Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates

Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets."

Comments

Evolve or die.....

[bagboy]

It's the way the world works. When the telephone came around did telegraph operators keep their business methods - or did they evolve to use the new technology?

Re:Evolve or die.....

[rolfwind]

They went into the sending money business. (And yet, they never saw Paypal coming).

Re:Evolve or die.....

[omeomi]

I still enjoy reading the paper. I've been a daily subscriber to the Chicago Tribune for the past 8 years. However, in the past few months, their delivery service has taken a major turn for the worse. The paper is supposed to be on my driveway by 6:30AM, and it absolutely never is. I leave for the train at 7:00AM, and it took weeks of calling and threatening to cancel my subscription just to get them to start getting me the paper before 7:00. I still call most days to complain that it's not there by 6:30. I get a credit for the days that I call, so they're not making much money off of my subscription at this point. Overall, if anything is going to cause me to cancel my subscription, it's that the delivery service that used to be fantastic has become abysmal. Mostly I'm probably waiting for the larger, magazine-sized Kindle (or some competitor) to come out.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[TorKlingberg]

The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior. I really don't see blogs and sites like digg and slashdot taking over journalism. They are great for commentary but don't produce original news, unless if there is an agenda.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[icebike]

The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior.

In six months you will.

Apple is set to release their new iTablet (or Slate, depending on what leaked name you want to believe).

They have been in negotiations with newspapers all over, and will be doing for the news print business what iTunes did for the music distribution business.

Your newspaper will await you when you pick up the device, silently downloaded and updated in the background over 3G/wifi without the need for a carrier contract.

Apple is building a huge data center on the east coast to handle the load, the subscription services, and the actual distribution.

Expect others to jump into this market, maybe even Google, but Apple will be the firstest withe the mostest.

If successful, this model will be the first remake of print news media since it first appeared and may arrive just in time.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[PaganRitual]

They are great for commentary but don't produce original news, unless if there is an agenda.

Yes, yes, but what about the newspaper alternatives?

Re:Evolve or die.....

[mirix]

Western Union *just* quit offering telegrams a year or two ago.

"Effective 2006-01-27, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."

I think the telex system is still running though, so it sorta still exists...

But since the late 60's, i think they just use normal phone lines & bell-103 modems, so i guess that's evolving.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[jdoyle1x1]

The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior. I really don't see blogs and sites like digg and slashdot taking over journalism. They are great for commentary but don't produce original news, unless if there is an agenda.

That is the problem with newspapers, they 'produce' news. Because they have an 'agenda'. If they were only reporting the news, instead of 'producing' it, their readership numbers maight not be tanking as badly...

Re:Evolve or die.....

[icebike]

I doubt I will buy one either, at least not from Apple. They can be way too controlling.

Wait till competition drives the price down is my take. In a year there will be 5 or 6 and the price of the device will fall under $200, and subscription prices will fall as well.

You can get the entire paper for a buck, so I can't see paying much more for the digital version.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[jmorris42]

> The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior.

No you, like almost everyone in the legacy media, miss the root of the problem. The overhead of dead tree distribution is a problem for newspapers. But it isn't THE problem. Otherwise the other parts of the legacy media such as the big three network newscasts wouldn't be suffering the same decline. Hollywood is having trouble selling both movie tickets and DVDs, the music industry is declining. Network television has been in decline for decades. The Internet isn't the problem. It's the content, stupid!

People are dropping newspaper subscriptions because there is nothing in them anymore that can't be read online. If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven't picked one up lately and actually read it. It's all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip and what doesn't fit into one of above categories it is probably inaccurate anyway. And that damnation is even before bringing up the political bias that has become so blatant the blind can now see it. But even worse than the lies, distortions and faked news is what they leave out of the news because it doesn't fit their prefab storylines

Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn't just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater. If you asked a doctor about medical coverage he would give you just as many horror stories. Mass media always had the problem of trying to dumb down stories for a mass audience, but years of budget slashing and general decline in overall education means it is now semi-literate reporters reporting for morons.

Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print? If they aren't even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story? And unlike most bloggers, they don't even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.

And it isn't the Internet or piracy that is killing Hollywood, it is the fact that have been pumping out crap for years.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[aztektum]

Seriously this was modded up?

That's a completely bogus comparison. Unless you can come up with a better way to do the job that trains do, they still have a purpose. Hauling lots of heavy shit/people long distances for a relatively low cost (compared some other methods).

What is the primary goal of a newspaper? Spread information.

Now, what invention has come along that can do as good a job or better? (Hint: You used it to post your bogus argument.)

Re:Evolve or die.....

[syousef]

It's the content, stupid!

I prefer: It's the stupid content

Re:Evolve or die.....

[internic]

If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven't picked one up lately and actually read it. It's all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip

What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, or the neglect of injured veterans at the VA? That was reporting all done by print newspapers during recent years that is not just press release or opinion piece or gossip. I often hear a refrain like the one I've quoted above from would-be critics of the "mainstream media", but it simply isn't true. And, as far as I can see, there are few people (if any) in the "new media" doing that sort of very crucial work. I will certainly grant, though, that newspapers have featured more and more opinion, rumors, etc. over time, presumably because it's cheap and people seem to like it.

Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn't just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater.

[citation needed]?
People in the general population have differing levels of familiarity with different subjects. For example, your average American is much more likely to know a significant amount about history than mathematics or, say, astronomy. This non-uniformity will be even more pronounced in specialized group, like people in a particular profession. The bottom line is that there will be certain sorts of topics that journalists are likely to be more familiar with and others they're unlikely to know much about. Absent some compelling evidence, it doesn't make much sense to assume that the rate of errors in one particular topic transfer over to all topics. Given that journalism is usually lumped with the "liberal arts" and journalism degree programs send to stress those sorts of topics, it's probably reasonable to assume that a journalist is less likely to have a good basis for understanding tech than, say, politics and law.

Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print?

But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don't have a perfect record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that's fallacious reasoning. The question you'd have to answer is how their accuracy and journalistic standards compare to blogs (or whatever alternative you're talking about). Clearly, this would take some work to examine.

If they aren't even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story?

Isn't fact checker a distinct function from copy editor at a newspaper? If so, then it's entirely possible that one can be under-resourced and not the other. Besides which, I'd imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.

And unlike most bloggers, they don't even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.

