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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."
Can't we link to the original source in the article summary? http://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountain-news-text.html
That RMN and Denver Post were essentially owned by the same parent company. Wasn't really a loss, given that neither paper has been particularly good for quite a while now.
Why on earth is this a link to a tiny summary of the actual article?
Here's the article http://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountain-news-text.html
Techdirt doesn't deserve the ad revenue for such pathetic summary spam
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
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.
Leaving aside the absurdity of the "liberal media" mantra in general ... the Rocky Mountain News was known as Denver's conservative newspaper. And the more they tried to chase the Fox News crowd, the more their fortunes declined. Take that FWIW.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
Someone already pointed out that this is an argumentum ad populum type of logical fallacy and so I will skip right to this:
If by "literacy" you mean "knowledge about the current affairs", then ask and you shall receive.
From there: the 2nd least informed and most confused (about basic geographic, geopolitical and other everyday facts) class of viewers: Fox News Viewers. Beaten only by the Network Morning Shows, of the "How to make Cookies with Martha Stewart and 3 other bimbo celebrities" variety, firmly holding the rather dubious honour of being the dumbest audience ever.
Conversely, most informed audience: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Oops.
Somehow I do not think this is what you were looking for.
And the rest of the drivel you posted goes down hill from here, to the point that it is not even worth responding to.