not because they are conservative. They have become popular because they don't really so much report the news, as try to manipulate it in some way so as to cause people to get emotionally involved with the story. It was only coincidental that conservative outlets were the first to do this.

However, I am seeing this kind of news "reporting" going on with news organizations of all flavors (conservative, liberal, whatever) and at all levels. If you carefully watch any news outlet now, especially TV, you will see them report a news story, then they get a few talking heads to "expound" on the story, and it is done in such a way as to get viewers emotionally charged with the story one way or another. Then, more often or not, they invite the viewer to write in, call in, or otherwise "sound off" about the issue -- which of course the viewers do.

Re:BS

[AP31R0N]

Eh. Democrats are our left, we'll call them left. Any further left that that and you're moving back to the right (down?). Much of what the rest of the world calls left leads to a different flavor of authoritarianism. Some authoritarian asshat dictators claim to represent the people, some are honest and don't. Left/right is only one axis of something more complicated. Chavez would likely paint himself as leftist, as might much of the world. But he's a jackbooted thug. That's not what "left" should mean, i think.

Hrm.

Re:BS

[Enderandrew]

As someone who studied journalism for years, and work for a newspaper, it is very much the truth. The paper I work for is certainly conservative, but most print media is liberal. What amazes me is most of my friends insist that MSNBC has no slant, while most of my coworkers insist that Fox News has no slant.

When a certain media source matches your own particular views, people tend to think it isn't slanted because it tells you what you want to hear.

That doesn't mean it isn't slanted. Objective journalism is all but dead in this country, because biased news generates more income.

Re:BS

[frank_adrian314159]

... and conservatives are trying to stop such actions (As the solution of the problem will do more harm then good).

Yes, because things like abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and equal rights for African-Americans (all things that the "conservatives" of the time were against) were the downfall of the country.

Re:BS

[gnick]

I think I have to object to your definition of "Center". The democrats and republicans are way too alike for my tastes, but if you're going to say that most of the US is right of center, you've got to decide where you're putting the center. When referencing US politics/voters, I'd call the center somewhere around the middle of the political stances of American politicians and voters. Defining a "global" center seems pretty meaningless for any useful discussion on local politics. Sure, you can say that Holland is generally left of the US. Or you can say that Iran is generally right of the US. But neither of those things mean much for a US-centric discussion.

Relevant to this discussion, about all you can say is that journalists tend to be to the left of the American center. Or that Americans in general tend to be to the left/right of Country X (although I fail to see how that would relate to the death of American newspapers).

I'm sorry, I got side-tracked. How does your post relate to newspapers dying again? You're rated at +5, so I'm assuming that I'm missing something important here.

Re:BS

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Then explain slashdot -- MS vs Apple, the RIAA apologists you see here in any story about copyright, vi vs Emacs, US vs UK, people for the drug laws vs people with a clue, etc.

Well partly some people do like a good argument and a disagreement and to be challenged, they're just a minority. Those people will go out of their way to find places to get a discussion or to try to espouse their beliefs and attack the beliefs of others. Some people go to christian chat rooms simply to tell them they're all idiots for not being atheists... but those people are fairly uncommon. Partly, people still argue with one another, just over comfortable issues once they can assume a like minded. Some people are happy to argue about whether the mantle that covered the heavens before Noah's flood was made of ice or liquid water, once they know they're in a comfortable setting where they won't be ridiculed for their lack of reason or scientific understanding for believing there was a giant flood that covered the whole earth in the first place.

Slashdot is also interesting because it is a subject matter site. People will argue the objective merits of vi and emacs all day, but they know that if someone comes at them with an argument that reading or writing anything but the bible is the work of satan and that they are going to hell because the bible says so, that person will be modded down by the community of modders, sort of protection in numbers for the ego.

In this community, at least, you have VERY diverse opinions, arguments, areas of expertise, ages...

Certainly, but we also filter out a large range of arguments, mostly ones that are not nerdy enough, like faith based assertions, and threats of personal violence. To call the membership of Slashdot diverse is fair in a way, but it is a self selecting group of people who pride themselves on being nerds, that is intelligence. This alienates a huge portion of the population and makes Slashdot readership very atypical. Heck, go down to your local bar and try to have the same kind of conversations as a typical one on this forum. It seems to be that people who value intelligence (a commonality here) are one of the subsets of our population that do like to argue for the sake of the discussion and the value it can bring.

