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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."
Is this problem with traditional newspaper a US-only phenomenon? I heard yesterday of a recent study of newspapers in Canada which actually showed growth in their industry. What do others see in their country?
That is true for both the time your paying for and the money you are asked to pay.
A blog dashed off in a few minutes (or hours), will never compare to the in-depth reporting that most newspapers still actually deliver. For that I'm willing to pay (and do).
If newspapers ever died, they would drag all the other mediums that have news down with it... most tv/cable/radio/internet copy I've ever seen is lifted from an old dead tree newspaper.
Not to mention - some of us LIKE real news. You know, stuff that isn't about sports, or celebrities, or the horoscope, or the comics, or crap like that. The only hard news you get out of blog posts are just glorified wire reports - sure I can find out about big events like an earthquake, but where am I going to find out about corruption in China? Or inflation in Zimbabwe? Stuff that is ongoing, slow, and less sexy - that require coverage over years. Cable news gave up stories like that a long time ago - all that's left for that in the US is PBS, NPR, and the big print (NY Times, WSJ, etc).
Interestingly - I have noticed that some print media is doing well (at least round me), the hyper-local weeklies that cover individual towns and villages in my area (as opposed to the area at large). Another area completely un-served by the web.
I think a fair amount of the media bias is really an urban bias.
Most major news networks are based in and around large cities. Most major news stories reported on come from those cities, and most viewers and reporters are from those cities.
However, it's still largely a national media. The people in rural Ohio watch the same national news broadcast as do the people in Manhattan.
Some issues of right or left, this isn't a big deal. Others it is - just as an example, a reporter from New York City or DC (where guns are almost completely banned for personal, law-abiding use, and no one grows up hunting) is going to have a very different perspective, regardless of any intended bias, from someone who lives were hunting and target shooting are a large part of their life, and that's going to show up when they cover a gun control related issue or a shooting.
You can call it a left versus right bias, but I think that implies consistency on more issues than what you actually see. There are conservatives living in urban areas - but their conservatism is likely to be of a very different kind than those living in small towns. News programs are speaking to a national audience, but they still can only really know a local culture, no matter how many different polls they take. Even if someone is trying to be neutral, his viewpoint of what is "normal" is going to affect which viewpoints he feels he needs to be neutral toward.