Again, [citation needed]. I've seen all sorts of radically mistaken stuff online. Sometimes corrections are posted, and sometime not. TV seems to be totally abysmal on this front.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[jmorris42]

> What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called
> "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program,

What about them? You are laboring under the mistaken notion any of those required a lot of work. All of those were the result of one whistleblower/traitor (depending on your viewpoint, but that question is offtopic for this discussion) doing a document dump on a friendly reporter. In a world without a legacy media they would have dumped on one of the new media outlets. In those cases you mention wikileaks, dailykos, huffingtonpost, etc. would have been able to ignite enough publicity to get the job done.

> > Thought experiment.

> [citation needed]?

No. First this isn't wikipedia. Second the point was for YOU to start noticing how bad the media is by paying attention to how often they get facts in reporting where you know enough about the subject to spot the problems. Any example cited would devolve into a discussion about that particular example and miss the point.

> But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don't have a perfect
> record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that's fallacious reasoning.

And had I made that argument you would have a point. But I didn't so you don't. The legacy media make the claim they have serious resources to devote to producing a professional product that is accurate and in depth. But by allowing the sort of obvious and trivial errors to make it into print that one can find in almost any published story these days it casts serious doubt that ANYONE other than the original writer ever seriously read the piece prior to publication. If multiple fact checkers, editors, etc. were actually involved in the production process one of them would have noticed and fixed the obvious typos.

In days of yore, before computers, a typo making it into print in a first rate newspaper was a fairly rare event. Grizzled editors wielded their red pen like a crazed English teacher. if you wanted to know how to write perfect English you could read the New York Times, what appeared on those pages WAS the 'official' definition of the current state of the language and it really was "All the news that was fit to print." Not anymore.

And if reporters are, as I suspect in the majority of cases, simply uploading stories straight into a content management system from where they get dumped almost unseen, certainly not carefully read, onto the web and print edition then exactly how is this different from a blogger? Because the reporter is wearing pants instead of pajamas? And who is verifying the reporter is really wearing pants? Bet Jason Blair wasn't. And that clown got away with inventing stories for years at the highest levels of journalism. How many more such scandals are waiting?

> Besides which, I'd imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.

And that nobody in the production chain even bothers to hit the spell check/grammar check button speaks volumes. I'm only posting to slashdot but I usually notice the red underline and fix most of the bad typos.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[daem0n1x]

Don't blame it on the newspapers.

In the old days the newspapers would be delivered on time. Now the EU has ordered the liberalisation of mail service and our national mail service is on the fast track to be privatised. That means they fired thousands of people and are subcontracting thousands of borderline illiterate kids for the minimum wage, the prices went up and the service went down really fast. Now I can't get my newspapers on time and I can't even trust that my correspondence won't get lost or delivered to someone else.

About the newspapers, they won't be missed. They all belong to half a dozen huge media conglomerates. If I open ANY major newspaper in my country, they all say the same: Lots of right-wing, ultra-free-market, pro-EU-bureaucracy garbage and a bunch of news about violent crimes and gossip about imbecile TV celebrities. As an example, all the major newspapers campaigned very hard for the approval of the Treaty of Lisbon, all news about the Treaty presented it in a positive way, all newspaper commenters agreed, but there wasn't a single line explaining to the citizens what the wretched treaty is and the consequences to the European people's lives. The treaty is a disgrace to the common citizen of EU but it's in the interest of the big money corporations and their organs of propaganda treated it accordingly, of course.

Also the editorial quality has gone down due to cutting costs. I've come to expect news to be poorly written and full of orthography errors. It's only normal that people don't trust the newspapers any more and don't want to spend money on them.

TV is the next to follow. I don't watch any TV at all. The news are usually manipulated or outright lies. All the commenter and pundits that talk on TV say the same right-wing bullshit. Why should I spend my time and my brain cells being duped?

It's funny that people bitch all the time about government interference in the freedom of media but nobody thinks about big-money interference in the same freedom.

Fortunately, there's the Internet.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[SnarfQuest]

The problem is that newspapers have been replaced already, by fanatic left wing radical publications, and people just aren't intrested in it. I can surf around the internet, and by choosing several sites, getting a fairly wide view of what's going on. Or I can read a newspaper and find out how wonderful Obama is, how evil the US is, how the constitution should be discarded, and that the US should switch to socalism, with government ownership of most businesses.
If newspapers want me to buy them, they should print news that I'm intrested in, not government propoganda.

Re:Evolve or die.....

[SnarfQuest]

What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, or the neglect of injured veterans at the VA?

What about the "investigative" journalism that suddenly brings up quotes from Rush Limbaugh from many years ago that everyone has missed all these years (because he never said them)?

What about the "investigative" journalism that found military papers from the 1970's about George Bush, that were typed up using Word 2003?

How about the way all of these journalists will all suddenly come up with an unusual word to describe someone, like gravatas? It's almost like they all receive their stories from one source.

What you call "investigative journalism", I'd call propaganda. It's amazing how they can be so one-sided in their hatred, and still claim to be independent. How can you believe anything these people say?

Are you surprised?

[B5_geek]

In other news, water is wet.

The last Buggy-Whip manufacturer was heard gloating with his buddy the Spittoon manufacturer about how they had 100% market share in their respected fields.

 

Re:Are you surprised?

[MBGMorden]

Actually the buggy whip companies aren't all gone:

http://yp.bellsouth.com.wvproxy.com/sites/buggywhips/page3.html?wvsessionid=ebd943fc8586457288938663beb3c962

I'm sure it's a pretty niche market these days though :D.

Re:Are you surprised?

[westlake]

We don't hear them whining about economic collapse, do we? In fact this past year was one of their best years with a huge bumper crop and plenty of excess food to feed their families.

The Amish are commercial farmers.

They are as focused on markets and costs as any other - and have been for generations.

The Amish are not excmpt from property taxes, suburban development and rising land prices.

Family members often do have to take on jobs in town to make ends meet.
 

Re:Where are the ads?

[ggraham412]

Never mind - I had "Ad Block Plus" enabled. (Oh I'm so embarrassed!)

Bay area

[WarJolt]

I live in the bay area and the only big newspaper around here is the Mercury News.
Without trying to start a flame war, it's much easier finding an unbaised article online.