Re:BS

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What evidence do you have besides that you don't like Fox that people only watch that confirms their presuppositions? Do you watch Fox? Have you ever agreed with Fox on anything?

My hypothesis was that people watch news shows and read news blogs because those shows confirm their presuppositions and challenge them less with facts that contradict their world view. I further hypothesized that Fox was the forefront of this movement. My support for this was the well documented trend of Fox News viewers to not watch any other news channel, when compared to those who view other stations which were shown to be more willing to consume news from multiple sources (not necessarily on the same issue).

I don't watch Fox News (although I did in the past) but then I don't really watch news on TV at all. I mostly prefer to read my news, primarily via internet outlets and aggregation sites like news.google.com. As to whether I agree with Fox on anything, if it comes to that, it isn't news. News is supposed to be presenting facts, not opinions and I'm sure some of the facts Fox presents are, well, factual. I am not willing to trust that however, given their track record. In my mind they lost any benefit of the doubt I would give to a normal news program or agency when they pissed on journalistic integrity in their court case.

The Internet is exposing people to other views because news sites, like /., are not pushing political views -- just their readers.

I don't think I follow you. How is that exposing people to other views? And what makes you think the average person goes to sites like Slashdot instead of special interest sites. My brother might be a good example of an average guy. The websites he visits and gets news from are devoted to AR-15 ownership, Kawasaki motorcycle ownership, and kayaking. The majority of the news he reads comes as articles posted in one of these three forums, with the vast majority being from the first one. He has pretty well self selected himself into getting a very narrow selection of news because of that, and I should think that is actually the norm.

Which, seems to be a trend considering that quasi-non partisan sites are more popular than the traditional ones.

I don't know what you mean in your terminology. What's a quasi-non partisan site? Do you have an example or two?

Furthermore, I don't think there's anything wrong with going to places that you agree with because you believe their[sic] right, not because you're sheltering yourself from opposing views.

We're not arguing the morality of what people are doing here. I was just discussing what I see the trends to be and how I think that has negative results. People tend towards internet sites that provide filtered news with a predetermined slant already injected. I see that as limiting and divisive and simply partitioning our society into smaller groups with less exposure to diverse views and facts that people in their small societal subset tend not to be exposed to.

I'm not trying to argue partisan politics here either. I think the Democratic and Republican parties are both very wrong about half the time. There isn't even a third party that lines up well with my values and understanding of the world. When I'm on Google news and I see five different papers have an article on something, I click on the BBC first, because they don't provide much opinion in their news and tend to do a professional job with the facts (and because their take on US news tends to be a bit less slanted). Fox isn't on my shitlist because of what their political affiliations are any more than say NBC. They are there because they have such strong political affiliations which does not make for credible news. They are leading the charge towards slanted partisan news and they have rejected of any sort of journalistic integrity. If tomorrow NBC were in court arguing they had a legal right to lie to their v

Re:BS

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

This isn't grade school and everyone isn't equally right. You have to form opinions rationally and defend them logically and show your work, or you are simply wrong.

You've just proven the point you were trying to deny. They aren't "different", they are "simply wrong". And you're the one holding the red pen grading other people's opinions, so you get to decide if what you don't believe could be "logical" or "rational". No possible bias there.

There isn't bias in deciding what is logical and rational because it is a formalized method. I have no problem with people who have different opinions than I do and people with access to different facts or who have a fundamental difference of value can reasonably and rationally disagree. The rhetorical method of discussion is how people discuss and issue to do one of three things:

• determine what the fundamental disagreement about a fact is so that it can be researched
• discover what the fundamental difference of value is so that others can understand the fundamental difference and everyone can better form their own opinion
• expose a logical flaw in the decision making process of one or more of the rhetoricians so that they can correct it

You see, some people simply are wrong in their opinions, wrong as in incorrect not wrong as in immoral (as that is subjective). I am happy to acknowledge the opinions of others as just as valid as mine, but I expect the same rigor in discussion that I present. If people aren't forming their opinions according to a logical process then they have no basis for presenting an argument to others and should not bother to try.

I saw a poll the other day. Don't remember where. Maybe here. 70% of people now believe that the mainstream media have a bias.

Everyone has bias. It's inherent in our nature. That's why we develop formal processes to limit the effect it has on our formal communication with others. The news is supposed to be using journalistic methods and reporting facts, not their opinion of facts. I postulated that this is becoming less and less the case because the public prefers bias. They prefer to be given not just facts, but a comfortable opinion as to how they should interpret those facts.

