Black and White and Dead All Over
Stop the presses! Will journalism take democracy down with it?
Exhibit Sources
Death of newspapers hurts civic life: "Internet Overtakes Newspaper as News Outlet," Pew Research Center, December 23, 2008
News comes from newspapers: "John S. Carroll on Why Newspapers Matter," Neiman Watchdog, April 28, 2006
Most reporters used to work for newspapers: Bureau of Labor Statistics National Employment Matrix
Journalist job loss: "State of the News Media 2009," Pew Research Center, March 16, 2009
Newspapers shut down: "2009 Total," Paper Cuts
Lou Carlozo not allowed to vent: "The Final Recession Diaries Blog The Chicago Tribune Does Not Want You To Read," True/Slant.com, April 23, 2009; email from Lou Carlozo
Take a bullet for the business: "Suburban Journals Fires Reporter Who Took Bullet During Kirkwood Shootings," Daily River Front Times, April 21, 2009; "For Kirkwood Shooting Victim, Gun Control Takes on New Meaning," Suburban Journals, February 1, 2009
Pulitzer Prize winner laid off: "East Valley Tribune Celebrates Winning Pulitzer Prize," East Valley Tribune, April 20, 2009; email from Tribune reporter Paul Giblin
No full-time investigative reporters: Interview with Arizona University Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication assistant dean Kristin Gilger, May 2009
Drop in Washington bureaus: "The New Washington Press Corps," Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, February 11, 2009
Fewer newspapers cover Congress: "The New Washington Press Corps," Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, February 11, 2009
Reporters covering state capitols surveys: American Journalism Review, April/May 2009
News Hole: "State of the News Media 2009," Pew Research Center, March 16, 2009
Foreign coverage cut: "The Changing Newsroom: Changing Content," Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism
Reporting jobs outsourced to India: Email from James MacPherson, editor of Pasadena Now, May 15, 2009
Brenda Starr laid off: "Brenda Star," Gocomics.com and phone conversation with The Chicago Tribune
Michael Precker: Interview, April 28, 2009
"Saving Newspapers: The Musical!": "Saving Newspapers: The Musical!"; Rock Cookie Bottom
Savvy media consumers watch Stewart and Colbert: "Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions," Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, April 15, 2007
Internet is No. 2 source of news: "Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet," Pew Research Center, December 23, 2008
Estimate of a Web-based New York Times: "End Times," The Atlantic, January/February 2009
Estimated Times endowment: "News You Can Endow," New York Times, January 28, 2009
Times stock and CEO: Yahoo! Finance; New York Times Co. SEC Proxy Statement, March 2009
Times moves, then sells: "Times Co. Building Deal Raises Cash," March 20, 2009; "Times Co. Is in Talks to Sell Part of Building," New York Times, January 22, 2009
Carlos Slim: "Mexico's Plutocracy Thrives on Robber-Baron Concessions," New York Times, August 27, 2007; "Mexican Billionaire Invests in Times Company," New York Times, January 20, 2009
Cost of a cover story: "Gerry Marzorati on the Future of Long-Form Narrative," Council for Advancement and Support of Education Editors Forum, March 31, 2009
MoJo freelance budget: Madeleine Buckingham, Chief Financial Officer, Mother Jones
Gannett goodwill: Gannett 2008 Annual Report
Bad on paper: "Total Paid Circulation," Newspaper Association of America; World Association of Newspapers
ASNE changes its name: "Proposed Bylaws Changes," December 16, 2008; "ASNE Votes to Drop 'Newspapers' from Its Name," April 6, 2009
French bailout: "A Newspaper Bailout," The Washington Post, February 27, 2009
Bailout for US papers: Newspaper Association of America
Warren Buffett: "Buffett Sees 'Unending Losses' for Many Newspapers," Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2009; Interview with Dorothy Obert, assistant to Charlie Munger, May 6, 2009
More newspaper reading equals less government corruption: "Are You Being Served? Political Accountability and Quality of Government," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization
Cincinnati Post: "Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of the Cincinnati Post," Sam Schulofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, Princeton University
Televised election coverage: "Midwest Local TV Newscasts Devote 2.5 Times as Much Air Time to Political Ads as Election Coverage, Study Finds," University of Wisconsin Newslab, November 21, 2006
Less Iraq coverage: "Iraq War Coverage Plunges," Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism
"America's first portable information device": "Newspaper Project: New Ads and 2 Original Cartoons," March 3, 2009
Blog Bites Man: Arianna Huffington: "Hearing of the Communications, Technology and the Internet Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee," May 6, 2009; Jay Rosen: "Blogger vs. Journalist Is Over," Press Thinking, January 21, 2005; Steven Johnson: "Old Growth Media and the Future of the News," March 14, 2009; Clay Shirky: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"; Jeff Jarvis: "Fast Company Dialogue: Is Print Dead," Buzz Machine, December 7, 2005, and What Would Google Do?
