Newspapers Are Dying, Blog At 11 279
The New Yorker is running a long and thoughtful piece by Eric Alterman on the death and life of the American newspaper. It's not news that newspapers are dying, but the acceleration of the process in the last few years is startling: "Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years... The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies' solution to their problem was to make 'our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.'" The article goes on to profile The Huffington Post as exemplar of what is replacing paper and ink. "The Huffington Post's editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the 'mullet strategy.' ('Business up front, party in the back' is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) 'User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,' Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to 'argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp.
On News (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now the only papers I read in the morning are the Financial Times (which does not count as an American Paper for reports like this, right?) And once a week I get the Sunday Times from a newspaper importer. While I feel the Times has fallen harder then all the others, it still has my crossword, and gives me the Murdoch point of view for the world.
I mainly get my news from reading the BBC website daily, and 20 minutes on Slashdot.
Re:Ha Ha (Score:3, Insightful)
caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
television was supposed to kill both radio and the movies. well, we don't see movie news reels anymore, and we don't see radio serials either, but you can't watch tv while driving to work, and no one wants to see indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull in your parent's basement by yourself on a 19 inch monitor
what new media does do is dramatically alter the audience and purpose of old media. so newspapers will come to see the point where their income from online content will eclipse their income from print content. so then what is the purpose of newspapers without the actual newspaper?
one answer: trust
like the story summary suggests, user generated content sucks. in terms of quality and in terms of partisanship. so newspaper sites will still be the place people go for breaking news and truthful reporting. you can't beat a salaried professional news gathering organzation in terms of trust. nothing the internet can spew forth threatens that
the internet has merely created lots of partisan fiefdoms with an agenda and user venting. much of it rambling, illiterate, unhinged, and mostly useless. usless to readers, not those who vent: that's the psychological value of catharsis. that is, user generated content is usually more useful for whomever is commenting than anyone who reads the comment. this form of online content obviously isn't a threat to anything newspaper's do, merely a weird ecological tweak to how they fit into the media universe. the internet makes newspapers part of a loud room of noisy feedback, rather than the lonely ivory towers they used to be
and so the newspaper will morph into a less prestigious role in society, but it will never die, and will still be vital in a modified way
Amount of newspaper ads as an economic measure. (Score:1, Insightful)
On the other hand, when the economy is poor, people aren't as willing to consume. So companies need to advertise more to incite people to buy more. People aren't willing to pay as much for newspapers, so the newspapers must look to advertisers as an extra revenue stream.
Look at American newspapers from the 1950s, when the economy was very strong. There are extremely few ads. Then skip ahead to the mid-1970s, and today. In terms of the page area used for advertising, it's typically around 70% to 80%. It's often higher for magazines, where it has become difficult to distinguish articles from ads.
mullet strategy (Score:2, Insightful)
only with professional editing.
I stopped reading at (Score:5, Insightful)
If you ever have seen the documentary Spin or just really paid attention you know the mainstream media including the newspaper is as far away as you can get from "objective." It annoys me that they and the nightly news toot their own horn with that BS every chance they get -- and unfortunately they are fooling a few others.
If they want to pretend that they don't shape the news, fine, but I think that's a big reason why people are leaving in droves to get better news online.
Journalists are the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust? (Score:3, Insightful)
There aren't as many total lunatics in newsrooms, maybe, but reporters and editors all have their agendas no matter how much they want to hide it, and the veneer of objectivity washes away as soon as you see a story in the paper where you actually know some of the facts, where you know enough to tell if they're objective or accurate.
The biggest difference between the Internet and the papers is that here you get to see all the political sausage-making out in the open... not hidden in the editor's office and the story room.
Do people prefer already-digested news? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it seems to me that people in the U.S. are increasingly divided. We want our viewpoints affirmed - not challenged. When was the last time you heard someone say or write "That makes sense. Maybe I'm wrong."
When I worked as a reporter, I always judged my job on controversial issues by the number of complaints I got from both sides. If they were nearly evenly divided, I knew I did well. Those I offended used almost exactly the same wording except for changing x for y in their complaints.