Re:Bay area

[Frosty Piss]

Without trying to start a flame war, it's much easier finding an unbaised article online.

I think what you really mean is that it's much easier to find an article on-line that agrees with *your* particular bias, rather than the local newspaper's editor.

Re:Bay area

[PCM2]

I live in the bay area and the only big newspaper around here is the Mercury News.

Which is funny, because growing up in the Bay Area I never even considered San Jose to be part of it! (It's the South Bay, which we always saw as synonymous with Silicon Valley, while the Bay proper stopped at around Palo Alto.)

No joke about the Mercury News, though. Believe it or not, I once interviewed for a gig writing about technology for the business desk of the San Francisco Chronicle. I was expecting somebody to ask me something along the lines of, "What do you consider to be the most important local companies if you're covering technology?" Nobody did. So I brought it up myself: "How do you guys focus on companies like Oracle, Google, and Sun? I assume you talk about new developments mostly in terms of market opportunities, rather than technology?" I was told that they don't bother, because the Mercury mostly handles that stuff. "Business technology news" at the Chronicle was going to be stuff like reviews of the latest iPod accessories, phone tips, and gaming consoles.

These days, the Chronicle's business coverage can be found on the back pages of the sports section.

Possible causes

[TonTonKill]

I wonder how this trend compares with non-internet related events, such as:

• Increase in popularity of highly opinionated "news" talk shows and cable TV shows (and similar decline in the popularity of objective reporting)
• Consolidation of news businesses (particularly acquisitions by News Corp.)
• Reduction in staff and budgets of the journalism and reporting departments within newspaper organizations

Re:Possible causes

[commodore64_love]

Ya know "objective reporting" is a myth. Prior to 1950 the Philadelphia Inquirer proudly trumpeted that it was pro-Republican. Many papers had the words directly in their names - "The Peoria Democrat".

And I see nothing wrong with that. Newspapers were invented as a way for the owner to express his views. If you didn't like those views, create a competing newspaper. That's what liberty and "free press" means... to say whatever you want to say, even if it's biased towards your own view.

Re:Possible causes

[Frosty Piss]

This is a good point: Many (most?) local papers are now nothing more than regurgitation of wire-feeds from the AP or whoever. Who needs to subscribe to the paper for that? And the sale coupons come in the mail now...

Re:Possible causes

[fiannaFailMan]

Ya know "objective reporting" is a myth. Prior to 1950 the Philadelphia Inquirer proudly trumpeted that it was pro-Republican. Many papers had the words directly in their names - "The Peoria Democrat".

And I see nothing wrong with that. Newspapers were invented as a way for the owner to express his views. If you didn't like those views, create a competing newspaper. That's what liberty and "free press" means... to say whatever you want to say, even if it's biased towards your own view.

Spot on. Newspapers in the UK and Ireland are still pretty open about what parties they support, they really nail their colours to the mast. If you want to win a British general election, you're on an uphill task if you don't have the tabloid press on your side.

Broadcast media is a bit different though. In the UK and Ireland people expect a certain amount of objectivity in the broadcast media. In the UK political parties cannot buy advertising time on TV, instead they each get the same amount of time allocated for "party political broadcasts" that are usually about ten minutes long before the main nightly news, and that's about it. The power of television is such that in the UK they prefer to make sure it's not open to political influence, which is why British people are a bit shocked when they turn on Fox News or MSNBC and see the blatant editorialising on the air.

Re:Possible causes

[Monsuco]

Broadcast media is a bit different though. In the UK and Ireland people expect a certain amount of objectivity in the broadcast media. In the UK political parties cannot buy advertising time on TV, instead they each get the same amount of time allocated for "party political broadcasts" that are usually about ten minutes long before the main nightly news, and that's about it. The power of television is such that in the UK they prefer to make sure it's not open to political influence, which is why British people are a bit shocked when they turn on Fox News or MSNBC and see the blatant editorialising on the air.

In Britain you have the BBC. There are other news networks, but the BBC is government funded through licensing (yes, apparently you need a license to have a TV in Britain) and is generally the most popular. As best I can tell the BBC is so politically correct they don't dare run anything that could offend anyone.

Rather than just not being controversial, I would rather just have choices. In America, if I don't like a reporter I change the channel. If I like Fox, I watch Fox, if I like CNN I watch CNN. Bias is only a problem if opposing views are not available. In America we have Fox (right wing), CNN (left wing), and NBC (very left wing). We have national news broadcast , local news subsidiaries, papers, talk radio, and now blogs. If I don't like what someone says on a station, I don't watch them. If I want a different point of view, I watch something biased from the other side. The issue of bias is something that goes way back. America's founders even worried about biased information in papers. They decided it impossible to eliminate all bias when discussing something controversial, so they decided it was best to do the opposite and allow for newspapers to say whatever they want creating so many viewpoints. This was the idea behind the first amendment, allow for a wide variety of opinions.

If you don't like something or don't agree with something, don't watch. I think most people understand that the media is biased.

Re:Possible causes

[Seraphim_72]

And yet here you say you have nevre read a newspaper in your life. How the FUCK would you know if they have biased reporting? By your own words you have never even SEEN it.

Re:Possible causes

[Some Bitch]

In America we have Fox (far right wing), CNN (right wing), and NBC (centrist). ... and CBS (centre right) and ...

This is how the rest of the world sees it. You don't HAVE left wing politics, merely different shades of right wing.

By the time you read it ...

[neonprimetime]

... it's nearly 1 day old

Re:By the time you read it ...

[unityofsaints]

... which is one of the strengths of newspaper journalism! CNN, Fox etc. (both t.v. & online) have this mad obsession with serving up "up-to-date, latest developments" that half of what they report gets contradicted half an hour later anyway. They throw out semi-speculation in the hope they'll "get it right" ahead of other stations but in the end it's just noise. Newspapers can have this problem too, because they're coming up to a deadline, but usually they err on the side of caution and only include what's known to be true. The other good side effect of the deadline is that a certain amount of reflection can be included. You get a sense that it's the "bigger picture". T.V. and the internet just trips over itself with minute-by-minute updates.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes you need to be in the known, like the Olympics 2016 voting (I followed the BBC blog for that) but more often than not I enjoy the distance papers put between the news item and the reader.