What Kindle could do for the Times: "Sulzberger: 'Wonderful' Kindle Will Help The NYT Reach New Readers," Poynter Online, May 6, 2009
E-Readers: "Digital Edge," Newspaper Association of America, April 2, 2009
Rupert Murdoch: "Murdoch Said to Stress Free Access to Wall St. Journal's Web Site," New York Times, November 14, 2007; "They Pay for Cable, Music, and Extra Bags. How About News?" New York Times, April 8, 2009
Phil Bronstein: "The Colbert Report," April 8, 2009
Google ads: "Google Ends Sale of Ads in Papers After Two Years," New York Times, January 21, 2009; "Google Puts Small Ads on Pages of News Site," New York Times, February 27, 2009
Internet is a "cesspool": "Google: Why Magazine Brands Matter," Advertising Age, October 13, 2008
Bloggers' salaries: "State of the Blogosphere," Technorati.com
Undergraduate starting salaries: "Best Undergraduate College Degrees By Salary," Payscale.com
HuffPo internship for sale: Charity Buzz
Press has "hurt democracy": "Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations," Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, August 9, 2007
Joe the Plumber: "Joe the Plumber: 'I think media should be abolished from reporting,'" Salon.com, January 12, 2009; "Pro-Joe: Plumber's Trip to Israel Scares the Establishment Media," Pajamas Media, January 12, 2009
They don't listen!
I have asked, over and over again, for a PDF version of my local newspapers. I have indicated that I would prefer this and would pay for the content, if it were made available. I have never received a response to this suggestion.
There are people willing to pay for content. It is not made available in formats that people want. RSS is fine, but it doesn't give the same feel of reading a newspaper. I would rather not sacrifice so many trees, but it's my only option.
News Papers Probaly Will Die
If they would told the truth all the time, they would have an audiuence. People are looking for the truth. When you have people who manipulate stories after a while it gets old. Why read a source which is always a shade of gray.
Anonymous, Are you
Anonymous, Are you suggesting that bloggers do not distort the truth?
This is a matter of economics, not quality (rather, it is a matter of economics affecting quality).
Newspaper websites bring in as much, or more, revenue as any other type. Unfortunately, the costs of newsgathering are much higher than the costs of aggregating and bloviating.
If you like, however, just go on thinking that the Invisible Hand of the Free Market will always reward the virtuous and slay the wicked. Your Masters will be mighty proud.
Everyone is held to a higher standard of fact.
Unfortunately those with pretty much one way media (newspapers, TV & Radio) don't get the feedback and so don't get a clue. If you have a blog with comments and you state something foolish, you will very quickly have comments pointing that out, often in great detail. If the comments are ill founded then they will have comments. So yes Bloggers are held to a higher standard than Newspapers.
What bloggers don't have is the money to dig out insider sources. On the other hand what they do have is insider sources digging themselves out. Newspapers have an overarching position of agency to those with the money to pull their strings, Bloggers have only the need to tell their story. That makes Bloggers dangerous.
Newspapers and their electronic top down partners long ago abandoned their proclaimed agency to readers, for maximum profits at any cost. Now with knowledge in a three way conversation that jig is up and the crocodile tears will only last till they manage to put a fence around the Internet.
If news is only what those in power don't want you to know, there has been decreasing amounts of it for many years until the Internet exploded and changed that. If they wall off the Internet "News"Papers will be back in some form. They never were great for such actual news but were mandatory for publicity, and that unfortunately we will never be short of.
I can't speak for the first
I can't speak for the first anonymous. But frankly if someone were to charge me and I found out they deliberately lied to me, I'd expect at least to get my money back. If print journalism were willing to put their money where there mouth was, I'd obviously be willing to pay a premium. But instead we see shenanigans like the media hiding behind "we keep our sources private" EVEN in situations where they find out the sources LIED to the newspaper. Obviously the newspaper in question just wants to see papers to gullible fools, and doesn't care about the truth. If you cared about the truth, you'd hang out to dry any source that LIED to you.
I don't see newspapers express the right level of disgust towards each other that they should. Which means they feel like a different class than me, which skeptical me, makes me think they care more about their advertisers and the old people that will keep their subscriptions until the bitter end.
Do I think bloggers are better? No. In fact I don't even like the blogging medium because readers will filter and select to only hear what they want to hear. What we need is healthy debate grounded in respect for the truth.
So we have a problem if the only investigative journalism is funded by advertising, because then the only truth that is investigated will be what the advertisers want us to hear. The big public relations nightmare the newspapers have if that the public (rightly) perceives that the newspapers are standing between the public and the truth, and the advertising based newspapers preach themselves as the spotless sole truth, but too few are dumb enough to fall for that, so the newspapers lose subscribers every day.
I don't want to PAY to be lied to. And I don't want a social medium to be used to ignore the pressing issues of the day, which is that we need change. More than we are currently getting. We need change that makes it so that we stop rewarding behaviors that are destroying us all. And these changes will end up changing so much that they will be "radical".
$40,000+ for a story?!
Thank you for posting this story; it's a very interesting look at the future of journalism that goes beyond the usual "print is dead" arguments. The one number that really struck me is that the NYT spends $40,000+ on each cover story for their weekly magazine. No wonder they had to mortgage their building--imagine how fiscally irresponsible they are with other aspects of the paper?
