Sarcasm: Save the newspaper!

In the latest Search Engine podcast, Jesse Brown brings the sarcastic funny on the need to save newspapers from the net.

JESSE BROWN: Save the Newspaper!

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Day Vexx

Among the top local news stories in my area– the newspaper has a new publisher. Thanks for keeping me updated, Meta Daily Gazette!
Guesstimate Jones

By all means, save the newspaper!

I’ll need it, later, to line the bird cage…
Talia

Well, considering I might well lose my job if newspapers go the way of the Dodo, yes, I’d prefer to Save the Newspaper :P
hello whirled

if it needs to be labeled sarcasm, it’s not very good sarcasm.

/sarcasm
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  We have a lot of readers with broken irony detectors. /sad truth
Trent Hawkins

“Print is dead”

- Dr. Egon Spengler
http://www.tompappalardo.com standard

This piece suggests that the internet is a superior way of delivering content (which it is, from an efficiency standpoint), yet it ignores the simple fact that lots of people just plain-old LIKE newspapers. So even though the internet is a great thing because it gives us so many CHOICES, somehow giving readers a non-internet choice is perceived as BAD. I’m glad you like reading the news online. But, like… so what?

If you are such a fervent admirer of efficiency, I suggest you stop eating food, and switch to vitamins and supplements mixed into a syringe. You’ll be able to bypass your mouth and get the important stuff you really need into your bloodstream a lot faster.
- Grey Devil
  
  “it ignores the simple fact that lots of people just plain-old LIKE newspapers.”
  
  Oh really? If this were true then the newspaper business would be fine right now. The reality is different, newspapers are an antiquated business that pushes opinions, crummy stories, and tons of ads as NEWS.
  
  The only saving grace it has is when their reporters do some actual reporting, but this is becoming more rare. The same can be said for tv news. It’s all sensetional dribble that has little to do with their original purpose.
Anonymous

@standard
That’s fine, it’s a free world and a free market. If enough people like something, and are willing to pay for it, it won’t die.

I may like sardine-flavored cupcakes, but that doesn’t mean I get to demand that my local bakery make and carry them. I’d have to make them myself.

No business should be guaranteed continued survival; they need to provide something people want at a price they’re willing to pay. Goes for commercial music, architecture, commercial art or newspaper publishers.

I’m sure a motivated person could build a system to take stories off the internet and print them out on unweildy, crappy paper, along with a whole lot of advertising, so that they could have something to lug around with them.
- http://glasswings.com.au/blog/ Xanni
  
  They have; here in Australia it’s called the “mX” which is made available to commuters every day with content fresh from the Internet a few hours before:
  
  http://www.mxnet.com.au/
airshowfan

For the techie/analytical types, here’s a more quantitative analysis about the idea that newspapers have very little “core” news and are mostly random non-news junk:

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/10/rescuing-the-reporters/

Hopefully the reporters will find a platform from which to keep doing their work, and flee the “random non-news junk” sinking ship.
Caroline

Oh, funny and true and sad.

As I said in the thread about NYTimes’ paywall: I’d be willing to pay for an online subscription to a paper if the quality of the reporting was good, and if subscribing would get me an ad-free page, or something else like offline access on my iPhone or e-reader.

The paper copy is clutter to me. If I’m going to subscribe, I’d actually rather get it online or in some electronic format. I would probably pay to subscribe to my local paper if it meant I could read it on my computer without having to deal with their poorly designed website. I paid to get the paper version last year, in an attempt to get and use coupons. The coupons didn’t end up saving me enough money to make the subscription worth it, the paper piled up all over the place, and I still had to deal with the crummy website and its pop-up and pop-over ads.

I feel this way about magazines too. I’d actually subscribe to some magazines if I could get them in PDF form instead of paper form. Could keep back issues for reference without cluttering the living room — and bonus, they’d be searchable by text. Why don’t magazines offer this option? Particularly magazines like IEEE Spectrum, who you’d think would be all over technology — or Mother Earth News, who you’d think would be all over saving a tree?
- Harry Goldstein
  
  One small correction: IEEE Spectrum IS available to IEEE members in a digital edition that can be viewed in a browser or as a .pdf. IEEE Spectrum magazine articles are also available in .pdf form from the Xplore Digital Library (subscription required). And you can always check out magazine content, plus online-only features, news, blogs, podcasts, videos and webinars at spectrum.ieee.org
kirchhaus

I also think this kind of mischaracterizes the debate. The problem with the death of the newspaper is that it provided a way to pay for the work of a bunch of reporters. I don’t much care if my news comes as a piece of paper or electronically, but right now the electronic version doesn’t generally create enough revenue to pay for the time of the journalists I think we need.Right now, newspapers provide better information, and as things stand, the internet isn’t able to pay for the same level of info.
razzberry2

yeah. And at least with newspapers you don’t have to log in to comment EVERY FREAKIN TIME!!!!
- gabrielm
  
  “yeah. And at least with newspapers you don’t have to log in to comment EVERY FREAKIN TIME!!!!”
  
  Because with newspapers you can’t comment at all! Well, I suppose you could snail mail an op-ed and hope that it gets picked…
Kimmo

PMSL.

That was a brutal smackdown : D
Billy Blight

In terms of ads, BoingBoing recently had a giant flash ad over the masthead and takes longer than Reddit to pick over the news story scraps. Also, simply linking otherwise slant free articles turns into a micro-editorial for just about every blog.

And lets not forget that citizen journalism is practiced by the likes of James O’Keefe.

