Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: Wither Print: 1 of 3
Gradually coming into focus is the very harsh prospect of a world without newspapers. McClatchy just announced more job cuts; the LA Times is becoming a shadow of what it was. The Rocky Mountain News is gone and the SF Chronicle may be the first newspaper to go, leaving a major city newspaperless. The NY Times, though privately owned, cannot sustain huge losses indefinitely. So what does this mean? I wouldn’t be so gravely concerned if there was something even remotely like a newspaper for organizing and delivering news. It is not just the investment in newsgathering that will be lost. It is also the issue of DESIGN. Unlike the Web, which has almost no design in media sites. Here design is integral in giving the reader a sense of the scope and weight of news. Only a newspaper does that. In the future I am sure the Web will because it will have to. But what about in the interim? It is in those cracks that very bad things can grow. Journalism is the fourth branch of government. Losing a big part of it will mean important things can be more easily hidden. I feel this is too important for the market to solve. Here is the first of a series of voices on the topic. The first is Bruce Bartlett, former Treasury Dept. economist under HW Bush writing on Forbes.com:
"Personally, I am partial to the nonprofit model. Foundations, universities, think tanks and even political parties might sponsor publications. For example, the Ford Foundation might take over The New York Times, Harvard University might buy The Boston Globe and the Heritage Foundation might assume control of [sic] The Washington Times. They could run these publications without expectation of profit and a [sic] least keep alive the basic journalistic function."
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NY Times
Brod, you are not wrong on this, just overly sentimental and thus, un-objective.
Newspapers must go because they are a fully antiquated way to deliver news. They consume wood-pulp and energy 9to produce and deliver), leave solid fill behind and even an avid newspaper reader does not bother with 2/3rds of the material.
Which is why we should be lighting a candle and not cursing the darkness. The web is the new information resource and we should be exalting it. The BIG mistake the newspapers made was not getting with that program and stubbornly reassuring themselves that the web was a passing fad. A normal newspaper does not translate well onto a CRT and these news platforms were too lame to develop a hybred that was interesting enough to maintain their normal revenues.
Now, about the NY Times.
When I was a kid in NY, the Times was neither the most liberal or the most intellectual newspaper. That was the Post. The Times was the domain of so called "Liberal Republicans" or the 'guilt-ridden rich'.
In recent years, the management of the Times has gone completely off their meds--on occasions too numerous to reconcile. For one example, they trumped-up some garbage used to support their claim that Bill O'Reilly is a racist because he believes in (and promotes) the adherence to existing laws on immigration and especially dealing with criminals who are also undocumented. Now, I do NOT love Bill O'Reilly and at times he can be exceedingly repulsive. That said, he is NOT any sort of racist and that point is ever so clear. But the Times thinks it is so 'royal' that whatever it says becomes reality. Screw them. {Don't slam the door on the way out.}
Respectfully submitted~
Troll:
I and others who think that the government is us and we have the responsibility to organize ourselves to form a more perfect union are all off the meds. Screw those meds. Especially when we can all see what the alternative was: a government for and by big biz. NOBODY trusts them to fix their mess (this week). But the tired old left/right thing doesn't matter. We need papers to doocument which journalistic integrity, and that doesn't mean perfect accuracy, just a good educated stab at it with an option to revise the next day, to state things for the record. If something is in the Times it is on the record. Good, bad or indifferent, it is now the topic on the table. Without that or the design that enables the prioritizing of the news, the opportunity to serendipitously bump into items, an obit, a recipe, a movie review, an Op Ed, we are much, much poorer. We must make the web as good at those things, and better. It's not there today.
Liberal Rags
I agree with you, in that it was time for these newspapers to go. The problem with them was not that they use wood, which was a natural resource which was made to be used, but that they were taken over by the liberal-agenda-political-machine. As part of the drive-by media, it can only be agreed that the moment when they sold out to socialists and the liberal eleet, their time was over, the American People lost interest in them, and they went out of business. It is still a center-right country, and anti-americn vews are not welcome.
Unchecked 4th Branch of Government
A propaganda war waged in the United States by Cuban émigrés attacked Weyler's inhuman treatment of his countrymen and won the sympathy of broad groups of the U.S. population. Weyler was referred to as a "Butcher" by yellow journalists like William Randolph Hearst. The American newspapers began agitating for intervention with stories of Spanish atrocities against the Cuban population.
Upon the destruction of the Maine, newspaper owners such as William Randolph Hearst came to the conclusion that Spanish officials in Cuba were to blame, and they widely publicized this theory as fact. Their sensationalistic publications fueled American anger by publishing astonishing accounts of "atrocities" committed by Spain in Cuba. A common myth states that Hearst responded to the opinion of his illustrator Frederic Remington, that conditions in Cuba were not bad enough to warrant hostilities with: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish-American_War
Yeah, that's the kind of unchecked fourth branch of government we need.