Another underrated advantage of the newspaper is the medium itself. Sure, it's awkward flicking through the pages of a broadsheet on a bus but there's big, high-quality photographs and an eye-friendly column size. Too often websites make columns too wide, resulting in eye-strain no matter what way you resize your browser. And please don't tell me a news photograph on your TFT looks as good as in print- if it does you must be a graphic designer with a 2,000$ screen. Besides, we spend most of our lives in front of screens anyway, do I really have to get my news off one?

Not believing it

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'm skeptical that there's an actual decline happening. There was nothing about this on Drudge.

Any alternatives?

[symes]

I'm not sure I see this as a good thing. There's no obvious alternatives to salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story. I just can't see the internet producing people like Bernstein and Woodward, Nancy Maynard, Anna Quindlen and others like them.

Re:Any alternatives?

[Monkeedude1212]

Why can't the internet have Salaried journalists?

Re:Any alternatives?

[symes]

It used to be the case that a lot of people would pay for their daily newspaper. How much are you paying for your online news these days? I really worry that the internet is turning us all into quick fix news junkies unable to spend more than a few seconds grazing headlines and that considered prose is slowly passing.

Re:Any alternatives?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

>salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story.

This is dying and has been for years. Editors, and more importantly their owners (http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html) prefer light, cheap puff pieces that don't disturb the citizenry or alert them to little things like the fact that the treasuries of the world are being looted by the worlds wealthy and that oil depletion issues are going to start rocking our world in an unpleasant way in the next decade or two.
.
So we get Yahoo and MSM, where the top stories are "10 ways to know if he/she's cheating on you!" and "How to tell if you're a f***king idiot." (Hint, you're reading Yahoo's front page.)
.
The internet, however, is still relatively free although who knows for how long. If net neutrality is withdrawn, you can forget that too.

Re:Any alternatives?

[DragonWriter]

I'm not sure I see this as a good thing. There's no obvious alternatives to salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story.

There also are essentially none of those left in the national papers, so the lack of an "alternative" is less relevant. Actually, with many papers retooling to shift toward less focus on advertisers for revenue and more focus on readers, there is a good chance that the decline in per-paper circulation will revive journalism, as the business of the papers becomes, once again, delivering news to readers, rather than delivering an audience to advertisers while avoiding offending those same advertisers.

I just can't see the internet producing people like Bernstein and Woodward, Nancy Maynard, Anna Quindlen and others like them.

While you don't see a lot of people like that in any media, at any time, the internet sure isn't doing any worse of a job of producing investigative reporters than the modern print dailies. Which isn't meant, particularly, as praise of the internet news outlets.

Re:Any alternatives?

[swanzilla]

The ability of the internet user to make his/her own inferences by cross referencing multiple sources basically makes the iconic journalist largely moot.

Moreover, the internet has the Tron Guy...the newspapers/journalists don't stand much of a chance.

Re:Any alternatives?

[Ragzouken]

At least we'll still have BBC news.

Re:Any alternatives?

[whoop]

How about James O'Keefe and Hanna Giles (the ACORN undercover videos)? Granted, they weren't salaried, but the Internet can produce a good story. Without Youtube, blogs, etc their story would have not gotten the press it did. It will probably be a few years yet before these sort of Internet journalists get more practice and find the right niche, but it's a start.

Re:Any alternatives?

[Ash-Fox]

Right now, sure. Most papers make their content available for free in hopes their site will make money one day. Their paper still makes money. So what happens when their paper doesn't make money and they can't put their news up for free any longer?

BBC, CNN, Fox news etc websites will still be around when they die.

Re:Any alternatives?

[Attila Dimedici]

I'm not sure I see this as a good thing. There's no obvious alternatives to salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story. I just can't see the internet producing people like Bernstein and Woodward, Nancy Maynard, Anna Quindlen and others like them.

I guess you haven't heard of Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe? And their expose of President Obama's former employer ACORN?

Re:Any alternatives?

[jabster]

James O'Keefe . Zombie (www.zombietime.com) are the first two that just jump to mind. Then there's the ACORN scandals, the Kevin Jennings scandal, Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett the slum lord, Michelle Obama and her hospital's practice of shoving poor patients to other hospitals.

Like we need more fake Rush Limbaugh quotes, fact-checking of SNL skits, or another Rathergate.

-john

Re:Any alternatives?

[ncc74656]

How about James O'Keefe and Hanna Giles (the ACORN undercover videos)?

...or, going back a few more years, where did the story regarding fabricated Texas ANG memos used by Dan Rather and 60 Minutes to try to throw the 2004 election break? Not only did you hear about that in the blogs first, but it involved malfeasance that calls into question the credibility of the MSM.

The bright side

[oldspewey]

At least there are some robust areas in the declining newspaper market.

Weakest Link

[mindbrane]

My best guess is news outlets that have deep links and high tech will win out. My best back of the envelope strategy would be to embed news stories in elective layers of deepening context. Readers would be able to elect to go ever deeper into a news story and link to information nodes that would shed light on how news events impact their neighbourhood, income level, etc. You should be able to enter a news story at a world wide level and exit at the neighbourhood mall. The problem would be how to allow for in depth news reporting without the content being lost in a jungle of links. National news outlets have the ability to provide just such coverage. The News_paper_ is dead, news reporting has morphed and the readership has morphed to meet the new coverage. The message is still strong, it's the medium that needs to change.

Newspaper Culture

[allknowingfrog]

It would be odd to see the newspaper disappear altogether. What will we roll up and shake at our dogs? What will spies hide behind? What will we line cages with?

Re:Newspaper Culture

[Zey]

Anonymous Coward on 2009-10-29 6:08 (#29903353) wrote:

People, including some from our online group, were mopping it up with the old papers that are everywhere. "Try doing that with a website," I observed as I walked by.

When your newspaper's remaining unique feature is its absorbency, you know you're really in trouble.

Re:Newspaper Culture

[wtbname]

I work at a news web site. A while back, we had a troll come through (drenching sarcasm, driven by 90+ wpm). People on our forums started modding him down, reducing his comments to irrelevancy. People, including some from our print group, were marveling at how online participation and comments in the news can provide so much value.

"Try doing that with a letter to the editor," I observed as I walked by.

Had an issue with national news for a while

[Maxo-Texas]

Why do I care, that some anonymous person five states over was murdered?
If it's of national import, it's going to be all over the web and television anyway.

