“Since mid-January we have been waiting for this announcement so it was pretty much expected.” Ringolsby said when reached by email late Thursday evening. “For myself it was a sense of relief because there is closure. But overall a real concern and fear for a lot of my co-workers. We’ve got people in the office with families, kids at home. Those people have the real challenge in a business that is shrinking, knowing they have a family to raise.”
Unlike many of his co-workers, Ringolsby said he has, for the most part, already landed on his feet. He will be involved with the pre-game and post-game shows on the Rockies telecasts on FSN Rocky Mountain, as well as increase the number of columns he does from foxsports.com from one to two a week. He also will continue his work with Baseball America, which he co-founded. In-between, he plans to take a breather.
...Asked how he views the print industry in light of the Rocky Mountain News folding, Ringolsby grasps the cold reality of the industry these days.
“The Rocky Mountain News folding underscores the seriousness of the print industry. I’ve been a two-time Scripps employee. I spent 7 1/.2 years with UPI. Scripps could have waited out the Denver Post given its financial trouble, but Scripps did not feel that it was financially sensible to remain in Denver, even if it was as the only newspaper.
“At some point, though, the main stream media will wake up and find a way to make the web successful and the demand for writers will be rejuvenated. The country needs a vigilant press, whether it bring newspapers or websites.”
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1. The Essex Snead Posted: February 27, 2009 at 02:31 PM (#3087812)Amen to that, especially if "success" eschews the Gawker model of "bloggers post 30+ newslets at all hours, Nick Denton consolidates his intellectual property & attends parties."
This is about as true a statement as there has ever been, and it applies to every country around the planet.
If they die I won't miss them. I can get AP, NYT, and WaPo stories from those sources. And if I want the daily liberal editorial, I can read the same.
I guess what I'm saying is: Most of these papers long ago abandoned their primary task, which is keeping a watchful eye on their local governments. So #### 'em. Someone else will show up, do the job right, and I'll pay for that.
So, how does the BBWAA hand out awards when there are no newspapers? Colorado doesn't get to vote for MVP?
Larry Walker, Vinny Castilla, and John Elway vote by committee. Cartman is the tiebreaker.
I can't say that I'm a fan of this format. It's a shame because I like Dave PInto and Craig Calcaterra as people.
Ugh, they'd vote this guy for MVP every year.
Over a period of time local newspaper competition was squeezed. Sure, in many major cities there were at least two dailies surviving; but the surrounding communities lost their local newspapers as the major city's dailies tried to expand coverage into the 'burbs. In some cases this eliminated competition within the city, but mostly it destroyed the local papers.
With the consolidation that took place in the newspaper industry in the last 20-25 years, each new owner tried to gain efficiency two ways: first, eliminate redundancy by using one report on national and regional affairs across multiple papers; second, reduce the amount of local coverage. When you have a monopoly on news coverage, it's pretty easy to pare back on local news - no matter how bad your coverage is everyone will still come to you.
I think where we are now is that city papers are getting beat on city/regional/national news by free-content websites, and the whole cost/benefit has been stood on its head. The only thing a newspaper can still deliver effectively - in-depth local coverage - is more expensive to support than the corporate owners signed on for, and they've already reduced themselves to the point of irrelevance on the local front. To get the ROI they want they can cut expenses, which is the death spiral mode they're in. If they don't like their prospects they can sell... but who's buying newspapers in this economy? Nobody. Or they can just accept that they have a lot of money tied up in a bad investment and learn to live with it. No chance.
From what I can see around here, the Hartford Courant (owned by Tribune) is falling apart, while the Journal Inquirer (covering a wide swath of suburbia east of Hartford) is doing OK. The JI covers local news far better than the Courant, because the (local) owners of the JI are OK with a lower ROI as long as the job is getting done well. Both newspapers have websites, but generally the JI doesn't post the local stuff on their site until the day after it makes the paper - giving some incentive to, you know, subscribe. The JI's business model probably didn't provide the ROI the Courant was getting a few years ago, but it is probably better suited to survive the current and future conditions.