One web experiment out there that I heard about through an AP story that is produced on MUCH, MUCH less (but is even more engaging than the NYT) is FLYP--http://www.flypmedia.com. Check it out--if print is dead, it's because they throw money at stories instead of working on them. FLYP just might be the answer...
So what's the point here?
So what's the point here? Is Mr. Gilson saying that absent printed media, all we'll have are blog posts like the disjointed list of "facts" he presents above?
Here are the facts as I see them. Chronological order is very important here; advertisers fled newspapers for new media long before readers left. And why not? Newspaper advertising was never a bargain, publishers routinely inflated circulation figures, and most importantly, it just didn't work that well. Internet advertising on the other hand, is better targeted, offers feedback, and costs much less.
It was only after advertisers pulled out, and publishers gutted their newsrooms to cut costs, that readers left for the internet. If newspapers can provide value to their advertisers and to their readers, they will survive. If not, good riddance.
Proliferation of paper
One week's Sunday NYT takes 75,000 trees in paper.
http://rainforestmaker.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&i...
Years ago I remember seeing that it took x amount of acres of rainforest to produce one Sunday edition and this has haunted me ever since. It's past time for a new model of how we get our news; it's time to figure out how to sustain good investigative reporting without depending on paper.
Black and White and Dead all Over
It was simply, and is simply, a take-over. Values have changed. Speed has changed things. People here are getting lazier. They are letting the take-over happen. People more interested in money, people who HAVE more money, are buying the papers out, systematically across the country. The answer -- community owned newspapers.
The canary in the cave of
The canary in the cave of democracy is choking from lack of air. Never fear he / she has been replaced with an immortal vulture in disguise. You'll not be able to notice the change or put your finger on who made the switch until till much later.
American are suckers. Tell them they've got Republicans and Democrats to choose from and they think they have the key to benefiting themselves. They'll fight and die for the right of Republicans and Democrats to sodomize them over and over in the political process with the hope that maybe one will emerge, Republican or Democrat, who will make things better. The nice thing is that the Republicans and Democrats let you criticize them openly. This is a free country.
Both of them operate from the same principles. However don't try criticizing the masters of the Republican and Democrat parties. The masters did Eliot Spitzer in. (thats what I got from todays article on the SC) What chance do you have? So will it be anal or oral is what you should really ask yourself when you vote for a Republican or Democrat. This is symbolically accurate because the rules they work by cannot benefit the average person to the extent that a government of the people would.
Good article. It's time for people to vote out of office those who presided over what is now our present economic condition and bleak future.
Newspapers
I respect the value of trained and attributable reporters (versus junk blog crap). I requested and offered to pay for an on-line version of the NY Times. A return email from the Times suggested donating money to a 'fund' supporting journalism studies.
I day make the leap and acknowledge the paperless media.
Is anybody else here worried?
Because,I'm sure as Hell worried!We can't rely, upon bloggers and the corporate news channels, alone, to tell us what's going on out in the wider world;which also includes our own backyards.
That's why the print media, the unsexy "traditional"media, must be saved from extinction.Because,if we don't know what's going on, in our own communities,than how can we make informed judgements, about the rest of the world?
Social Enterprise as a business model for news
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tagged as:
- solution
News gathering is time consuming and it takes skills and intelligence. News room staff have been cut to the bone to maximize profits. The mission-based nature of news must be acknowledged. That is why I have been writing for the Huffington Post Chicago about the Future of News and specifically L3Cs, an LLC business hybrid, as a potential business model for new news gathering. You can link to my Future of Journalism articles at my blog http://www.sallyduros.com. or follow my twitter stream @saduros. Lots of journalists and business people are working toward launching a golden age of journalism and newspapers will be part of it.
Social Enterprise as a business model for news
-
tagged as:
- solution
News gathering is time consuming and it takes skills and intelligence. News room staff have been cut to the bone to maximize profits. The mission-based nature of news must be acknowledged. That is why I have been writing for the Huffington Post Chicago about the Future of News and specifically L3Cs, an LLC business hybrid, as a potential business model for new news gathering. You can link to my Future of Journalism articles at my blog http://www.sallyduros.com. or follow my twitter stream @saduros. Lots of journalists and business people are working toward launching a golden age of journalism and newspapers will be part of it.
Blogging is a passion that
Blogging is a passion that have rules to follow. Bloggers are trying their very knowledge to give an accurate informaation. It comes from a blog, called Voices Revealed, about themanwhospokewithhismind – and who is that? It's Phillip Garrido, a convicted sex offender and the abductor and likely rapist of Jaycee Lee Dugard, a vile wasteland of human scum who should probably be beaten severely and given a one way ticket to the whacko basket. He claims to have been given a device from God who taught Phillip how to speak with his mind, and he distributed the literature on the campus of University of California, Berkeley – one of the greatest centers of scientific learning in the U.S. - Phillip Garrido
I loved the article as it
I loved the article as it took no prisoners and made me laugh. I totally agree that the mainstream newspapers deserve to go out of business. I haven't read a newspaper for years because they are so full of propaganda and lies. I wouldn't give any of those corrupt journalists a job if I was in your position Al.