Maybe people are giving up newspaper for blogs because they want to hear the digested version of a story. Skip the thinking and just go to the umbrage.
you have a common misperception (Score:5, Insightful)
once upon a time, all media was unbiased and neutral. then fox news came along and made it into propaganda. really? go into wikipedia and type "yellow journalism". read up on the uss maine and why the usa went to war with spain in 1898. you think the manipulating of facts to start a war is a new invention? please! story as old as time. every regime that has ever existed has engaged in this. go further back in history, all the way to the printing press, and earlier: there never has been, and never will be, such a thing as fair and balanced media (pun intended). ever. in any country. in any era. that ever was or ever will be
why?
that gets us to misperception #2:
that a neutral unbiased media is even possible. it is impossible. the media is made by human beings. all human beings are biased in one way or another. everyone has an agenda. those who claim they are not biased, or actually fervently believe they are not biased, are in fact probably the most biased of all: blind to one's own nature
so what does one do in a world with bias everywhere? answer: they develop a good bullshit detector
and making peace with this fact of biased media is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. do you honestly believe it is a better world where everyone just took something written by a media mouthpiece as solid gold truth, and never questioned it? isn't it better to have a well-read populace who disbelieves and doubts everything? and how do you train such a populace? you throw bias at them from every monitor and printed word, and you train their mind like a muscle to develop an extremely strong and sophisticated bullshit detector
those who argue for censorship do so in the name of preventing the spreading of lies, from the right or the left. but when they do this, they actually show little faith in the general populace. they don't save the populace from themselves this way, they merely breed zombies and sheep. in the name of preventing lies, they create the environment for more lies. this is the true value of free speech: a darwinian competition of ideas. to let out all of it, all the bullshit, let it all be spoken. even the biggest lies and the most vile words. in this way, the general populace can decide for themselves, and you get a general populace that values critical thought. you never get critical thought in a society where unbiased media existed. in fact there is societies today where "unbiased" media exists: iran, china, russia, etc.: the places where freedoms are the least. and the people there, unfortunately, have very weakly developed bullshit detectors, and are therefore prone to the kind of pies manipulation and propaganda that makes your concerns over fox news look quaint. just look at china's one sided coverage of tibet: all they show is ethnic colonial han getting attacked. as if that is all that is going on and the tibetans aren't being attacked! propaganda. half-truth. beijing understands the idea very well
a world of biased media everywhere is actually SUPERIOR: it trains the minds of the general public to have a healthy bullshit meter. so while some people lament things like fox news, i, as a liberal in the deepest sense of the word liberal, am thankful for fox news. because fox news serves as a cautionary tale, an innoculation device. it weans people off propaganda, by being propaganda. fox news is a training device fro stronger minds to overcome. and for all those who believe fox news 100% and look no further for the "truth": do you honestly believe that in a world of "unbiased" media they would be flower children? no. a right winger is not made. it's like being gay. their minds are just made that way
Let's Clarify. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's be clear here. To the New York Times and every Internet blogger who fancies themselves the Times-killer, all American newspapers are publicly-traded, big city dailies.
Unfortunately for the Internet, this isn't even close to being true. I've personally helped start several small-town weeklies/dailies in my area (I do Websites as well, so no bias here), and although one startup over the past 5 years has folded, we've got a net gain in my county of two community newspapers over what we had in 2002. Plus one very high-end magazine aimed at folks with $100K+ annual incomes. And this is not unusual across the U.S., where small community publications are still going strong.
The real story is that the Internet, over the past decade, has failed completely as a local news/information delivery system to the average consumer. And, bear in mind that although the Internet is good at delivering on my $1,000 computer, at much higher cost and bother, what my $30.00 radio delivers every day for little cost or bother — national/international news briefs — it's next to impossible to find out what's happening in my town on the Internet in any detail or in a timely fashion. And, lo and behold, what few sources that do exist to find out are, (are you ready, now?) those put up by — you guessed it — my local community newspapers. And those sites normally only have "teaser" versions of the story. You have to subscribe to the Dead Tree Edition to get the full story. Very clever, no?
Now, this is not merely academic to me. I own a small advertising agency. I absolutely can not get my local businesses to do much advertising on the Web, other than building their own Websites (another interesting topic, but not for this post). Sorry, but they're just not interested in reaching folks in Botswana and Poland. Can you blame them? The overwhelming majority of American businesses (according to the US Dept. of Labor/Census Bureau) are small businesses, defined as having less than 100 employees. The much-glorified Huffington Post is completely useless to most all of my 300+ small-business clients, as is the New York Times. Without advertisers willing to spend on the Web, Web news sources will stay pretty much as they are now — Digg with the same rehashes of UPI/AP/Reuters feeds, repeated ad nauseum with posters trying desperately to add a sentence or two summary spin to the canned article hoping to reach the site's front page. Internet News is depressingly incestuous, sketchy, amateurish, and a couple of hours behind my local NPR radio station.