For now, however, I'm writing you off as a nutjob ...

Yes, he must be "simply wrong", and if you can't prove it logically and rationally, you'll write him off as a nutjob.

In the opening lines of his rant he committed several logical fallacies. That is incorrect, but moreover, he was not addressing the points I made in his writing, and that's not even an argument, it's some guy going off on a rant without addressing the statements that led him to go off on a rant.

So yes, he is simply wrong in that he argued that because most people believe something it must be true. He is simply wrong in that he attacked what he claims I was going to accuse him of in the future. He was wrong in that his writing did not address what I wrote and was thus not relevant. He was not wrong in that he did not bother to educate himself well enough to form a rational opinion and present it, but he was deficient and I don't see a lot of point in presenting reason to people who don't understand it or reading a lengthy rant obviously written by someone who is irrational. But I did not refuse to have a discussion with him, I just presented reasonable boundaries if he wants to have a civilized discussion and asked him to adhere to them.

Re:BS

[IgnoramusMaximus]

perhaps spirituality

That, and lack of knowledge about various "trivialities", like science etc, is the sure-fire path to mind-boggling religious woo-woos, assorted New-Age hokum, and sooner or later to "spiritual" stock market Ponzi schemes.

I have more respect for a man who can drop a transmission than one who knows the top three reasons why Chavez is an awesome leader.

Which is truly great if one needs one's transmission overhauled. Of course when one is interested in what Chavez is up to ... then not so much. Which is precisely the point. People who care about their transmissions far more than about the geo-political goings-on, should not then act surprised and violently upset when their opinions on the global affairs are summarily put into the "laughable nonsense" file.

You see, what you are trying to do here is the classic case of "have your cake and eat it too". Either you are willing to invest the time and effort to get informed, at which point you get the chance of your opinion having some probability of being correct, or you are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong and thus justly treated like the ignorant hillbilly you seem when you try, loudly, very very loudly, to enforce your "view" on those who actually spent time trying to learn the stuff. A fact which most anti-intellectuals refuse to accept (which is why they are anti-intellectuals and why they watch Fox). Which, incidentally, was historically always quite popular at times, the "an-angry-and-menacing-mob-is-always-right" (particularly when confronting wimpy "intellectuals", "professors", "scientists" and the like) branch of philosophical approach to scientific debate never quite having gone out of style.

To put it in the terms you mentioned, it is like having some salesman show up and demand that you take his advice as to the exact procedure of removal of that hypothetical transmission, despite having never seen one up close, never you mind knowing how one works. But he claims that he doesn't need to know so because he has far more respect for people who know how to calculate compound interest lease payments in their head, than some "trivial" "transmission repair" knowledge.

You see, he goes for the Mammon "spirituality" view of the world, where Everything Is A Sale (sadly I am not kidding, I personally knew a salesman who actually believed that life was one gigantic, never-ending series of Sales).

Trust is your most valuable asset.

[girlintraining]

Do you know why people are moving away from traditional media? Because it acts like it's better than we are. Blogging has become popular because it's there in plain english, the way we look at things -- and it's accessible and free. I can share it with my friends instantly -- unlike a newspaper which is physical and takes time. With the digital age, all of my friends are only a few feet away from me most of the time. Cell phones and laptops are like spiders -- there's always one within a few feet of you.

Traditional media has forgotten that the most important asset they have is trust -- and accessibility. There is still just as much need today to know what's going on in the world now as there was fourty years ago. But most media is awash in a crapflood of advertisements and profit-oriented behavior, which when people see they reflexively numb their senses. Seriously -- hold a normal conversation with someone and in the middle of it toss off a marketing slogan. If they don't strangle you, did you notice they're about half as smart as they were a second ago? They recover, but the momentum in the conversation is now gone. We don't trust traditional media (GenX and GenY) because it's full of crap and irrelevant to our daily lives -- so we blog and we talk to our friends, and they filter stories they find relevant back to us.

I have friends on facebook that post links of personal interest to their feeds so the rest of us can see and comment on it, and this is the foundation of the new media -- peer relationships. Journalism needs to mesh with this, and the journalists themselves need to get out there and put their reputation on the line in a public and accessible way. I want to 'friend' journalists I like and trust on facebook and then see their stories -- separate from these stupid constricting media websites and the constant crap-flood of advertisements that go with them.