Newspapers should give very deep news on local issues, sports, local editorials, etc.

Re:Had an issue with national news for a while

[DoofusOfDeath]

I agree that local reporting is important. But how much do you care about receiving it in print, rather than on a web page?

Re:Had an issue with national news for a while

[PaganRitual]

I have to agree with this. So much of "local" news on TV or print appears to regard a local car accident death as highly important information that we all need to know. Actual issues appear to take a distant second place to things involving violence or things to be scared of.

Why are ads so much cheaper online though?

[brunes69]

Every time I see a story like this I ask the same question to myself, and have yet to hear an appropriate answer.

Why can a newspapers and magazines charge 100 times more for an ad on ink, that reaches a tiny fraction of the people that an online ad reaches? The economics of it make no sense to me. Is there some research that shows people are more likely yo pay attention to print ads than online ads? Because I have never paid attention to a print ad in my life.

Why don't newspaper websites (which are very popular) just charge more for online ads, comperable rates to what they charge for print ads?

What happens when the newspapers and magazines have such low subscribership that they can't justify their high ad prices anymore - will then THEN feel justified to charge more for their online ads?

Re:Why are ads so much cheaper online though?

[QuincyDurant]

Retail advertisers (like me) need saturation coverage of small geographical areas and the (highly annoying) big splash ads over two or three days that drive customers to sales days. Of course, we could all start selling online all over the world, but then every storefront mom and pop would have to adopt radical (and expensive to implement) new business methods. I'll try to quit whining. It's doggy dog out there.

Re:Why are ads so much cheaper online though?

[Idiomatick]

*"dog eat dog" ... hopefully the saying makes a little more sense now.

It's their own fault

[mschuyler]

I don't really intend this to be politically controversial, though that is probably inevitable. Of course newspapers have been challenged by the Internet, but this is not the first competition they've had. TV has been competing with newspapers for decades and they survived just fine. It isn't that newspapers have lost a competitive edge; they've lost a monopoloistic edge. It used to be they were the only game in town. A rare city had two newspapers. If you wanted to sell your car or post a job, the Classifieds was your only choice. Ever tried to sell a car through the Classifieds lately? Yowzaa! $100 easy just for an ad too tiny to read! But put it on cars.com for $24.95 with a bunch of pictures, and whaddya know, it sells. Happened to me anyway two years ago.

The second issue is that newspapers once stood for something. They were either avowedly and unabashedly partisan in their outlook, or they proclaimed journalistic objectivity. I think that no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Internet has allowed you to broaden your horizons, and THAT has lead to a realization that 'journalistic objectivity' is an oxymoron. It's not so much that newspapers lean one direction or another--though my local one never seems to like a Republican candidate, even for innocuous posts, but that you can see "sins of ommission." The real power of a newspaper is in what they choose to publish. They get a tremendous amount of information 'over the wire' and then they choose which stories to print, ignoring the stories they don't wish to print.

When you suddenly have the Net and a tremendous number of news sources to choose from, you can see this. You can see what the newspapers have been leaving out, so the newspaper becomes less relevant to your 'news needs' and you drop it. I dropped my paper because they couldn't seem to get it in the box. After continual complaints of poor service I finally decided I really didn't need it. I don't miss it.

Re:It's their own fault

[aafiske]

"I think that no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Internet has allowed you to broaden your horizons"

Or more likely the internet provides a convenient place to get opinions that agree perfectly with mine, so why should I read a newspaper that I sometimes disagree with and that is therefore stupid and wrong and biased?

Re:It's their own fault

[JohnFen]

The second issue is that newspapers once stood for something. They were either avowedly and unabashedly partisan in their outlook, or they proclaimed journalistic objectivity.

And whichever kind they were, they strove to be at least somewhat accurate rather than just a PR outlet.

This is the newsbiz's real failing: they have become entirely unreliable. You can no longer read a newspaper and have any confidence that you're getting even an approximation of the facts. Newspapers used to do journalism, or at the least give it the old college try.

This means that newspapers (and TV & radio news) have no real innate value. It's hard to retain readers when you aren't offering them anything worthwhile.

Re:It's their own fault

[Anonymous Coward]

Now thats funny, I use the internet because it is possible to find dissenting opinions which isn't possible in a newspaper. I dont really understand why people think newspapers are biased--they seem rather bland to me, maybe I am just blind. But I understand that a newspaper only gives you one side of a story and the internet gives you two. It has almost got to the point where an article without comments is by its very nature under suspicion of being propaganda.

Re:It's their own fault

[mandolin]

Well, maybe both.

Yes I probably wouldn't enjoy being on a site that went on and on about "Windows Rocks/Linux Sucks" (as much as this site does the reverse, anyway).

But that kind of rhetoric is not really why I read this site. As an example, I found the (apparently) 1st-person accounts about air traffic and ATC procedures yesterday to be one of the most informative and entertaining bits I've read in awhile.

Slashdot has (more than?) its fair share of trolls, and troll articles, but there is (sometimes) a depth here that I haven't really found anywhere else yet; and that includes your local newspaper.

I look forward to the edifying spectacle...

[caitsith01]

...of hordes of ./ readers taking time out from flaming one another and bitching about the poor quality of editor control on the site and the dubious submissions which make it through to the front page to sanctimoniously celebrate the death of "old" media.

Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal? Do they even have the resources? Would they have survived the commercial and political pressure resulting from pursuing the story (the Post nearly didn't)?

Newspapers have failed to adapt, but they do have a number of useful features which IMHO the web has so far failed to replicate, such as strong editorial structures, proper investigative journalism (not just "in today's blog blog, we blog about a blog about something which someone wrong somewhere else"), accountability (once it's printed, it's printed), a selection of content which does not automatically conform to every pre-defined interest and prejudice of the reader, and a delivery method which involves passivity from the recipient rather than requiring the recipient to go out and proactively seek the information they want.

Does all of this mean they deserve to prosper in their current form? No. But I am scared if the Drudge Report is what is going to replace the Washington Post. On one level the issues facing newspapers seem to me to be facing society more generally: how do we manage our apparent addiction to short, semi-meaningless factoids now that we have a series of electronic systems for delivering them faster and more meaninglessly than ever before?

Re:I look forward to the edifying spectacle...

