Frankly, looking at the state of technology today, why would anyone imagine daily newspapers could be a viable medium? When was the last time you decided to buy something based on a newspaper ad? Heck, it’s got to have been years since I even saw a newspaper ad.

It may not be “just” that the internet exists, but that’s plenty sufficient. Print is dying as a medium for daily news. This strikes me as unsurprising, and not even necessarily sad.

#15 jimtealiii
The rightwing base says that and I suppose from their extremist point of view it may seem that way to them. But there is very little honest self reflection on the right. I have yet to see any.

Cheap ass owners indeed. The staff in most newsrooms has been cut and cut and cut. The owners want the profits, but don’t feel any need to provide a quality product.

And product is the best you can hope for. A sense of responsibility to the community? Not a chance. Any thought of the fourth estate, of the importance of having an informed public, is long gone.

Here’s a not-so secret secret. Newspaper publishers do not think of you as citizens, nor even as readers. They think of you as consumers and not very bright ones at that. They think of their newpapers as crappy product.

I heard the publisher of our local city newspaper droning on about how his paper provides important local news, local news that people cannot get elsewhere. But this same sleazebag has cut his reporting staff to a skeleton crew and has but one reporter assigned to the state capitol. His idea of local news is to report the little league and soccer scores.

In the course of rattling on, this publisher referred to his readership as “consumers” no less that four times. And when I called him on it, he lied and denied it. Got him on tape … Grrrr.

An informed public? That might stand in the way of increasing shareholder value.

Certain readers——especially those who write articles or reports, or post to Wikipeida (“citation needed”)——regularly clip or photocopy stories and columns from newspapers. Such items often lack the part of the page that contains the date and/or title, forcing them to write those facts in by hand. But hand-entry is a pain in the neck, and it’s error-prone: the date might be entered incorrectly, or not entered at all.

A datelined-newspaper would appeal to those readers, who are attracted to online news stories partly because they (usually) contain embedded dates. Doing so would also implicitly proclaim to advertisers the seriousness and intelligence of its readership.

There’d be no manual date-entry needed, since typesetting software would interpret and fill in an embedded “Current Date” directive in each story-template.

BTW, the old-style datelines newspapers used to include forced clippers to provide the year and title, and to increment the day by one, so they weren’t very helpful.

This is the heart of the old business model. Businesses that are following the old model are all in trouble. The big three television networks, radio and newspapers all work on the model that the advertiser is the customer. The viewer, the listener and the reader — i.e., us! — are the product to be delivered. The actual medium is, in each case, just the truck used to deliver us to the cattle chutes.

That’s why we love Google the way we do. They are using the new business model. We, the end users, are Google’s customers. The advertisers are there to support us; thus, they don’t get privileged placement, either in rankings or in obnoxious banners. We moved to Google because we trusted them more; I vividly remember thinking, “None of these results are ads?” and dropping the other search engines quite literally immediately. Google’s logic is that by catering to the end user, they can expand the whole market qualitatively, serving everyone better. That logic, the “rising tide” model, seems to be working this time.

This is all possible because the internet is as close to a true democracy as this planet’s ever come. I know an actual bum who has a blog. You can literally be homeless and jobless and still participate. Earlier democracies have had de facto barriers to entry that were much higher. To vote, you have to leave your house; to start a blog, you just need to sit down in front of your computer. To change your newspaper subscription requires a request, personal information, a delay and paying attention to bills. Reading a different website requires a new tab loading in the background while you finish reading at your current news site; and you’re not committed to that news site in any way.

The new model is finally a much more real democracy, based on a technical layer designed to re-route around a nuclear war. The old model requires scarcity to justify an oligarchy; that scarcity no longer exists in the degree it once did, and if you read Boing Boing regularly, you’ll read about frequent attempts to impose a new artificial scarcity. Those are just stopgaps, of course; you can’t use the old business model anymore.

Well, you can, but that guy with the weird round, spinning, sled runners is going to out-pull your old-style sled any day.

