Obviously, this is good in an environmental/paper waste sense, but other than that – I find the struggles of news organizations to thrive in the world of “new media” one of the great, ominous issues of our age; and one that – due to the lack of a true political motivation one way or the other –one that no one (other than journalists themselves) really gives that much thought to.Friday, June 13, 2008
The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper
Obviously, this is good in an environmental/paper waste sense, but other than that – I find the struggles of news organizations to thrive in the world of “new media” one of the great, ominous issues of our age; and one that – due to the lack of a true political motivation one way or the other –one that no one (other than journalists themselves) really gives that much thought to.
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For me, the demise of the print newspaper leads to conflicting emotions. The Cedar Rapids Gazette produces a FREE online version of their printed paper everyday. It looks and reads just like the print version. It's also static. Their website has dynamic features. In other words, I can post RSS feeds to the reader of my choosing. While this increases my convenience, it prevents me from seeing the "whole" paper, but just the parts I "want" to see. In my experiene, RSS readers also encourage skimming over in-depth reading.
On the other hand, I have attempted to maintain an RSS reader with many relevant, diverse sources, from newspapers and other resources from around the globe. In my final analysis, this is preferable, just as long as I take responsibilty to actually read the various news sources.
There's a general inevitability here that is mostly innocuous in intent even if maybe bad in its effect.
Fewer people reading the 'dead tree edition' isn't necessarily a bad thing, if people are getting their news by other means. If those other means are solely to 24hr news channels, that's probably a bad thing.
It seems to me that local papers need to concentrate their efforts on local news, and stop spending as much money on bureaus outside their sphere of influence. They're far better off getting their national news from AP or similar, and even more, eliminating movie critics and other similar positions that could be done by robots on Mars.
I essentially never read a print newspaper and miss out on tons of local news as a result. I would say that other than local news I manage to be as informed as anyone on the gist of what's going on in the world. But interest is the key.
Lots of people that 'read' the paper don't read most of the articles. Some seem to only read the obituaries. Others just skim the headlines, many of which are wildly misleading relative to the content of the article.
I've noted that the feeds from local papers, from the Des Moines Register, C.R. Gazette and the I.C. Press-Citizen, are now also available. For what it's worth, that makes monitoring the local areas more efficient.
Certainly - the no dead tree part is a good thing. But my concern about the trend has less to do with my fear of losing "the local angle," or the idea that all the news is in one place as it has to do with the ancillary issuse that come about as a result of the loss of revenue for news organizations.
Gone are the foreign bureaus that have journalists "embedded" in parts of the world PRIOR to crisis, as well as a certain degree of impetus to report for noble "4th House" sort of reasons, rather than sexy story of the day reasons.
Cetainly - at this point we can still seek out unbiased sources of news that we want on the internet (I, for one, have never been better informed about the world around me), but what if the AP & Reuters generally begin to dry up without the $$ support from print subscriptions and what we're left with is Drudge Report & Daily KOS?
That's my fear.
Thank God, thand GOD for NPR.
You potentially would have the BBC, The Scotsman, Agence France Press, etc....
The foreign bureau thing is largely a mega paper phenomenon or the total purview of the broadcast news. The fact that broadcast news is dying too seems partially the result of the consolidation of news into the market. GE owns NBC, etc etc. They tilt their coverage to appeal to the lowest common denominator and people leave in droves.
Thank god for NPR indeed.
I think Dan's concern isn't so much the demise of the foreign media bureau, but the basic nature of what "the truth" is and how we are informed of it. I don't believe any one source can provide truth, so, at least, the multiple resources (BBC, NPR, blogs, user-driven data) have helped in shaping perspective. For me, the current flooding is a microcosmic exaample: the traditional television media was out-of-date and wrong about current conditions, the print media was crippled anyway, the web was more immediate and full of rumors. The only way to get any sense of what to expect was to review as much information as possible and attempt to form a clear picture. It's a lot of work. At that's for an event mere blocks from my home. Ironic, I suppose, but the downside of fast information is that misinformation travels faster than ever.
this is a great discussion - I am in conflict about it
on one hand - that newspapers only exist because of willing advertisers - that is a good thing because I hate advertising - Dan touched on it a while ago - but I fear that advertising RULES the world and in so doing is RUINING the world - if not in newspapers they have found their way online - I am not exactly sure how online advertising works compared to print ads - they are the same yes - but do work differently
Stephen: in the cartographic world, we call that "triangulation."
