The big newspapers have only themselves to blame. Becoming part of the cocatil weenie culture instead of reporting on it. They became “insiders” – their survival dependant on the crumbs dropped by real insiders instead of foraging for tasty nuggets of truth. (now I’ve made myself hungry)

Sounds to me like we’ve got a bunch of whiny congressmorons who are computer illiterate. I don’t see a lot of the foreign papers whining about their declining numbers. American papers don’t use reporters any more. They laid them all off to improve the bottom line. Lot of columnists, etc, but most of the “stories” are pulled off the wires. Even the online versions of NYT and WaPo are pathetic as far as content goes.

And BTW, what the hell was John Kerry thinking?

I fear you give the good Senator far too much credit. Besides, blogs are run by disreputable DFH types, while printed “News” is generated by authentic Villagers. Bygones being bygones and all that, what have we in the netroots done for him lately? I am convinced that the House of Lords is populated with knaves, complete fools, and people who are totally detached from the real world.

HAHAHAHAHAH Jane, yo usaid John Kerry and thinking in the same sentence.

Thanks, Jane. Great post.

Only people who don’t actually read online news sources could possibly think that bloggers are parasites. Well, ok, Michelle Malking probably falls into the parasite category, but Huffpo? Honestly, our congresscritters are clueless.

There is a serious fault in a lot of people’s thinking that journalism and printing paper are the same thing. Newspapers, as we know them, are built around the mechanical printing presses that made stories available to wide audiences.

Radio and television came along following the printing press, creating a more immediate means of transmitting information over wide areas. Those technologies, however, failed to dislodge printed news because neither radio nor TV can offer “on-demand” content. You hear or see what’s being broadcast at the moment, whereas with a newspaper you can choose when and where to read it. And go back and reread parts if you care to.

But now we have the internet, which can offer the instantaneous communication that radio and TV could (and actually over the entire world), but also the perusal and recall capabilities of newspapers. This is why, finally, newspapers can’t compete. The printing press is just becoming less relevant, and newspapers are structured around those machines.

As the internet occludes the need for printed matter (even books are feeling the sea change), we need to divorce the writing of content from the way it gets distributed. Which is what blogging is all about. Traditional newspapers who move their operations onto the web but still do things the old way (such as syndicating mediocre columnists) will find the new medium very inhospitable. Some, such as the Huffington Post, are trying newer approaches, and are finding themselves thriving.

So no, there’s no way to save the newspapers. Because the problem isn’t with the market, it’s with their approach to doing their business. They just can’t seem to see how completely different things are for making and reading content. Dinosaurs blaming the small mammals for the sun getting dimmer isn’t going to save them.

All I saw during the hearing was a group of rich, white men, wanting everything to go back the way it was 15 years ago. No mention (refusal to mention) from them on the CEO Bonuses or holding papers hostage to get the bonuses. They do not know who their audience is anymore.

The women on the panel there represented the future of journalism.

Some of the best reporting / journalism is online now. Marcy has put them all to shame.

here’s what’s wrong with the news;

it’s not

I am making this point fairly often these days:
I live in a community with a terrible “local” paper that is owned by an old school Bircher family (that doesn’t live here btw) that goes way back with Goldwater. Their “local” reporting appears shaded to protect their developer crony buddies and the editorials they run are possibly ghost written by Joe the Plumber.
Please quit pretending that everyone has Pulitzer Prize winners in their backyard. For vast swaths of America, the death of the self serving, monopolistic, fake local paper would likely be to the benefit of the community.

This was great! Somebody ought get the last 1/3 or so, if notjhing else, to Kerry. And yeah. “cacophony without standards.” A what??? And McCaskill….”For your audience, there’s not going to be a lot of stories about the cop that has been running the dice game on the side,” she said. I’ve spent all week at blogs looking for that newsflash “Cops Corrupt”. Look, if I wanna know about the dice game being run by the cop, I’ll pony up and get into it. If I have an interest in the zoning board meeting, I’ll go to it. But how will I know about it beforehand so I can go? i dunno. The local papers don’t print cover that stuff beforehand. Our weekly paper here gets away with a goof column on our City Council meetings. Why? Because the “real” daily paper doesn’t cover them. So please guys, spare me the bullshit. How to convince these people… oh, man, how to convince these people… that the coverage of this election… this historic election, in the mainsteam, “legitimate media” absolutely blew. Horrendous. Wanted to know about it? Here, Kos, HuffPo for starters. Why is Kerry even wasting everybody’s time?

And there you have why I read blogs: they’re hungry for facts, and so am I.
Hungry enough to go to the Libby trial and live-blog (thanks FDL).

You could add Teddy’s coverage of “Teh Deb Howell Era as the Protector of Teh Villagers” to your “as opposed to” list.

Here’s his farewell: Howl No More

(Deb is also featured in a Classic Hamsher Late Night post from 2006.)

Jane, with the facts, you have just helped John Kerry make a fool of himself. The newspapers he defends helped him lose the election with the Swift Boat lies and half-truths they feverishly cranked out. The internet was Kerry’s friend. Internet reporting sought to reveal the truth. The truth happened to be of benefit to John Kerry’s campaign.

Clinging to aristocratic old-establishment ways sure makes Kerry and others look like out-of-touch dopes.

Newspaper Narcissism
Our pursuit of glory led us away from readers
By Walter Pincus

Jane says

it’s happening because that’s where people want to get their news.