If one wants to succeed in the news business - or any business - one needs to find something that people want but don't have. Truly local coverage is lacking in a lot of places, and has been so for the last 25 years or so. If newspapers are to rise again, or if former newspaper employees are to find similar jobs again, that's where to look. I just hope that they go into something with a sound business model.
- - -
Tracy, I wish you well. Sounds like you're somewhat at peace with your path, so good for you.
I believe I heard that there are only 10 cities left with two daily papers.
On February 2, 2009, the Jersey Journal announced that the paper, along with its sister weekly papers in Hudson County, will close on April 13, 2009, if the papers' "revenue is not sufficient to support the papers' reduced expense plan." Its weekly Spanish-language publication, El Nuevo Hudson, will fold after the February 26 edition.
I think there is still an unmet need for investigative state/local coverage but I don't think you can fill a daily paper with it in most markets. There's a niche for an investigative bi-weekly or monthly magazine for each region. Just as Time and National Geographic still fill a niche I think there is an opportunity for investigative reporting in a local news magazine format.
We consider Minneapolis and St. Paul two different cities around here but I bet we're on the list of 10.
Most major cities have a free weekly that does this to a greater or lesser extent, although the coverage is usually pretty spotty.
There's a lot that goes on in big cities that the citizens should probably know about. Whether or not you can get them to care enough to pay for that news is something else entirely.
I cancelled my Courant subscription a while ago once it reached the point that there was absolutely nothing in the paper that I didn't already know.
And this would include Philadelphia, where both papers are owned by the same company. Diversity in the newspaper business is dwindling to nothing ...
> pretty spotty.
There's plenty of opportunity to pick up proven, experienced investigative reporters now. The major newspapers have more of this on Sunday but in order to compete they should give it away for free (the ads pay for the Sunday paper anyway) to keep circulation up and remove space for nearly all breaking news stories. The next radical step would be to eliminate their daily paper. It is more likely that the free weeklies improve to fill the void because they don't have a cost structure built on providing a daily paper.
As I mentioned in another recent thread, the newspaper industry has been in trouble for a long time. The death of smaller dailies and the death of big 2nd papers started a long time ago. The shift away from expensive news to cheaper and more marketable (in terms of ads and readers) fluff started a long time ago in an attempt to sustain declining readership and revenues. The internet may have hastened the end of newspapers but it really has very little to do with the underlying causes of their demise.
And I don't find the prescriptions here particularly persuasive either. The main underlying issue is that most Americans don't give a #### what's going on. They traded in newspapers for 30-second TV news stories decades ago. Now they're trading in TV news for the Daily Show and Fox's (and CNN's and MSNBC's) yammering heads ... or for HBO or Family Guy on DVD or BTF. There are _niche_ markets out there for serious news coverage but they are small -- the E! network would probably get better ratings.
Anyway, civilization came to a halt when the Weekly World News went under.
They could use a scores writer. My guess is you can cover both the UES and West Side locations... ;)
I don't think they do. What NPR does, and does well IMO, is talk about things that other news outlets don't, which makes them seem to be deeper.
-- MWE
What started out as Mr. Snitch about 60-70 years ago...it's a hell of a mess and will be doing the inky-dinky folderoo soon enough from what I'm hearing.
First, advertisers prefer bias. They want readers/viewers to be homogeneous, as it makes their targeted advertising more effective. To the extent that news organizations relied on advertising, bias was good. Now that tradiditonal advertising is drying up and news organizations will have to rely more on subscriptions (for print or online editions) they're better off appealing to as many people as possible. As such, bias is bad. To the extent that news orgs become less biased, a large segment of people who've given up looking for unbiased coverage will return. (IMO)
Second, as I've mentioned, what the news orgs have been peddling has been less proprietary than in the past, at the same time that non-proprietary information (as most news is) has become freely available. With consolidation some org like Tribune doesn't need a movie reviewer at every paper; they don't need a national bureau for each paper; they don't even need to fill the editorial page locally; and so on. But anyone can set up a web page with an AP feed; anyone can post opinion and analysis anywhere. If they can shift to something nobody else can cover in-depth - which I contend is local coverage in suburbs and rural areas, something that is poorly handled in many cases - they can regain subscribers. It won't be many, and ad revenue will still be low, but I think it can happen for the industry as a whole.