Unfortunately, it is a most active form of news-seeking, and it takes a most disciplined mind not to seek out only those sources which confirm your biases.
It seems like our future mass media model balances on the edge of a knife.
The knife edge has always been the state of being.
There used to be WAY more newspapers than today, and many of them were locally produced partisan hack rags.
Thomas Jefferson controlled a newspaper and wrote nasty anonymous screeds against Madison. And the other side did likewise.
Managing sources of information has always been difficult. People naturally incline towards sources that fit their point of view, hence the once immense popularity of FoxNews.
Life is simpler if objective reality always matches your understanding. Unlucky for all of us, it often fails to do that.
What's scary and fascinating is how we've come not too far at all from those yellow papers of yore. Fox News is unabashadly biased, but of course, they claim they create an overall "balance" to what they/Rupert M. see as a liberal skew. So their integrity is not soley based internally, but within a playing field subject their POV. I think Fox even had a "Daily Show" of their own to counter Comedy Central.
That facade of "integrity by balance" skews elsewhere. MSNBC is under a bit of fire, partly due to Keith Olbermann's "Countdown". He borrows a bit of Edward R. Murrow's style, and I admired his "special comments" when he was critical of Bush. But that show openly positions itself as a counter to Bill O'Reily, and Olbermann's recent diatribes against Hillary Clinton made me cringe a little.
The notion of liberal bias in news is a bit of tired conventional wisdom.
FoxNews may indeed see itself as balancing CNN's liberal bias, but it's almost entirely propaganda.
Olbermann is a funny case, in a similar way to Jon Stewart. These people may be left of center (and in Olbermann's case maybe not even that) but the fact that they call out Bush and Republicans (they're the ones that have been in charge for most of the last eight years) that gets them labeled as the equivalent to Rush and O'Reilly.
It's fairly absurd. The Daily Show is set up to make fun of whoever is in charge, and Olbermann has only had his show during the wildly corrupt and incompetent Bush Administration. We've yet to see how he might react to a Obama Administration. I would guess, however, that he's unlikely the become the cheerleader Rush Limbaugh/FoxNews is.
Those two, and O'Reilly to a slightly different degree, are essentially strong arms of Republican public outreach. Nothing that R's do is bad, and nothing D's do is good. In fact, D's are trying to kill your babies. It's hard to imagine Olbermann becoming a party shill even if that doesn't mean he says some stupid things now and again.
I agree with the first thing Steve said about the free paper online. I think that the tree paper should die for good. Why not get your local news from the online version and your national and world news from a variety of sources like NPR and others like it?
Local news should focus on local news only. When I say local I mean city, county, and state. If you have to announce any news on the national or world level keep it to one page.
Boy, I'm not sure I can agree with that. There was the "The Incredible Shrinking World Section" long before there was "The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper." That's one of the reasons - I fear - that we have such a generally uninformed populace, myopic in their world view and ignorant of anything going on in the world that is not happening among the "Disaster of the Month" nations.
And I'm not sold on the triangulation, based on different internet sources we, as readers, seek out. It may work for some - but (as is proven in study after study), people pretty much hear what they want to hear and believe evidence to reinforce already-held beliefs. How much worse is that when we're allowed to cherry-pick our sources?
I'm just about as eco-minded as any of us in this group, I think, but I haven't heard anything yet to convince me there is a suitable, well-rounded (and generally unbiased) source of news that is prepared to fill the void when the tree-killing large dailies breathe their last.
Maybe I'm just cynical about newsprint organizations. I read the WSJ for years until the Murdock take-over. Press coverage suggested Murdock wanted to position the WSJ against the NYT. It sounded too clear of a case of "balancing the liberal bias" much the same way Fox News is set up. So I bailed. I haven't settled on a national paper since, and given that the NYT is available, along with other national and international papers (including my beloved Daily Yomiruri), I abandoned the newsprint editions completely.
Most people don't READ anymore, as the N'tl Endowment for the Arts relentlessly reports. There may be fundamental issues to address as we talk about new information portals.
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