[demachina]

The Washington Post is a pale shadow of the paper that broke Watergate. Personally I stopped reading it about the time they fired Dan Froomkin and their execs thought it was cool to sponsor pay-for-access cocktail parties with politicians. Their online site was showing promise until Katharine Weymouth canned the people making it happen and forced consolidation with their print division which was like mixing oil and water. Last month they issued guidelines forbidding their reporters from using Twitter and other social media which shows their dinosaurish nature. Dan Froomkin is now in charge of the Political section of... the Huffington Post. Jim Brady another Washington Post luminary is starting a new online Washington news site for Politico.

If you want to hop in the way back machine to just before the Iraq invasion, Judith Miller, used the New York Time to shill for her books on WMD's and for the Bush administration to whip up the frenzy about non existent WMD's in Iraq. This has since cost the U.S. about a trillion dollars and thousands of dead and tens of thousands wounded for a lie, which a dead tree journalist helped propagate. Of course the Hearst empire pioneered yellow journalism and shilling to start wars for no reason in 1898, "Remember the Maine", so its not a new phenomena. And of course in 2003 the NY Times also had Jayson Blair who made a career on plagiarized and fabricated stories and it took forever for the Times editors to notice.

So to balance that one Watergate success story everyone cites in these debates there have been multiple recent failures. The U.S. press was pretty much asleep at the wheel during Iraq, Patriot Act abuses, torture, warrantless spying on Americans on a massive scale, etc. The NY Times did break the warrantless wiretap story but only after it had been running for years.

You seem to be waxing nostalgic for old school journalism that doesn't really exist anymore if it ever did. I'd being willing to bet if Woodward and Bernstein were to try to break Watergate today, Nixon would call up the Washington Posts management/editors and it would be killed before it saw the light of day because the management of most papers today are pro establishment and pro corporate interests instead of a beacon of truth and freedom. All the Presiden't men was a product of a handful of unique people who did something amazing and right, it had nothing to do with the actual merits of dead tree journalism.

I too would wax poetic for old school journalism but to think its still even alive or it will flourish in the brain dead environment that is most dead tree newspapers today is optimistic at best. I have to hope the web actually does succeed in producing a beacon for truth and freedom and that it rises above the sea of noise that is the web. Its a long shot but its a lot more likely than hoping for dead tree newspapers or TV networks to be honest stewards of the truth.

I gather AOL is hiring reporters at a furious rate and the plan of the new CEO who came from Google is to make it in to the leader in online Journalism. I wish him well, though my brain has seizures whenever I see the brand he is working under.

Re:I look forward to the edifying spectacle...

[demachina]

Well there was the ties to Al Qaeda thing, also been proved False.

There was the "to get Iraq's oil thing", well if that was it we completely botched that since I think the Chinese have more Iraq oil contracts than the U.S. now. It would take a LOT of oil to pay back the trillion dollars we've squandered there.

There was the "excuse to give huge no bid contracts" to all our Republican connected friends. Check. That one is a winner.

There was the "to bring Democracy to the Middle East". That's iffy at best. We mostly created a Shia dominated, Iran friendly, theocracy with a whiff of disfunctional Democracy. Once we pull our troops out it could crater in to a civil war in a week.

There was the "to kill Saddam" because he tried to kill my dad(George W's dad). That might be a winner.

There was the "my daddy botched the first Gulf War and I have daddy issues" so I had to do it again and prove I'm better than my daddy at the price of $1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed.

I could go on... maybe you should tell me the reason for it... I really can't think of any that actually make sense, Mister Anonymous Cowtard?

Re:I look forward to the edifying spectacle...

[demachina]

"So your argument is what? Better never than late? Was anyone else even close to revealing it?"

In the case of warrantless wire tapping all indications are the NY Times had the story in 2004 prior to the election and Bill Keller sat on it until December 2005. Would it have made a differences in the 2004 election, probably not, but you never know. I sure wish it had because it would have saved us another four years of abuse, Constitution shredding and incompetence. It was certainly something the American people had a right to know before they reelected the Bush administration and for whatever reason the Times sat on it until a time when revealing it had little effect. I wager they were afraid of and intimated by the Bush administration in 2004 when Bush was riding high in power and popularity, so they waited until after Katrina and Bush popularity had already started to plummet. If so it was pretty spineless.

It also wasn't really NY Times reporting that uncovered it. It was apparently due to whistleblower at the Justice Department, Thomas Tamm. It took some serious guts on his part to risk his career and prison to expose it to the Times and they did nothing with the information for nearly two years.

This is simply not a case for why newspaper journalism shined. It makes a case for why we need whistleblower protection and a reliable avenue for whistleblowers to expose illegal activity in the halls of power. It tends to suggest the NY Times wasn't a very reliable avenue for this.

I'd have to research the other stories to comment, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were also exposed by whistleblowers in the Bush administration fed up with their law breaking more than New York Times reporting. The one really good thing about big newspapers like the Times is they do have lawyers and the ability to fight the government in court to protect whistleblower's identities.

Re:I look forward to the edifying spectacle...

[internic]

In the case of warrantless wire tapping all indications are the NY Times had the story in 2004 prior to the election and Bill Keller sat on it until December 2005.

I thought that people at the Times have outright stated that was the case.

Would it have made a differences in the 2004 election, probably not, but you never know. I sure wish it had because it would have saved us another four years of abuse, Constitution shredding and incompetence. It was certainly something the American people had a right to know before they reelected the Bush administration and for whatever reason the Times sat on it until a time when revealing it had little effect. I wager they were afraid of and intimated by the Bush administration in 2004 when Bush was riding high in power and popularity, so they waited until after Katrina and Bush popularity had already started to plummet. If so it was pretty spineless.

I certainly wish they had run with the story before the election, though I'm not sure it would have made any difference. IIRC the news about the "torture memos" surfaced in about August of 2004 (the story was broken by either the Washington Post for the NYT, I'm fairly certain) and people barely seemed to notice. As far as the reasons, they claim it was due to grave warnings by the administration about damage to national security. This seems quite plausible to me. They had to accept the fact that people in the administration knew many things they did not, and there could be some very real danger. I'm not sure they made the right decision, but it does seem like it would have been an extraordinarily hard one. Also, by the end of the summer of '04 Bush's approval ratings were down around 50%, so they weren't especially high.