Third, Americans have shown repeatedly that they'll respond to something they can trust. Right now the economy is tanking because banks don't trust creditors, depositors don't trust banks, employees don't trust employers, and nobody trusts anyone having the power to do something about it (including the media responsible for covering this stuff). If money is to be spent or lent, those with the money need to trust that their money won't be wasted. If news orgs can build that reputation again via unbiased local news I think people will respond. It certainly won't be overnight, but in time I think it'll happen.
I agree with the spirit of this, while noting that I think the level of discourse is marginally better there than what I might hear on most TV programs.
Naively, I think that's an oversimplification. I bet more do less work now than they once would have to learn about the world/news and more also now do more than would have once been true - in line with the behavior/exposure stratification we're seeing across the board.
Then there's Car Talk...
My intent was to say that what a newspaper delivers, if it's doing things well, is a lot of information that is impractical for the reader to have assembled on their own. One of the reasons people have given up on newspapers is that newspapers are no longer doing that. The really impractical stuff is left undone because it's expensive, and the easily-gleaned info is so easy to get that nobody needs a newspaper to do it for them. It's not that people don't care; it's that newspapers no longer serve a useful purpose for them. I'm one of the few who think they can, but as long as they think of advertisers as the customer, they're dead.
My gut tell me to go with the expanded local coverage argument. I honestly don't think that the complete death of the newspaper industry is upon us. Then again, if subscription prices stay where they are today, I'm not sure I'll ever subscribe to a newspaper again. And I grew up in a home where we subscribed to three (my dad working in the industry has something do with that).
I might add that I spend more time reading old newspapers on ProQuest than current ones. The price is right, and, all too often, the coverage is better. I've fallen in love with the 1908 Chicago Tribune archives. There are reasons for that, too. The Tribune had absolutely amazing election coverage in those days, including both a wealth of statistics and analysis. The paper was much more attractive then as well, with relevant cartoons both on the front page and throughout the newspaper (much more attractive and thought provoking than the modern symbolic editorial cartoon). Villageidiom is absolutely right. I just hope that one day some editor discovers these archives and puts the focus back on content.
The newspapers still have this idea that people will pay for the same kind of information that they did before all news became international.
One shouldn't. If no branch of the US federal government had involved themselves in any way with Napster, other than civil judiciary presiding over trials, yes, we'd still be seeing record labels folding.
The music industry, left devoid of a government interested in helping them in other ways, likely still wouldn't have caught on. The TV networks haven't, not really. They're getting really close, and lucky for them they had both the example of the music industry and the benefit of a number of years between easy home sharing of music and that of TV shows/movies. BitTorrent closed that gap much quicker than anyone expected; if the protocol had been around and employed by Napster, Napster would have been 10x what it was. Of course, it came about in no small part due to Napster's closing: a Napster allowed to flourish would have prevented forty different copycats which would have prevented a lot of frustrations incumbent in that (harder to find files, harder to find people online hosting those files) and may have impacted Cohen's desire to develop it, its marketability, and/or its adoption rates.
The movie studios had offers from a number of places, including movie88, which was already up and running and successfully streaming movies for $1 apiece, in 2002. They didn't take heed, even while witnessing the fact that Napster's crushing didn't stop anything. They didn't partner with movie88. They didn't offer their own streaming service, which would have crushed it. They didn't offer a download service to compete with movie88. They didn't even start offering a download service just to save their own distribution costs! Shown a viable and burgeoning market of people willing to pay $1 to stream a movie from some crap website in Taiwan, they didn't even investigate the question "How many of them would pay $20, same as they pay for a DVD, to download it from us?" They'd have made full retail instead of just wholesale, they'd have saved every dime from distribution costs with no additional costs except semi-fixed costs of hardware and personnel and the only truly large cost would be marginal: bandwidth.