Okay, but how do the journalists get paid? I mean, it costs them time to do the job, right? I don't have all the answers there, because it's not my industry, but I know that having a hundred friends that listen to me about anything related to computers is worth something. And a lot of people here on slashdot are in the same boat.

Re:Trust is your most valuable asset.

[jedidiah]

It's not just the pretense.

Quite often, people with direct knowledge of events or a subject area
will find that "Journalists" get things terribly wrong. Their view of
a given field may be woefull out of date or they might put so much
spin on a set of facts that those that actually present don't recognize
the situation anymore.

Once you see this, you quickly lose any trust in journalists.

Then you continually wonder what else they are leaving out or misrepresenting.

Journalism has lost most of it's value based on it's originally stated goals.

If journalists are also "full of themselves" then this probably doesn't help the quality of their output.

Hindsight is 20/20

[BadAnalogyGuy]

There are a handful of leader-types.

- The conservative (like this guy). He understands his company's strengths only as a function of what it currently is. He can fortify the company's business in good times.

- The forward-thinker (like *gack* Larry Ellison). He understands not only his own company's strengths in regard to what it is, but also in regards to the changing environment. He can take action to position the company well for the future.

- The visionary (like Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin). He understands both his company and the changing environment and can perceive the changes within the changing environment. He is able to not only strengthen the core competences of his company but drive new business and create new markets.

- The idiot (like Woz (sorry)). They grab on to anything that looks like a good idea and drive it forward without care for business, competition, longevity.

What happens is that every once in a while the idiot will strike it big (Jeff Bezos). Most of the time, these guys go out of business. On the other hand, the conservative leaders will do what they can and most of the time it pays off. Markets really don't change very much, and there will always be winners and losers. All they need to do is try to stay on the winning side as much as possible.

But RMN stuck to what it knew and failed. This is what happens in business. But to look back now and to analyze the failure is a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. Of course it's easy to see all the trends after they've passed. It's easy to see where mistakes were made and how easily it probably could have been to avoid them. But at the time it would have been much more difficult to make the same judgment call.

It was a failure of management to fail to adapt to the changing business environment, but not every leader is going to be a forward thinker and even fewer will be visionaries. You can academically analyze these business cases from now to eternity, but unless you're actually in the leadership chair at the moment of crisis, you'll never know whether you would make the right choice.

Newspaper Value

[colganc]

The main value in newspapers previously was their distribution network. They had a system in place to distribute information. Radio, TV, and the internet all compete with them for information systems. Each one added more competition, lower latency, and broader reach. In short they provided better value. A daily delivery of dead tree is a non-optimal delivery system. It is getting boring hearing about newspapers and TV news dieing. Why care? The replacement is here. It is better, faster, cheaper. It is the internet.

Re:Newspaper Value

[Rob Riggs]

They should have gone weekly, focusing on Denver, Colorado, and Western US interests in the same way that Time/Newsweek/et al focus on US national interests. No one owns that market (yet) and there are enough folks that would pay for it. They could have been a mainstream Westword and people would have continued to pay for it. It would not succeed as a daily. A daily just isn't needed. I doubt the Denver Post is going to last more than a few more years.

Re:Original Blog Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

I skimmed it. In other words ignore the end users of your product at your peril. If you think you know better than the end user your usually wrong. Sure there are tons of examples of dumb end users. But in the end if you do not do what a majority of your end users want they will find/invent something that does. What are they asking for now vs 10 years ago? If you do not keep re-evaluating what you are selling you usually end up selling something people no longer want. Do people still want a pet rock? Probably a small few do. But you do not want a factory cranking out 300k a month to satisfy a demand that is not there.

With newspapers people want more 'local' stories. Less AP/Reuters shoveled at us. So sites like drudge/fark/slashdot and so on took over that market.

We wanted a place to list our junk for sale and do it cheap. Instead eBay and Craigslist took the market away from them at low costs and better interfaces.

We wanted news to show up instantly as it happened. So sites put up RSS feeds to shove them at us faster. Instead with newspapers you find out tomorrow.

We wanted a way to read just our comics instead of 2 pages we ignored. So we went to the individual comic sites and just read them.

They forgot about the 'why' the people who pay their bills were around. While advertisers probably paid a large portion of the bills. If there is no audience the advertisers will go elsewhere.

The internet dismantled ever reason a person would want a paper piece by piece. Papers let the genie out of the bottle and there is no way to put him back in.