This is simply not a case for why newspaper journalism shined. It makes a case for why we need whistleblower protection and a reliable avenue for whistleblowers to expose illegal activity in the halls of power. It tends to suggest the NY Times wasn't a very reliable avenue for this.

It suggests that the NYT was a much less than ideal avenue, but again I'm not sure what is the reasonable alternative. While better whistleblower protection is certainly a desirable thing, the idea of relying on a government structure to protect whistleblowers exposing government malfeasance seems fundamentally flawed. One needs some other large, public organization with the legal resources and self-interested motive to bring these things to light. Newspapers serve this purpose, and I don't see a viable replacement at this juncture.

It also does not follow that just because a whistleblower came to them that no investigation was involved. I thought there was quite a lot of investigation to corroborate the claims, which would require a significant network of trusted sources within the government.

More victims of news piracy!

[Tsar]

Obviously, the Internet is to the American newspaper publisher and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.
Information wants to be free, you say? Well, so does Charles Manson!

Re:Where are the ads?

[smclean]

They have: http://www.adblock.org/2004/07/adblock_detection_demo/

Re:Where are the ads?

[Daimanta]

However, the trick to counter this little menace is to block the anti_adblock js-file. Works like a charm.

I seriously doubt that there is an easy and hard-to-defeat method that will stop adblocking software(I haven't seen any).

I think this is the first time...

[deblau]

I have ever seen a headline that used a third derivative.

No integrity

[plopez]

I've given up on the mainstream media (MSM). They have no integrity or validity as far as I am concerned. They are in my opinion nothing more than gov't or corporate shills.

Case in point is the WMDs and the war in Iraq. For months the New York Times (as well as other "legitimate" news outlets (I'm not counting the Fox network)) beat the drums of war. They helped stampede the US into the Iraqi invasion and discounted dissenting opinion and facts.

Then when no WMDs were found they buried it on page 7. One article for one day. Many Americans still believe there were WMDs and connections between Sadam and Al Q. If the NYT, and the MSM had beat the drums of "no WMDs" and "no ties with Al Qaeda" for months, what would American opinion be instead?

AFAIAC, they have no integrity and I do not trust the MSM.

The sooner they die the better.

(Yes, as a matter of fact I am ranting)

Re:No integrity

[jmorris42]

> Case in point...

Uh huh. Sounds like you are still stuck in the legacy media's world.

> Then when no WMDs were found they buried it on page 7

What planet do you live on? The legacy media harped on that fiction daily... at least until The Won replaced BusHitler. The facts differ. You have to google hard for em but they are there. We did indeed, quietly. ship a shipload of uranium out of Iraq. It made barely a ripple in the news when it was finally made public months later.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/06/world/fg-cake6

And despite the reimagining of history in the popular version, Joseph Wilson's misbegotten adventure provided direct confirmation that Saddam had tried and failed to purchase yellowcake in Niger. Which, if you could be troubled to read the actual quote.... Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush didn't say they succeeded, only that they had made the attempt, which is exactly what Wilson reported. And since the British government did indeed say it, Bush was also 100% correct in quoting it. Yet the popular version of history, the one created by the legacy media, is that Bush somehow lied. If anyone can explain how that is even possible in the context of 'the sixteen words' I'd be happy to be enlightened.

You would also have to be ignorant of and/or willfully ignore the fairly credible statements of a former Iraq Army general who swears he oversaw a planeload of WMD moved to Syria in the days before the invasion.

> Many Americans still believe there were WMDs and connections between Sadam and Al Q.

Perhaps that is because there WERE actually WMD in Iraq? And when every intelligence agency on the planet was in perfect agreement on the presence of WMD in Iraq it really is rather unfair for you idjits to go on and on about Bush and Darth Cheney cooking up some sort of conspiracy over the matter.

And as for Saddam and Al Qaeda, yes there are plenty of links. No there isn't the slightest smidgen of evidence to implicate Saddam in the 9/11 attack but there is abundant evidence of a working relation between UBL and Saddam. We have direct video evidence of Saddam proudly supporting terrorism in general. He was flagrently and notoriously harboring several name brand international terrorists, making payments to the families of suicide bombers, etc. And please remember it was the Global War on Terror, not the war on AQ. After 9/11 it became US policy that anyone who thought terrorism (defined as random attacks on non-military targets and/or deliberate killing of civilians) was a valid tactic was going to get snuffed.

You are of course entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. I too have one and it fairly obviously shows in this post in places. So please try to dispute the FACTS in this post because unless you can do that, while you can have your opinion it will be but a silly thing based upon fantasy.

Re:No integrity

[gordguide]

" ... We did indeed, quietly. ship a shipload of uranium out of Iraq. ..."

Uranium, by itself, is more more a WMD than a lump of aluminum is a fighter jet.

Your source reveals a supply of yellowcake was found in Iraq. It's one of the most common elements on Earth, and there are traces of it in the dirt around your yard.
You can't make a bomb out of yellowcake, in fact you can't even use it as reactor fuel, without a whole lot of elaborate, expensive, and time-consuming processing. After you do that, then you can start to think about more elaborate work to turn it into an WMD.

There are working alternatives already

[SuperKendall]

Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal?

Big Government broke the ACORN scandal, and the stuff around the NEA pushing a government message through art funding. That's at roughly the same level in that it's national news that had an impact on congress (they voted to shut of funding for ACORN).

Newspapers have failed to adapt, but they do have a number of useful features which IMHO the web has so far failed to replicate, such as strong editorial structures, proper investigative journalism (not just "in today's blog blog, we blog about a blog about something which someone wrong somewhere else"), accountability

Newspapers are an absolute joke for accountability. At best you may get a retraction so small and buried no-one will ever see it. At worst they simply ignore the fact they incorrectly reported on something and carry on as if what they said was the truth.

The blog standard is far superior, where usually the incorrect section is stricken through (but left readable) with a statement right below saying what they got wrong. The key is that the correction is attached to the original media, far stronger a correction.

And there are real investigative journalists today. Look at people like Micheal Totten and Micheal Yon for excellent independent and pragmatic war coverage of all the major theaters. We'll see more of that as newspapers continue to falter, and more people look for oversight of the government.

Re:Where are the ads?

[mcsqueak]

That may be a goal... but I suspect it more effective (and definitely more polite) to display a "please don't block my ads, bro" message.