Wire stories? I read the headlines on news.google. Sports? If I cared I would watch sports center.
Stocks? If I cared I would watch CNBC
Hi and Lois? Peanuts? If I cared I would be 70.
Classifieds? If I cared I would check out Craig’s list or the school’s online classifieds.
So what does that leave? local stuff, editorials, and letters to the editor and the occasional *gasp* original reporting that is more than just the facts of what happened and is something that I would need to do more than read the headline to get the information from.

I read an op ed at HuffPo a while ago about newspapers not understanding what service they provide. In the horse and buggy era, news was a rare commodity and newspapers had to go out and find it. Now there’s so much news that it gives you a headache just thinking about it. The job of a modern newspaper is to select news for its readership. Which means that you almost have to have a niche and you definitely have to understand your demographic. Huge difference in mission between pre-web news and post-web news. I thought that it was a pretty good point.

What newspapers should do, and don’t, because they’re short-sighted, is become the source for heavy-duty in-depth reporting. Big newspapers should be *the* place to go for investigative journalism. Instead, they’ve ceded that spot to the weeklies.

Here in Madison, the local paper (The Capitol Times) occassionally manages to squeeze out a relevant investigation. But mostly it’s our weekly, The Isthmus, that really brings the bacon home with long-piece local stories.

It’s simple: Printed media is best for stories that require exploration and lots of words. If the major papers focused on that instead of trying to cram in every 500-word story from around the country, they could re-capture an audience.

Most of the other news they cover is old by the time they get it printed. It’s called “internet time”.

Those of us that do care can’t get what we want out of American’s current newspapers. For instance, I care about international news, not local. And the newspapers in Minneapolis don’t carry many international stories.

Of course, I haven’t found a decent online paper that does comprehensive international news either.

And am I the only one who absolutely hates newsprint? The way it sticks to your fingers? Its acrid industrial smell? And the newspaper format is horrendous. You don’t read a newspaper. You wrestle with its huge, maddeningly thin and crinkly sheets. You fold and subdue it into rough rectangles just to isolate a few skinny columns of text that end in a jump, requiring you to do it all over again. Extracting information from the format is an utter nightmare.

Give me a break. Customers pay. I don’t know about you, but I don’t pay Google. Google isn’t a new different business model than newspapers. It’s exactly the same business model, done better. Just like newspapers, they make money selling ads that are displayed next to the content we actually want. They’ve brilliantly offloaded the risky content-creation side of the business. Individual content sources can die, and Google keeps making money selling ads on the ones that live.
It’s great for them, and arguably for good for content producers (e.g. reporters) and consumers (us) as producers can take what risks they like without the business side of a newspaper caring so much if they, as individuals entities, live or die.
I mean, feel free to love the fine works of Google (I do). They’ve got a nice big-picture view whereby they don’t sacrifice their longterm asset (our eyeballs) for short term gains. But their revenue comes from advertisers; and it is advertisers they must keep happy. Keeping us happy is merely a necessary prerequisite, not the goal.

But accurate, not so much. Although that’s also true for other media, online seems to be an egregious offender.

And am I the only one who absolutely hates newsprint?

I have a phobia about getting my fingers inky. Watching people trying to read them on a subway or a plane is funny, though. It’s like trying to fold a bedsheet in a phone booth, if the phone booth were made out of other people’s body parts. The inability of modern humans to move in a linear fashion without a cup of coffee elevates the hijinks potential.

The aspects of the Internet Google has their hands in — Google maps, web search history, advertising, email, blogs, etc. — makes this prospect a little scary.

Check out the action the Charlottesville Daily Progress has been doing to Joe Stirt over at the BookOfJoe:

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2008/01/media-general-1.html
http://www.bookofjoe.com/2008/02/the-charlottesv.html

And several more…trying to C&D a guy that is probably the only one that has ever brought in outside links to a po’dunk newspaper.

And they wonder why they are so last century…

Of course, the same is true for most (if not all) online media outlets. News editors all seem to think that what we need is a little shazam in our news headlines and truth be damned.

It’s like every news media source these days is just the editorial section of a real newspaper, but we can’t find the real newspaper. We can’t find the section where a real journalist pounds the streets to interview both sides and get to the bottom of a matter.