They would have failed anyway

[bzzfzz]

I read TFA (more specifically the speech transcript) and I don't believe that the Rocky Mountain News would have been much better off even if they did everything right. There aren't any city-specific news web sites out there that are making anything like the kind of money that newspapers made in their heyday. Like the buggy whips, the telegraph industry, and home coal delivery the business is gone and the new industry that is replacing it is too far removed for a transition to be possible.

It IS NOT about "community"

[realmolo]

Dead-tree newspapers are dying for one simple reason: All the news anyone could ever want is available for free on the internet. Just a Google search away. The whole idea that a newspaper can survive by catering to the "community" (either in real-life or online) is stupid. It's something to make the investors/owners feel better as their doom inevitably approaches.

I've thought about it a lot, and I don't think there is any workable "defense" against free news sites. The newspapers are all going to die, or at the very least, shrink radically. Even if they start really producing some great, exclusive content, it isn't going to help for long, and it isn't going to help them regain their fortunes.

The news world has changed.

Re:It IS NOT about "community"

[93 Escort Wagon]

Dead-tree newspapers are dying for one simple reason: All the news anyone could ever want is available for free on the internet. Just a Google search away.

I disagree with this statement. For world news and events, this is largely true at present - but largely because Google (and others) are pulling info from the online content offered by "dead tree" newspapers, IMO. But the thing we're currently losing when a newspaper dies is good local news and reporting. Amateur bloggers simply don't cut it. Twitter doesn't cut it. Look at the crap that was all over Twitter during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, for instance - the noise (incorrect information, incorrect speculation, plus repeaters) overwhelmed any real news content (and it's not like you could really tell the difference between facts and fantasy from half a world away).

Quality content requires some sort of editorial presence at some level.

Thing is, the newspapers are mostly doing a piss-poor job of adapting to the new online reality. I'm sure once they all die people will notice the void, and because of that eventually that void will get filled.

Re:It IS NOT about "community"

[superdana]

All the news anyone could ever want is available for free on the internet. Just a Google search away.

And who do you suppose is writing that news? While I strongly believe that the newspaper industry is unsustainable in its present form, the news does not write itself. We will always need professional journalists, and there will always be a demand for local news. The newspaper industry as we know it may very well collapse. But in doing so, it will only be making room for a new generation of professional journalism that can exist within the boundaries of the world today. Think of it as the business equivalent of a forest fire.

Re:Original Blog Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry. A webpage on the Internet will never replace the feel of the morning newspaper in your hand, with a cup of coffee and a danish or bagel within reach of the other.

Pry. cold. dead.

Newspapers didn't die because they were primitive

[Anonymous Coward]

They big argument against newspapers on Slashdot is this perception that they are low tech. I know personally the reason I stopped reading a daily paper had nothing to do with the internet. I stopped years before the internet got relevant for a few good reasons. First was far too many ads. In a major city like LA or New York you got a daily paper the size of a small phone book for a handful of stories you actually wanted to read with the bulk of it being ads. The Sunday papers were even worse. Also newspapers were where you went to get the whole story and not the fluff you tended to get through television. That changed and the quality of stories and reporting dropped like a rock. I saw it happen early on with my hometown paper, I come from a very small town. Back in the day they covered national news stories but by the end they were more like a high school paper. I found gradually with the newspapers I was reading the relevant stories got rarer and rarer and the quality of the information wasn't as good as I was getting on the evening news. I often found there were no more than two or three stories that interested me and some times there were none. The internet was the death blow for the papers but they were weakened before the internet came along. The decline was apparent back in the 80s and revenues have been falling for 20 years or more. The reasons for the decline are hard to put a finger on because blaming even TV doesn't make much sense because TV news was decades old when the newspapers started their fall from grace. In the end it may be more the newspaper's fault than technology itself. Focusing more on ad revenue and not on news itself weakened them and made them open for failure. Once they were the only source of news, then they were still the best source of news and finally the became a poor source of news. Their final death blow was easily available news and the need for news on demand but those things weren't the root cause of the newspaper's fall from grace. Most people on the site probably don't remember a time when newspapers were your primary source of news. Most thing things are better now but the truth is the quality of news is appalling. Things have gotten so bad most consider blogs a source of news, they don't in any way report news they are purely predigested information and mostly opinion and not news. There are no standards for blogs. Even web sites like CNN are shockingly bad. It's hard to find an article without typos. In an age of spell checkers they actually post most stories with typos. That's beyond embarassing. In the old news days a single miss-spelled word or mistake in a story was a black mark for an editor. On line news is largely free of editorial oversight. The death of newspapers shouldn't be celibrated but mourned. TV news has become news bunnies and male models and on-line news is so chaotic that there's no way to separate fact from fiction. The death of newspapers is in some ways the death of news.