This wasn't just a so-close-to-guaranteed thing that it was basically arbitrage. This was literally someone slapping them in the face with a stack of crisp bills and saying "Hey, we're making this money. We'd like to share it with you." They had three possible responses:
1) Okay!
2) Why should we cut you in? Thanks for doing our market research for us, suckers. We'll take over from here.
3) Back, foul beast, to the maws of hell! Even though we see that every time the music industry kills one of you, the only result is that you split into ten others that are duplicates in every way except smarter, more determined, and less likely to work with us, we have a new plan. We will team up with them, and kill you faster!
It was obvious what the solution was not. So obvious that you could quite literally ask a random person on the internet and they knew. Read this 2002 Slashdot thread on movie88. This isn't a bunch of people saying making tortured arguments about why piracy is okay. This is a freaking bunch of people either saying "I'd love to do that" or "If only the MPAA would do this themselves." This isn't a good story, because everyone knows how it ends. It ends with the fact that I still can't just go pay and download a movie in a non-completely ###### by DRM version with my choice of formats, and that even if/when I could, an entire generation of customers has been trained on how to screw them over and has been given ample reason to not mind doing so. You think the US has created a generation of terrorists with the occupation of Iraq? That's this mess writ microscopic (in numbers, not impact, of course.)
On top of all those reasons why the music industry would have made the same dumbshit decisions even if the government had said "We've got better things to do. Do what you've always done and everyone else has to do: take them to court.", I'll point to this excellent article on Torrentfreak from just two days ago. It's an excellent compendium of previously made points, if light on argumentation. To boil it down, the thesis is, to quote: "So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?"
1) Explosion of video games taking recreation dollars formerly earmarked for music.
2) International trade agreements/world markets limiting ability to tier prices based on local GDP/avg income.
3) New media introduced 30 years ago that doesn't break easily (CD) and move to digital media killed the rebuy market, which was a cash cow. Also allowed secondhand market to flourish, which shifts the cash cow all the way from with the record labels, to nonexistent, to in the pockets of third-party retailers. [RIAA reaction to that? Tried to sue, tried to change legislation/interpretation of existing laws, but these people had lawyers and pockets of their own.]
4) Drastic reduction in price to record an album means some can do it on their own, and those who don't have access to thousands more labels, and thousands more labels means more competition which begets less screwing of artists.
5) Digital distribution means BMG's knowledge of how to ship 100,000 CDs and the network to do so doesn't have the value it had.
6) So much streaming, so easy, and so targeted to tastes means "Why should I ever purchase?" to some.
7) Like 3, another revenue prop was that customers were forced to buy 12 songs for $15 if they wanted just one. No longer.
So yeah, they'd still be making dumbshit decisions, faced with a market, both supplier and customer, that's wised up to the fact that they're not as necessary, and having revenue streams go away at the same time as those props do. If you run up to a group of old guys with canes and cut off one leg and kick the cane out of their hands, even some of those that can hop are going to get knocked over by all the others falling around them.
Two comments on this:
First, read Nicholson Baker's Double Fold. If you appreciate the century old newspapers as it appears you do, you have to read this book.
Second, at some point you should read the Chicago Tribune's campaign coverage from 1936 (FDR vs. Landon), if you want to see (a) partisan coverage that's so lopsided as to defy belief**; and (b) the limits of newspaper "bias" in shaping public opinion. You can also check out the coverage from that same year in any of the Hearst papers, the New York American in particular.
And I'll second your point about the superior coverage of older papers in at least one field: sports. When I had my book shop, I bought the entire bound run of the NY Times from 1913 to 1946, and when I closed it I still had over a dozen of the volumes covering some of the key World Series, such as 1919, 1924, 1926, 1927, etc. You have to read the coverage from those years to believe just how thorough they were. Take out the videos and advanced statistics and they go way beyond not only today's papers, but beyond ESPN as well. One of the true gems is the 1926 inclusion of the complete radio play-by-play transcripts of every World Series game, back when radio was in its relative infancy. And so on. Check it out.