I run ad-block and have seen such messages from time to time. Basically, above the news or whatever it'll say "Hey, we noticed you're running ad-block. We can't stop you, but would you consider turning it off to support our sponsors or signing up for a subscription to our site, where you'll see no such adds displayed?"

Based on the tone, I've certainly paused block on certain sites I frequent every day, such as Slashdot. I trust them not to run shitty ads that will annoy me, and I help throw a few pennies their way. Granted, Slashdot doesn't nag you to turn ad-block off, but I do it anyways.

Re:Where are the ads?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I'm surprised that web developers haven't copped on to the fact that ads hosted on their own server don't get blocked.

Re:Where are the ads?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...maybe if their newspapers and sites didn't suck they wouldn't have this problem in the first place? I stopped reading both my local and state papers years back when it became VERY clear that their only purpose was to regurgitate AP wire stories while adding a hard right spin and overflowing the entire mess with ads. The only "local" coverage was who died and who was having a bake sale, everything else just the same old crap spewed from the wire with enough hard right spin put on it to make the whole thing feel like the old Soviet Pravda.

And I switched to using ad blockers because ads went from simple text or maybe a .jpg or .gif to "shoot the monkey and win an iPod!" and all other sorts of bling bling, noisy, flashy, irritating as hell monstrosities that made it pretty much impossible to actually read the content or even keep a modicum of sanity. If they want to know whom to blame for the popularity of ad blockers simply surf for awhile without one and see how quickly they irritate the living shit out of you with flash ads.

I think they can blame both the decline of newspapers and ad revenue on the "too big to fail" mentality, where these corps that have been around as long as dirt suddenly decide they don't have to actually give customers anything of value, but instead " maximize profit potential", treat the customers like crap, spam them with ads or badly rehashed crap they picked up off the wire services, and then act just shocked! shocked I tell you! when people run away in droves. Main street papers turn into a pile o' suck and go down the toilet, news at 11. Oh wait, we ain't watching that either, thanks to 20 ads for every 5 minutes of content.

Dereliction Of Journalistic Duty, Reap what u sow!

[plasmacutter]

It's quite simple. In their efforts to "compete" with cable news to be first to the story, they slashed real investigative reporting, fact checking, and depth in their coverage.

They are guilty of dereliction of their duty to inform our democracy. They did not leverage their major advantage over cable news: freedom from constraints to 15 minute time slots.

They began publishing corporate and government press releases unquestioned.

They stopped digging deep into issues which really matter to the nation, uncovering actual political corruption or travesties of the political process (the daily show is the only one which seems to do this now).

Gone are the days where they stood up to governments and corporations for the right of the people to be informed. When was the last time you heard of a case like time magazine's pentagon papers?

"You write what you're told! Thanks Corporate News!"

Just think...

[ThrowAwaySociety]

...by the time they covered Balloon Boy, they already knew he wasn't in it, and suspected a hoax! Where's the entertainment in that?

Re:first

[compro01]

If you are signed in and hit "post anonymously", it will wipe out the mods.

The only way to comment and moderate is to comment while completely logged out.

Re:Where are the ads?

[Ceiynt]

My local paper is an AP regurgitator. It wouldn't be such a problem, except for the fact it regurgitates about 2 days behind the rest of the world. and on top of that, will do the same story 2 days in a row, with no change to the story what so ever. Any local stories it does do are normally about 2-3 paragraphs, and about the local bake sale or some school got a $5 grant for being the one picked out of a hat.
With the advent of the 24 hours news channel and the internet, they quickly became obsolete asthey rehashed 2-3 day old news.

Re:You deserved George Bush

[nbauman]

I spend a big part of my life taking complicated scientific information and making it simple enough for people to read on the Internet in bite-sized chunks.

But sometimes it isn't possible.

Sometimes if you want to understand something important, you just have to sit down and go through something long, with difficult language, and boring parts, where you have to read it several times and look things up before you get it right. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html

The Republicans and Democrats are competing with each other to see who can destroy the common good faster and make more money out of it for their campaign contributors.

If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 that shows you how the free market system is failing and how the Bush administration was pimping the regulatory system, you won't understand what they're doing to you (us).

If everybody is like you, this democracy is in trouble.

Yeah, I read the blogs, I read Glen Greenwald, Common Dreams and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But even Greenwald (he's a lawyer) will tell you that sometimes the only way to find out the truth is to read the (long, complicated) original source.

This idea that you can take a lot of snippets from ideological bloggers on all sides, throw them into a box and somehow the truth will shake out, is like the idea that you can take a lot of bad mortgages, aggregate them together and have them turn into good investments. That's what we call "A mile wide and an inch deep." You wind up with a lot of manipulation and cynicism.

Sometimes you have to do hard work. And one thing I don't tolerate is being lazy when you have an important job to do.

You could make an argument that nobody deserves George Bush. That may be true. But we get him because Americans are too lazy to read a 5,000-word news story.

Re:Dereliction Of Journalistic Duty, Reap what u s

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

My thoughts exactly. I happened to log onto Drudge probably within an hour of his posting the first ACORN video (I remember being amazed that only a few thousand people had bothered to watch it). My first thought was, "how come I'm not seeing this on CNN or 60 Minutes?" I think the destruction of the traditional media machine is one of the best things to happen for our society. We are really beginning to get a solid grasp of how the machine works - basically just supporting Wall Street and K Street. The most popular story in these discussions is usually Watergate. But what was the real cost in terms of dollars to report on this scandal? I really don't know, but it sounds to me like the real cost was just the time of the journalists, and bloggers seem to have nothing but time. I understand I'm going on an assumption, so it would be nice if someone who actually read book could give me an idea of what it cost The Washington Post to publish that series of articles.

Re:You deserved George Bush

[the_humeister]

I'm sorry, but could you condense that into a 140 character Twitter-compatible post?

Re:Where are the ads?

[walshy007]

I somehow magically get no ads without being a subscriber.. not sure how it happened, but one day slashdot told me.. 'you are awesome, want us to disable ads for you?'

As I type this post, on the main page I still have a small box that says "Ads disabled (tick) - thanks for helping make slashdot great"

haven't heard anyone else talk about this feature.. so I don't know how common it is, or if it's one of those unspoken things, but yeah

Wrong

[pnuema]

What is the primary goal of a newspaper? Spread information.

This is false. The primary goal of a newspaper is to sell eyeballs. The information is what they use to attract them.