What media pundits seem to be missing out on is that the American consumer is more and more interested in what's happening in his own county/town/neighborhood and less and less interested in what is happening in The Big City or on the other side of the planet. We're getting less centralized, folks. Most of the US population has been diffusing from the big cities and spreading out into the surrounding countryside for the past few decades. I'm here to tell you that the Big City Daily has been dying since the 60's, mostly due to cable television news channels and the advent of 24-hour all-news radio. I'm in a rural county just on the edge of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Sprawloplex, and we've got no less than three 24/7 all-talk radio stations who are getting their quota of advertisers, last time I checked. Plus two 24/7 all-sports stations. Yes, they stream on the Web. No, it's not an income source for most, but a loss-leader supported by over-the-air broadcasting.
I do think that eventually, most all news will be delivered via network. In about 30-50 years. Right now, Google and the porn industry notwithstanding, nobody has really figured out how to make money off the Internet in the more localized news market, where the majority of advertisers (small business) and consumers are. We've got several itty-bitty print publications in my county that can draw enough revenue to pay for professional writers, design
Re:we have the same beliefs, but different conclus (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether they are honest or not (and you know, I hope, they aren't always honest) doesn't change the fact that the result is an illusion. I've blogged about that before... the chain from the witnesses and primary sources to the front page is often a game of telephone. The difference is that when it happens on a blog you get to see the whole thing, and can go back to find where the fellow turned "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal of visiting tourists" into "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal for visiting tourists".
Whether they're honest or not, their biases inform their idea of what impartiality means. A reporter on Fox News and a reporter at Pacifica Radio may both think they're being impartial, but they're not.
And, again, they're NOT always honest. And, again, whether they are or not... the result is the same. You shouldn't trust what you read in the newspapers any more than you should trust what you read on the Internet. The difference is that on the Internet you CAN get more of the information you need to inform your own best attempt at an unbiased opinion.
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/harlan.html [scarydevil.com] (1998)
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/bunk.html [scarydevil.com] (2004)
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/cringe.html [scarydevil.com] (2006)
your comment asumes something (Score:3, Insightful)
random demagogues exist in every society, because they satisfy a portion of the audience. but they don't appeal to all of the audience, NOR can the audience be completely innoculated against the efforts of demagogues
so you have to make peace with the fact that a large portion of any human society is populated with people with permanently broken or nonfunctional bullshit detectors. and this will always be true, if you respect the notion of free will. which is a much greater thing to value than absolute adherence to some arbitrary bullshit detector standard
put your faith in the large, mostly silent majority of people who can sniff bullshit out when they hear it/ see it. they exist, they really do, and they are self-replicating in a society that values freedom of the press and freedom of expression. they're will is not always expressed unaltered by their government, but again, we live in an imperfect world. we can only approximate the higher standards we are discussing here. all we can do is try harder to approximate better
Re:Ha Ha (Score:5, Insightful)
When the Kurds were getting gassed in Iraq. Most major newspapers in Europe made it front page. In the US, there was no mention of it, or if there was, the story got buried so deep -- most American people -- even the ones who do manage to read Major American newspapers on a daily basis -- couldn't tell you what had happen.
Furthermore, when the issue came up in front of the UN security council to impose sanctions, only one member was totally against it and -- that was the US. Once again, this brings us back to this information asymmetry. When I tell my American friends this, they have no idea of what I'm talking about. Once again, there seems to be some information asymmetry going on here. Before we ousted their democratically elected President and installed a puppet of our own choosing, Iran was a SECULAR country in every modern sense of the word (i.e. women went to school, women were doctors, gays didn't get publicly executed, etc.), the only crime they had committed was that they nationalized their own oil fields and kicked out British Petroleum. That's when everything started going to hell. And that's only then that the religious nationalist nut-jobs rose to power.
Think of me as a "troll" if you will. Assume that I'm just like another liberal whack-job, that will distort and romanticize past history to maintain his own distorted sense of reality. But whatever you end up believing about me, realize that the poster you just replied to -- didn't deserve half of the insults and the condescending remarks -- you gave him. And nor did that poster need to imply that all the people who disagreed with him were racists either. There are no winners here. In either case, there is no need to demonize someone because they disagree with you, or because they may know less than you do. This kind of inflamed discussion leads nowhere.
Relative Authority of News Sources (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Dumbed down their content by turning to celebrity gossip, etc. and cutting investigative reporting.
2. Turned to publishing corporate press releases almost verbatim
3. Began regurgitating Reuters/AP feeds for national/international stories instead of doing original reporting
4. Slashed local reporting in favor of the economies of scale of publishing the same news across multiple markets.
5. The owners and editors began spinning everything from a partisan perspective.
All of these things were done, of course, to maximize profits by cutting costs or pumping up mindshare through sensationalism.
