Are Newspapers Doomed? 338
Ponca City, We love you writes "James Surowiecki has an interesting article in the New Yorker that crystalizes the problems facing print newspapers today and explains why we may soon be seeing more major newspapers filing for bankruptcy, as the Tribune Company did last week. 'There's no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up,' writes Surowiecki, but the 'peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they've arguably become more popular,' with the blogosphere piggybacking on traditional journalism's content. Surowiecki imagines many possible futures for newspapers, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to deep-pocketed patrons. 'For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime — intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on — and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can't last. Soon enough, we're going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.'"
How about the debt load (Score:5, Informative)
OK, newspapers have their problems, but the biggest problem with the Tribune is that Sam Zell loaded it up with an unmanageable level of debt when he bought it.
The Tribune is more an example of how raiders like Zell enrich themselves during a leveraged buyout than an example of a failing newspaper.
Perhaps the giants are dying (Score:5, Informative)
Newspapers used to be the main source of aggregated of information about current events; they were few alternatives. Now we have a wide variety of sources for the same information; and don't need a daily paper to satisfy our information needs. As a result, the business model will change
You'll still need services such as the AP; but how the information is used will change. I would expect to see the multi-channel news organizations who can combine television, radio, and internet (blogs, websites, streaming data) to be replace newspapers as the primary daily news source.
As a side note, I expect more DCMA take down notices as organizations seek to protect their IP from being redistributed by outlets that don't pay for it.
I'd also expect to see local papers thrive - they can cover stories of limited interest beyond their communities, and deliver targeted ads for businesses. In addition, I'd expect specialty papers that target specific audiences (such as sports fans) to thrive because they can do more in depth and broader coverage of a narrow topic than say the AP. And of course, USA Today because every major hotel in the US buys a ton of them.
Re:I doubt all newspapers are... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/11/61165 [wired.com]
And that's 2003... it's got worse since.
Re:Oh No! (Score:4, Informative)
Newspapers were considered so important to the country that the first amendment to the Constitution preserved the freedom of the press.
If we follow that what you say is true, which I don't but lets for the sake of argument, then horse carts were also considered important to the country at that time. However you don't see the US still keeping that industry afloat. Rather it's the free press part that matters.
Newspapers are dying out due to technological advances. By virtue of what they represent it's more sad than with other things that have done so. And of course they will go down kicking and screaming. I'll personally miss a cheap way to line a kitten or puppies floor area. Or an alternative to a drop cloth when I'm painting something.
Re:How about the debt load (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone's talking about how the advertising model isn't working, well what this says is that the subscriber model isn't working either. That doesn't leave many funding models to try... let's see... government subsidy, pledge drives and tip jars, billionaire sponsorship, bake sales, criminal enterprise, and "... ????
Re:Oh No! (Score:3, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
On June 24, 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who represents most of San Francisco, California) told reporters that her fellow Democrat representatives did not want to forbid reintroduction of the Fairness Doctrine, adding "the interest in my caucus is the reverse." When asked by John Gizzi of Human Events, "Do you personally support revival of the 'Fairness Doctrine?'", the Speaker replied "Yes."
Re:Oh No! (Score:3, Informative)
This is terrible. You can't put websites at the bottom of the parrot cage! Or use them to wrap takeaway food...
Ummm just buy a printer. Problem solved.
Re:Ad revenue is a bad model (Score:3, Informative)
>>>"insightful," which means actual info was provided,
Bzzz. That's not what insightful means. "Informative" is the label for actual info provided, and my post was not labeled as such so no harm; no foul.
Re:Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
I hate responding to an AC here... as this is usually an exercise in futility. Still.... I hate to see stuff like this get posted that is so blatantly untrue.
I don't get this. The Bill of rights clearly followed the procedure of Article V of the original constitution, including having the 1st U.S. Congress pass the wording on twelve amendments and submitted them to the state legislatures for approval.
Of those original twelve suggested amendments, ten of them were passed by the required number of state legislatures rather quickly and became known as the "bill of rights". One of them, now known as the 27th Amendment, was finally "approved" in 1992 when the Michigan state legislature ratified that amendment proposal and is surprisingly the most recent addition to the U.S. Constitution.
This amendment, BTW, attempts to stop Congress from giving themselves pay raises while in office... although it hasn't seemed to work out very well, nor has Congress really followed the intent of this amendment since its passage.
What happened to amendment #12 of this original proposal? It was about how Congress (the U.S. House of Representatives in particular) could in theory be expanded substantially if the population of the USA were to grow significantly from 1780 levels. The House is no where near the maximum number of representatives allowed under the U.S. Constitution, so this amendment is really irrelevant to the current conditions of the country.