** As one tiny example, the Tribune ran a small box in the upper corner of the front page, opposite the weather box. It read, "YOU HAVE __ MORE DAYS LEFT TO SAVE YOUR COUNTRY---WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?" The only modern equivalent would be the chain e-mails you get from the sort of folks who think that the Republicans have gone soft on Obama.
#53: Thanks for pointing out that book. I will buy it as soon as I set foot in the States. The Amazon description has me very excited.
I'll take a look at the '36 Tribune coverage. I guess that I should note that I don't believe that early newspaper coverage was less biased than modern coverage -- especially the Chicago Tribune. But I'd much rather buy a biased newspaper that gives me a lot to read than to buy a biased newspaper that reprints the AP's top stories any day.
I have also heard good things about New York Times baseball coverage from the 1920s. If only my ProQuest subscription would last forever! I'm going to try to collect as much as I can as quickly as possible. I'll start with the 1926 World Series.
I've still got to give out more praise for the '08 Chicago Tribune sports sections. You'd have to see them to understand what I mean. They are a delight to read a hundred years after the fact. I also downloaded all the sports sections from the 1914 Tribune, as well as a number of other articles, mostly involving the US military intervention in Mexico and the start of World War I. The World War I bits are very clearly pacifist, including scary drawings depicting the horrors of war.
This really has been a good thread.
I think this is an astute observation. In the name of cutting costs, newspapers gave up a lot of what they did very well - and that no one else could do as well - in favor of things that other people can do at least as well if not better.
I just ordered it, thanks, Andy.
-- MWE
And of course, this isn't new. Loads of American firms did this in the 80s to compete with the Japanese, thoroughly misunderstanding why the Japanese were kicking their asses. They cut costs wherever possible, streamlined down to the point they had no flexibility, and generally behaved like a Little League team after a visit from Julio Franco. Holding your bat like Franco did out of pure hero worship is about equally likely to be successful as cutting costs without thinking strategically is just because that's what you think the guy who's beating you is doing. The Japanese weren't cutting costs. They were harping on efficiency, and one byproduct of that is that some costs will be cut. Other costs will go up, because you do some things, the most efficient things, more.
Finance students hate marketing classes more than Ralph Nader would, but they do get one thing right (typical for that bunch, they get the one useful thing out of the way on the first day): the way you compete is differentiation. Now, sure, price, pure economic differentiation, is one way. But only one guy can be the cheapest, so it didn't take long for there to end up with one paper in basically every city. Having blithely ignored that lesson, they're now busy learning that a geographic monopoly means ####-all when there's a "competitor" that's a free replacement good. Faced with this, somehow the solution arrived at for the last 10 years has been to further cut costs, cutting staff, relying more and more on wire services, while watching classifieds (as #48 mentions) go from money machines to complete evaporation in a few years and somehow not doing a damn thing to prevent the same thing from happening to obituaries.
Even now I'm not sure they get the fact that while they were busy differentiating themselves from each other locally by focusing on all the wrong things (price, money spent rather than how money is spent), they cut their own throats just at the time a new medium came along. Then they looked at the new medium, thoroughly misunderstood and underestimated it long enough for it to catch and surpass them even at the very few things they remained any good at whatsoever. Now, and I do so love this just from the humor perspective, now the big idea is what? Look at the Newsday thread. Let's take our product, which is getting murdered a little more every day by this other product (the internet news space), and let's compete with the guy kicking our ass on his turf instead of our own. And charge when he's free. Despite the fact that we all tried this less than 10 years ago and got our asses handed to us.
You know what the newspaper industry is? It's the fifth bad guy in the circle of six surrounding Bruce Lee. After watching four guys just like him get brutalized one by one, he never looks at the sixth guy and says "Hey, how about we try this at the same time?" He wades in by himself, and the result's as predictable as the fate of the Seattle P-I.