Online sources of news/information, however, are evolving to a quality that's much greater than what the old media ever had. Let me explain:
What's happening with information online is happening to the process that we here on Slashdot already know works with similar public goods like Science and FOSS and Security. Let's call it "Peer Review." Yes, there's a lot of dross, but what's good quickly floats to the top.
And there might not be a single online site where you can get top-quality information on all topics, but that's fine. "jack of all trades, master of none" and all that. But there are at least several I know of that are worth the time: Slashdot for general geek news (I love reading an article about, say, cryogenics and then seeing posts from professionals who actually work in that field); Tom's Hardware; Stratfor for political/international/international relations. There is a lot of aggregation/regurgitation from the MSM, but increasingly from the primary sources journalists wouldn't bother to check or feign to understand as well as original research.
And if anything puff-piece-ish shows up on those sites, it almost always gets shot down in flames almost immediately. That wouldn't happen in the MSM, where the echo chamber picks up and repeats errors 10 million times so that when the real information does come out, it gets ignored because everyone's sick of hearing about it.
If the MSM were to sit down collectively and send all their reporters, journalists, and editors to re-education at the BBC, which was and still is the best that the old media had/has to offer, then they might have a shot at relevance. But they won't, and they'll vanish, and good riddance.
Re:Ha Ha (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ha Ha (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's a small enough town, I would probably infer that not enough happens in the town every day to justify printing an entire newspaper. Besides, if one of the 2000 townspeople discovers the mayor in shenanigans, word of mouth will spread the news faster than a daily newspaper. If one of the 2000 townspeople murders another, word of mouth will spread that news too. There's no need to print how the high school football team played last night because everyone who cared went to the game. The entire idea of newspapers (and other mass media) is that human populations had scaled beyond what word of mouth could reach. In small towns this isn't the case, so it's not surprising to see the newspaper beleaguered there.
Re:Do people prefer already-digested news? (Score:2, Insightful)
When I worked as a reporter, I always judged my job on controversial issues by the number of complaints I got from both sides. If they were nearly evenly divided, I knew I did well.
This explains everything that is wrong with modern "journalism" in one simple statement.
Someone says the earth is flat. Someone else says it is round. The "reporter" judges the success of his alleged "reportage" by whether the number of complaints from those holding one viewpoint is equal to those holding the other.
Thanks for helping to fuck our country up in the name of balance.
Thoughtful content is not going away (Score:3, Insightful)
I also subscribe to several paper monthlies. These are generally funded by foundations that are somewhat immune to the vicissitudes of consumer choice. If the ads dry up, they can continue to deliver well-researched articles, albeit fewer. Or they may go to an NPR-type of model.
Most of these also have blogs, in which comments tend to be far more thoughtful than the average blog. With the immediate communication of teh internets, hot news from the higher-noise blogs can quickly find its way to every other blog. People who value their time will gravitate to those blogs with better signal-to-noise ratios.
Blogs are not going away, but neither are the well-researched papers and magazines.
Concern with blogs. (Score:3, Insightful)
I feel like people are getting increasingly polarized and narrow-minded and I think blogs, at least in some ways are helping to contribute to that. Get on some blogs and post even the slightest dissenting view and be prepared for a shit-storm of unimaginable proportions. They don't even want to consider an alternative.
On a fairly regular basis I'll visit some blog where the author interprets a particular news story. And of course news is cherry-picked to reinforce that author's particular messages. And as is often the case links don't direct a visitor to the original story but rather to yet another blog which essentially is saying more of the same. Most people aren't going to bother digging for both sides of the story.
I'll concede, however, that blogs are an immensely useful tool; they're a great alternative to the mainstream media. What I really look forward to is their continued use as a way to keep corporations, governments and other organizations in check.
Re:you have a common misperception (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't tell me this is the writing style of someone who types with two fingers of one hand, where no "and" was spared.
Seriously, this does not help the reader, though I might make an allowance if you replaced the unreliable and nearly invisible sentence final . with a more visible splat (*) to offset the loss of the sentence initial caps your withered pinky is unwilling to type.
We just need to get another version of the splat mark added to Unicode, aligned where the period used to be found (so it doesn't look like a footnote) and while we're at it, we should also adopt the Chinese dunhao comma into English orthography, which I've always liked.
Re:Ha Ha (Score:3, Insightful)
And how is it useful to bring up 50-year-old talking points like this? It makes the point that "America is bad". Ok, point made. You think America is bad, partly because of stuff that happened 50 years ago.
Do you have anything to say about the future? How is "America is bad" a useful observation on which to build a future? Do you think the solution to the problems in Iran is for all the Persians to pretend it's 1940 again and everything will work out grand?