Where it gets unconstitutional is that the passage of the Constitution was provisional for some states until the bill of rights were passed and approved. So technically the meeting of the 1st congress was unconstitutional as the constitution wasn't yet approved completely.
This shouldn't imply, however, that the founding political leaders of the USA didn't like the bill of rights and didn't think it should be in the document. The only argument against the bill of rights is that "rights" not found in this document would be taken away by the government on a whim. This has, unfortunately, proven to be a correct assessment as well.
Re:Oh No! (Score:3, Informative)
The creator of howobamagotelected.com is an idiot. Specifically, John Zeigler is a standard, right-wing blowhard (former) talkshow host. Check out Nate Silver's interview with Zeigler [fivethirtyeight.com], where they discuss the poll that is the flimsy centerpiece of howobamagotelected.com.
He calls Silver a "pinhead", "a hack", "the enemy", and ended the interview by twice telling Silver to "go fuck [himself]. He refuses to say who financed the poll, and constantly mocks his interviewer for not having the guts to post a transcript of the interview.
The poll itself is manipulative and misleading. It dings Obama supporters for not knowing that their candidate "would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket," which isn't close to what Obama said.*
On the Hannity and Colmes show, he said "There are three questions on this list that a group of monkeys, if they had been guessing, would have done better than the Obama voters did."
Remember that Zeigler -- in between comparing Obama supporters unfavorably to a pack of howler monkeys -- continually asserts that his poll is showing that the media didn't do their jobs, not that Obama voters are stupid. But this obscures a crucial fact: the poll never once asks which sort of media the respondents were consuming.
Also, one of the questions designed to show how well the Evil Liberal Media had done in getting out damaging news about McCain and Palin ("Which candidate said they could see Russia from their house?") seems specifically designed to cast a bad light on the respondents. First, the possible answers were "Sarah Palin" or "John McCain". The actual correct answer (Tina Fey) isn't offered. It's also the only question where Obama and Biden aren't offered as alternatives. Both facts seem designed to drive up the "stupid Obama voters who bought into a fraudulent anti-Palin meme hook line and sinker" percent. In fact, I think that the question shows only that the people taking the survey didn't expect to be subjected to trick questions.
The message of the poll is that "anti-Obama controversies" didn't get as much media attention as "anti-McCain controversies." But unless you actually believe that Barack Obama, Harvard graduate and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, really believed that there were 57 or more states, why should his gaffe have gotten media attention? Gaffes are supposed to be important because they're moments when the candidate lets his or her public persona slip for a few brief seconds and gives insight into the workings of their mind. McCain's inability to say how many houses he had was one such moment. So were Palin's various exaggerations of her foreign policy credentials.
By comparison, Biden's previous "plagiarism controversy [wikipedia.org]" was no such thing. The formulation he was criticized for using was one he'd correctly attributed numerous times in previous stump speeches. The media reported two other examples at the time, but a Biden speechwriter took the blame for one. The point is, since the "plagiarism" was an oversight by a man who is a known to be a one man gaffe factory, not a true attempt to pass off the work of another as his own, nothing really new would be gained by focusing media attention on it.
Notice that none of the howobamagotelected questions ask about the ancient history of McCain or Palin. Nothing was asked of McCain's Keating Five connection, or his "bottom 1%" graduation from the Naval Academy. Nor were voters asked about the controversies that did gain traction, like the Jeremiah Wright association, or his comment about people bitterly clinging to guns and religion. Obama supporters did get asked about Obama's "spread the wealth" comment, and did exceptionally well (81% correct). So of course that result shows up nowhere in Zeigler's summaries of the poll.
This poll is
Unlikely, actually (Score:3, Informative)
Remember that the Bill of Rights was written as a "sure, we'll put it in just to be safe" thing. It wasn't part of the original negotiated plan, and was likely written by a legislator who was trying to compe up with a good inclusive list one afternoon.
The way you say "likely" shows that even you can tell that you don't know what you're talking about. The U.S. Bill of Rights was introduced by James Madison the year after the Constitution was ratified. It was a compromise with anti-federalists who had been (rightly) suspicious of the power that was being ceded to the federal government. And it wasn't cobbled together in an afternoon, it was based on George Mason's earlier Virginia Declaration of Rights which was included with the Virginia state constitution thirteen years before. Indeed, Mason had refused to endorse the Constitution because it hadn't included that sort of explicit set of guarantees of individual rights.
Re:The John (Score:2, Informative)