Just to be clear, I couldn't agree more with that perspective. I absolutely love the old Robert McCormick Tribune, even though the slant of its news coverage made that of the Drudge Report seem like Pravda by comparison. Being fortunate enough to live in the one metro area in the U.S. where you can get the last three first rate U.S. newspapers delivered to your doorstep every morning, I can sometimes lose track as to just how bad all the rest of them have become. Once you leave the rather rarified air of the Times and the Post, both of which have tons of original reporting and interesting features spread throughout each issue, you wind up in a vast wasteland of barebones national and international coverage, taken almost exclusively from the wire services. I can easily spend two hours or more on the print editions of the Times and the Post every day, but whenever I'm in cities like Boston or Seattle or Chicago, I can get through their local papers in about ten minutes. If I lived in any of those areas, I doubt if I'd even bother to buy anything but the national edition of the Times.
I have also heard good things about New York Times baseball coverage from the 1920s. If only my ProQuest subscription would last forever! I'm going to try to collect as much as I can as quickly as possible. I'll start with the 1926 World Series.
You won't believe how good their World Series coverage** was, beginning in 1919. Before that it was kind of dry, and reflected the thought that sports weren't worthy of much attention---the Times ran several editorials in favor of shutting down baseball when the U.S. entered the First World War. The Times also was way behind the curve of most of the other papers in introducing photographs and other graphics. All in all, I wish I'd been able to buy the World or the Sun or the American, rather than the Times, just for the visual variety.
I've still got to give out more praise for the '08 Chicago Tribune sports sections. You'd have to see them to understand what I mean. They are a delight to read a hundred years after the fact. I also downloaded all the sports sections from the 1914 Tribune, as well as a number of other articles, mostly involving the US military intervention in Mexico and the start of World War I. The World War I bits are very clearly pacifist, including scary drawings depicting the horrors of war.
In line with that, Nicholson Baker also wrote a followup to Double Fold, called The World On Sunday, which is a full-color collection of many of the World's best Sunday features at the turn of the century. It was fifty bucks new, but you can now get used copies for as little as $9.98. This ain't exactly the Golden Age of book stores, but it's certainly the Golden Age for used book buyers with access to a computer. Ninety-nine per cent of all non-antiquarian books (and by antiquarian I mean the truly rare collectibles, not the average good used book) are cheaper today than they were 10 or 15 years ago, and far more easily available.
**The Times' overall baseball coverage, though, was nowhere near as good as several of the other New York papers. It was only their World Series coverage that stood out.
Seconded. Even living in Chicago, the only broadcast news that ever I listen to is Today on Radio 4, in large part because it starts with the idea that its listeners are intelligent and informed and goes from there, something that American broadcasters (even, IMHO, NPR) just don't do. Even considering that the news is of course aimed at a UK audience and is often baffling and/or irrelevant to me I still end up hearing far less pointless talk than I would listening to an equal amount of American radio.
And that's not even considering Radio 4's arts and letters, dramatic, and science programming, which at times is way beyond great.
The closest thing I've ever seen to an indoor riot was Baker's Q&A;session at an American Library Association conference. I haven't read the book so I can't comment on it, but I've yet to meet a preservationist that agrees with any of Baker's arguments about paper.
Generally I hate this, of course, but: Dude, you really need to leave the basement more.
Read the book and decide for yourself.
I'm more than aware of Baker's lack of popularity among certain preservationists, but in great part both they and the libraries** are simply trying to defend their beancounting ways when it came to the many decisions to destroy the bound volumes of newspapers. It would have cost a relative pittance to preserve one bound run of each of those papers, and the value to historians would have been beyond calculation. It was a grand scale version of the LOC's decision (one of a million similar ones) to destroy a 500 volume collection of 19th century U.S. city directories, an action I witnessed firsthand in the 1970's.***
And as to the specific complaint about paper deterioration: My own bound volumes of the Times are the regular editions that were bound by libraries for use, in my case the main library of Winchester, Virginia. They were NOT the rag paper editions that the Times often sold to bigger libraries. In 1989 I bought the entire 601 volume run from 1913 to 1946 for $3000 at an auction, and probably spent another $500-$600 in getting them up to Bethesda. It was a total steal, despite all the usual comments about "who would ever want to read a bunch of old newspapers?"