But I suppose this should be about addressing the platform rather than the industry itself.
eZee

Slightly OT:
Everytime i hear the someone say ‘save the newspapers’ or ‘save the music industry’ i have just one quick and simple answer/question:

Why?
- Anonymous
  
  Because without the newspapers to hire reporters and publish stories, much (though of course not all) of what we like to post on our blogs simply wouldn’t exist.
Anonymous

I appreciate the sarcasm, but some of his snark is pretty hypocritical. I mean websites are loaded with ads, including wonderful pop over flash BS and horrible music that you didn’t ask for. Like the editorial pages in the paper much of the internet is self stroking diatribe and while Maramduke and , christ don’t get me started on Family Circle, are real groaners, take a sample of the webcomic community. Internet gets points for XKCD, Questionable Content and the cream of the crop but let’s not forget Calvin, Far Side and Bloom County (yes I realize those 3 have ceased publication). Newspapers function in much the same way As boingboing, digg and fark do. They aggregate content (via Reuters or AP) and present it in combination with original material. Local reporting is essential to a fair democracy and as awesome as BB is I don’t see them delivering me a story about how my town school board is upping class sizes and reducing educational quality. Newspapers are the best worst way to get local information right now. Blogging of course plays an important role, but honestly unless somebody’s paycheck depends on their ability to get the facts and maintain some objective distance (NOT LOOKING AT YOU FOX “NEWS”) I’ll reserve my faith in bloggers to a minimum.
- Itsumishi
  
  No BoingBoing isn’t likely to be discussing any matter to do with your local School unless it somehow falls under one of the writers radar and they feel it’s a topic worth sharing with the world. Boing Boing is a blog, aimed at a wide audience, worldwide.
  
  You might find information about your school on the website version of your local newspaper.
  
  I visit Northcote Leader fairly regularly. This way I can read all the same stories that are in the local paper. There’s no reason more local papers can’t start doing this more and more, with local ads on the pages. As for costs, newspapers are cheap and the cost of buying one barely covers printing and distribution once the resellers take their share. Papers make money from advertising and pretty much always have.
  
  There is no reason they can’t do this online.
Patrick Austin

@standard: Lots of people just plain-old LIKE newspapers? Sure, but not enough to support a staff of reporters, a fleet of trucks, printing presses and all that other stuff.
omnivore

Clearly, we ought to want to have the most informed opinions at the least cost. Jesse Brown’s stupid “aha” moment at the end when he shows his astonished audience how little news is in a paper just reflects the belief that more – more volume, more diversity — produces the goal of being more informed.

It doesn’t, and that’s the crux of the save the newspaper debate. No matter how much low-grade opinion I read, from however diverse a range of sources, I don’t become better informed. The internet’s near-zero cost enables diversity, but works against quality: if I believe that the metric for cost is the cost of my internet provider vs a newspaper subscription cost, the web wins. If I believe that the cost is the amount of time and opportunities to do other things that scouring hundreds of articles for a few, perhaps a dozen that make me better informed, the web is far more costly. Cheap delivery of bulk information in no way precludes valuable informaiton, but by encouraging us to think in terms of diversity and minimum cost per datum, it steers us away from the goal of being as informed as possible via the minimum amount of information consumed.

The main obstacle to understanding the world, to being better informed is not a problem of thinking and writing. It is in part a process of reporting, but reporting is not enough.

That’s why newspapers aren’t reporting organizations, but editorial organizations. The objective is to provide the minimum information to produce the maximum effect — in other words, efficiency. Not the efficiency of delivering huge amounts of low-value material, which is the argument against them. If nothing else, this ought to neutralize the naive use of efficiency as a measure in this debate.

Their core value is not the function of reporting but of the relationship between editors and reporters. If the names Ben Bradlee, H L Mencken, I F Stone, C P Scott or Otis Chandler mean anything to you, you know what I am talking about. To support an editorial process, a customer must be prepared to pay a certain minimum that is above the cost to deliver a low grade generic weblog. And, it is worth noting, in 20 posts, no-one considered the editorial dimension of traditional media vs the web.

The failure isn’t one of relevancy of the newspapers, or a failure to understand the new technology’s implications. It’s a failure to predict the collapse of civility, and to be sufficiently cynical on the part of papers to anticipate the pervasive Reaganite civic irresponsibility that is now engrained in society, and nowhere more than the quasi-libertarianism of the web generation. It’s a failure of people to defend their social integrity, by allowing the economic logic of the onslaught of low-cost high-volume data delivery to trump the value of a viable press.

Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The inability to judge the value of what a newspaper actually offers, by reductively reducing it to a matter of price (and its corollary, diversity) is at the heart of the reductive cynicism of this debate.
Anonymous

Cory, one word, maybe two: snailpapers or snail papers, a new term of endearment for our print newspapers that get delivered to our homes in the morning with news that is, sigh, 12 hours old. But I still love my daily snailpaper, don’t get me wrong. I told Jesse Brown the same thing today!
Anonymous

“Oh really? If this were true then the newspaper business would be fine right now.”

This is incorrect. People do like the content of newspapers. They’re reading it on the Internet. And they are reading the advertisements that used to be in the newspaper on the Internet. But they aren’t reading the content necessarily on the website of the newspaper, so the ad revenue that used to pay for the paper is going somewhere else.

So papers are trying to save money and sell more ads. Fewer reporters, more ads.

” The reality is different, newspapers are an antiquated business that pushes opinions, crummy stories, and tons of ads as NEWS.”

Like that isn’t happening on the Internet. You’d get a pretty thin pile of pixels showing off the original news generated by bloggers who aren’t connected to the MSM.

The worst part of this piece is that it’s from TVO. Nothing like taxes to give you that sense of security on pay day.