Re:blogging wastes my time

[the_womble]

So why do these edited sources keep making factual mistakes, write misleading stories, bury stories that do not suit their political line etc?

Read Reuters for neutral factual coverage and blogs for opinion and analysis. That said I do read a few newspapers and the BBC online.

Re:blogging wastes my time

[0123456]

There might be some fact checking then

But probably won't be. Almost every news story I've been involved with -- either directly, by knowing some of the people involved, or by understanding the technology or science they're reporting on -- has been sensationalist garbage which bears little resemblance to the facts.

I find far more facts and better analysis of them on blogs than in mainstream media.

Blogging tends to be more like newspaper columns where assume a certain bias and literary style in whom you chode to read.

Sorry, but if you think that newspapers are unbiased, I have a bridge you might like to buy.

Re:Original Blog Posting

[paiute]

And a piece of newsprint will never have links embedded in it to get more background on the subject, doesn't have tabs so you can be checking local, regional, and worldwide news with a click, doesn't have video of the event, doesn't let me whip over to Wikipedia to get a quick introduction to topics I'm not up to date on, doesn't let me compare prices between Home Depot/Lowes/Ace Hardware vs. ordering it from Amazon, etc. All while drinking my morning beverage and trying to keep the cream cheese off the keyboard.

Not much "News" in a Newspaper any more

[Anonymous Coward]

Take any daily paper, from any city in the U.S. and measure how many column inches are actual news articles.... now subtract the number of inches that are from A.P. or direct pulls/quotes from other news papers, blogs or web sites, leaving only the news actually written reporters employed at that paper. Is that number greater then zero? If not - enough said, but if it IS some real content, do the same thing from the same newspaper, but from an edition from 10 years ago....then 10 years prior to that...notice a trend?

Let me make this clear:

[Darth_brooks]

"There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset...."

Let me make this abundantly clear: The above statement is 100% bullshit. My local paper, the Ann Arbor News, also went tits up. Over the last two years, the paper had opened comments sections on the majority of its stories to enable the aforementioned pipe dream. End result? The trolls moved in and feasted like rats in a corn silo, the nut jobs flooded the forums with "facts" on every story from free republic and the knock offs, and the signal to noise ratio plummeted. Now the paper has relaunched as annarbor.com, and the solution to the above has become: censor comments, and allow the newspaper staff to wade right into the thick of the mud. Fantastic.

When I see what has happened to old media sites that get into "Web 2.0" I feel like a WW1 vet being told by a fresh out of west point grad that "trench warfare 2.0 will revolutionize war as we know it!"

I don't really *want* to engage with the community when I go hunting for local "news", I don't *want* to hear from the friend of the victims brother-in-law who got arrested for B&E two blocks from my house. And most of all I don't want the most most useless section of the newspaper (Op-ed) to become the foundation of our "new media." Report, and leave me to use my gray matter to formulate my own opinions. If I'm at the site, the I'm there because I want local news. Period. Well researched, well reported, well digested, local news. It doesn't exist on TV anymore, i don't think it will ever exist on the web.

That's not REAL news

[pnuema]

That's polished news - news that appears well researched, articles that are well written. I'm not sure what your experience has been, but every news story I've ever been even tangentially involved in has been hopelessly wrong on many counts.

Blogs are all about the comments. Yes, it may start with a wire feed. But soon after, you'll get a post from someone who is much closer to the situation than the original poster, who can share real insight on the topic. Then someone else with familiarity comes and corrects a piece that the knowledgeable commenter got wrong. As the comments on a well-read blog build, the real story emerges. THAT is real news - input from dozens of intimate sources, aggregated into a whole. Figuring out what is really happening takes effort - but a good blog can do the work that a single reporter would take months to do in just a few hours.

For example, it was reported a couple of days ago that the public option was defeated in the finance committee. Major news sources pushed it as a real story, when the truth was it was known by insiders that the public option was never going to come out of Finance for weeks or months. There are 4 other committees in the senate that have passed bills with the public option in it. Bloggers on sites like Dailykos can give you all the inside baseball of what is happening with health care reform, far better than any of the main stream media.

Re:Original Blog Posting

[commodore64_love]

>>>Drudge is political bullshit

So it's like CNN and MSNBC