Over the years I sold the volumes for anywhere from $25 to $500 each, the vast majority at either $50 or $100, and when I closed in 2006 I took home the last remaining volumes, which were nearly all World Series months or half months. I've looked at them many times and haven't taken any particular care of them other than to make sure that they're stored flat, rather than upright.
The oldest one I still have is October 1915, and most of the others are from the 10's, 20's and 30's. NOT ONE OF THEM shows any particular sign of aging, other than the usual slight browning. There is no brittleness and no need for anything more than ordinary care in handling them. The idea that newspapers of this vintage are somehow beyond salvation---the party line that many of Nicholson's critics parrot---is complete and utter bullshlt.
** with a few honorable exceptions such as the libraries at Ohio State and Duke, which now houses the entire bound volume collection (including the World) that Baker rescued (with his own money) at British auctions.
*** the man who was given the contract to pulp them then decided to sell them himself, one of the best cases of self-interested civil disobedience I've yet to witness. Of course the LOC tried to prosecute him when they discovered what he'd done. This is typical of the common librarians' mentality, many more examples of which can be found in Double Fold.
Have magazines like Harper's, the Atlantic, the Economist, (eve Time), etc. seen a drop in subscribers similar to that of newspapers? If they haven't, then that would lend credence to Mike's theory here. Perhaps instead of trying to deliver readily information, newspapers should have been moving more towards comprehensive synthesis (which you really can't get from a blog and are much more likely to get from a magazine)? Or is that kind of commitment too much to offer at newspaper prices?
It's a shame that newspapers went towards less analysis/depth and more for Internet style information dumps... there's probably a dramatic need at the local level for in depth synthesis and analysis that you're not going to get from a blog unless you're in a very large city or metropolitan area.
This weekend their doing readings of "The Talented Mr Ripley" and "Rendezvous with Rama" which is worth listening to.
"In Our Time", "Material World", "Just a Minute" and "Old Harry's Game" is probably my favourite non-today program shows.
Ninety-nine per cent of all non-antiquarian books (and by antiquarian I mean the truly rare collectibles, not the average good used book) are cheaper today than they were 10 or 15 years ago, and far more easily available.
Absolutely true. I buy used books online much more often than my dad ever did when he was my age. It's not quite as easy here in China (I'd have to fly to Hong Kong or Taiwan to get any of the books I REALLY want), of course, but it's quite easy in the States. Now I've got two books to buy when we get back.
Well, one should think.
If you want to go for a third, I'd strongly recommend Red-Color News Soldier, which is an collection of photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution, annotated and with a full explanatory text, including eyewitness accounts. It's quite a document, and I've never seen anything like it.
EDIT: Read the reader comments in that Amazon link if you want more details about the book.
For $37.80 postpaid, this baby is the stone nuts.
Hearst developing e-reader, charging for e-news
"Material World" is similar to "In Our Time" but focuses exclusively on the latest breakthroughs in science/engineering.
Jesus, they're taking terrible ideas and combining them with terrible technology that nobody wants, much less for the price tag, meanwhile combining all the disadvantages of newspaper with the disadvantages of digital. I'm starting to wonder if drunk children could have more strategic sense than these people.
Jesus, they're taking terrible ideas and combining them with terrible technology that nobody wants, much less for the price tag, meanwhile combining all the disadvantages of newspaper with the disadvantages of digital. I'm starting to wonder if drunk children could have more strategic sense than these people.
Not to mention that the last time that the Hearst chain (or what's left of it) produced anything of value was about 100 years ago, when their papers often had terrific Sunday comics sections. Now if they brought those back, they might be onto something, once they could skirt around the fact that they'd all be in the public domain by this time.
If newspapers were continuing to provide the kind of information they did when David Simon worked for the Sun, they likely would not be replaced. They likely also would have had higher subscription prices (as this level of coverage is expensive and advertising rates are not directly sensitive to quality of coverage), which in turn would have provided more stability to revenues when the ad market fell apart, which would have made newspapers more viable now.
Honestly, I couldn't tell you why there aren't any crime beat bloggers. It seems to me that there is a built in audience who would be interested. Perhaps it's because you have to do a little work. You can't just sit in front of the laptop and comment on something you saw on a screen.
Etkin was another guy from that paper? I remember his articles form some Bill James books.
I'm not sure anyone was claiming that fantasy as their own. I, for one, was suggesting that newspapers generally aren't good any more, which makes what little they provide much easier to replace. In a way, Simon is making the same point.
I wasn't referring to anyone in particular, only to the sanguine POV that somehow the internet can magically replace a good newspaper.
If newspapers were continuing to provide the kind of information they did when David Simon worked for the Sun, they likely would not be replaced. They likely also would have had higher subscription prices (as this level of coverage is expensive and advertising rates are not directly sensitive to quality of coverage), which in turn would have provided more stability to revenues when the ad market fell apart, which would have made newspapers more viable now.
I only wish that it were that easy, though I certainly agree with you that the Big Three excepted, "newspapers generally aren't good any more."
But why is that?
IMO---and I know that this will tick people off to read this---with the internet picking off the freeloaders, there's simply not a critical mass of readers in any cities but New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles (and maybe Philadelphia) to sustain the sort of newspaper that can even hope to give the web a run for its money. And of those cities, only two of them (New York and Washington) have their leading newspapers run by independent families with institutional memories. The papers in the other four cities might as well be headquartered in Houston or Las Vegas, for all the interest their owners have in providing a first rate product.
And so you have a downward spiral, with fewer readers resulting in lowered money for good reporting, which in turn leads to a product that fewer and fewer readers will want to buy.
At the rate we're going, it wouldn't surprise me too much to see the remaining big city newspapers (other than the Post and the Times) devolve into glorified suburban shopping tabloids, with a skeletal staff of local reporters to disguise the rot. Which will leave the Big Three to have the market for serious readers all to themselves, since I don't see any other papers out there with both the necessary financial resources and the commitment to operate on a high level of quality. I wish that there were Happy News exceptions to this, but I sure can't think of any.
And much as I love the internet, until news-oriented websites find a way to make enough money to pay good investigative reporters, the sort of scenario depicted by David Simon is going to be more and more the rule, and the sort of hard news that used to be readily available to newspaper readers with a quick glance at the headlines is going to gradually disappear from American life---unless you make a conscious effort to look for it. The net effect is going to be as some people have already described it: A small minority of hyper-informed readers who spend much of their time gathering news from websites all over the world; and the vast majority of surfers who never get past the headlines, the sports and the gossip. It's never been easier to become hyper-informed about the world---YAY---but it's also much easier now to ignore everything that doesn't directly affect you. IMO too many people are celebrating the better of those developments without bothering to think about the long range effects of the other.
"It's great to be young, and to be a Giant" --- Larry Doyle
And it must be something to be a 25 year old American and to be able to read Chinese. I'm also almost as impressed that you've managed to acquaint yourself with "Red-Color News Soldier," since I've yet to read any reviews of it and it seems to have hit the remainder bins without making much of a splash.
Question: Where did you find those PDF copies of Hong Qi? And are they available in an English translation? I've read a fair amount of Chinese Communist propaganda from that period, and a couple of very good accounts by western observers (Simon Leys' Chinese Shadows in particular) but it's always more interesting to see a doctrine evolve on a day-to-day basis in reaction to outside events.
No, sadly, they wouldn't, or probably not most of them. Life+70 is a ############, and you have the Walt "It's okay for our namesake to steal ideas from the past, hell we built our company on it, but damned if you're going to put Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse on a shirt" Disney Company to thank for that.
They might have the budget, but they definitely don't have the incentive. Very few local TV stations do any real investigative reporting, and even the national networks don't have a full-time investigative staff; the pressure to get on the air is far too great to allow for long lead-time pieces.
The Economist has been adding subscribers, from what I've read. Can't speak for any of the others.
-- MWE
Jack Etkin has been linked here many times (much to the dismay of others).
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