And the main reason is they go online is because they simply don’t trust the corporate media outlets. They don’t need to be spoon-fed only what corporate America wants them to know. Corporate America can do its best to debase our educational system to dumb down the populace, but they it can’t choke off the will to learn. The internet and its democratization of information is starting to level the playing field, and the poor old-money hacks don’t know how to deal with it.

The death throes of the newspaper industry are not a pretty sight.

I guess “What’s black and white and read all over?” will soon be a joke nobody gets anymore.

as atrios would say: time to convene a blogger ethics panel

I still subscribe to the dead-tree SF Chronicle, but now i feel like such a parasite for reading news online as well. :~)

When I stopped going to newspapers (and cable TV) for my news and turned to the Net, it wasn’t because I had a strong, innate desire to destroy the old institutions of newspapers. It was because the reporting on those newspapers was (and still is) a joke that only people living in the real world seem to get.

The Times, Newsweek, Time, etc., etc., have done such a mangling of the truth over the last few years. They run puff pieces, write terribly, the magazine itself is paper thin (has anyone picked up a Newsweek lately, crackers weigh more), and they end up sucking the toes of those in power.

People are tired of the same, ancient sound bite journalism that flourished in the 1990’s. American newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur simply because they aren’t doing their job. The journalists are so self assured of their own importance that they see nothing except their way of life is being dismantled, and it’s their own fault.

And as someone said, WTF was John Kerry thinking? The MSM ran the Swift Boat lies and mocked him, making sure he lost in Nov. 2004.

The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing,” added the casually clad Simon, “is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of balance.”

Will a Bull City Rising reporter at a Durham NC Board of County Commissioners meeting suffice?

Or how about the coverage that The Weekly Independent, print and online news organization provides. See especially the article “With fewer reporters covering local news, upstarts try to fill the gap.

Memo to David Simon: Huffington Post is not going to send reporters to local events, but local online news organizations will.

The people who really killed the newspapers are at Craigslist; that killed their very lucrative classified ads revenue.

Jane, David Simon has a lot more to his credit than “because he created a cool TV show and is a snappy dresser”

Please see this interview.

I find it tragicomic that Kerry or McCaskill didn’t bring up the FACT that newspapers are ‘going out of business’ because those who own such periodicals no longer can make their 20+ per cent yearly profit on them.

And there is also the simple idea -fact?- that the ‘blogging’ world does better,faster reporting than newspapers; and in the case of Marcy, better investigative reporting.

BUT I suspect the real problem is the diversity of voices presents the problem of not being able to deny access, which has been a prime weapon in the elected officials ability to shape public perception.

Money and power is what it’s all about as far as elected officials are concerned (and I won’t even get started on what a loser Kerry is.)

NPR – always threatened by Republican funding cuts – finally caved and ceded control to Republican management.

During this fund drive, Orlando NPR affiliate on-air personalities plead for contributions. They complain that their government funding has been cut.

The singular problem with online journalism is its unsuitability as fish-wrap compared to, say, the Washington Post whose sole purpose seems to be for nothing else.

Your comment makes a good point. This isn’t about achieving some mythological “balance.” It’s about competition, advertising dollars, and finding and cultivating one’s audience. I daresay, what could be more American than that?

Good article. It can apply to a lot of things, not just newspapers. Politics, media, Hollywood, the music business.

Top-down management isn’t working anymore.

Lot of truth to that statement.

I hope this doesn’t come down to an either-or issue between newspapers and online news. I want both and I see them being complementary in providing my news content, analysis and editorializing.

Will newspapers find a revenue answer in collecting a royalty payment from every linked story akin to musicians getting some remuneration every time their work is played?

adapt or die.

this notion that if the big newspapers fail the news as we know it ceases to exist is ridiculous.

a new model will take the place of the old, as it has in the past and will again.

i attended a panel on the future of the L.A. Times a few months back, and there were stories of the more seasoned staff’s resentment at having to learn how to use a computer, much less surf the Internets. that the Editor’s suggested “improvements” for the paper didn’t even begin to address the realities of why newspapers are failing left me with the sad certainty that they’d chosen the “die” option.

But isn’t Marcy’s case actually one that mostly demonstrates the fundamental inadequacy of online journalism?

Let’s posit that Marcy is, and has been for some time, one of the top, most productive reporters and commentators in the online world.

Here’s the problem: to this very day, apparently, she has no means to support herself in fulltime work doing precisely what she wants to do and is celebrated for doing: reporting on major political news.

The problem is the online business model. How many journalists does it support generously enough that it might attract a group of practitioners of true excellence?

I’ve seen an estimate that print journalism supports, across the nation, perhaps 40-50 thousand full time journalists. I would be extremely surprised if the number of full time journalists working entirely from an online business model even broke 1,000 (I’m not including those journalists who are employed by print publications who do strictly online work, since they can be supported by revenue from the print publication).

Yes, there exist very real deficits in the current print journalism establishment. Yet does anyone really believe that a reduction in the number of journalist by over a full order of magnitude would not result in far, far less good basic news and journalism? Why believe that there will be a greater diversity of opinions in this vastly more restricted class?

This point should be obvious and compelling. That advocates of online journalism typically refuse to address it doesn’t make it go away. And their ignoring that howling defect in their own model strongly suggests something more: they are themselves subject to the same kind of blinding, institutional prejudices as the print journalism world itself.

royalty payment from every linked story

I think it wouldn’t take long for the papers to get greedy and end up with nobody running their content.

I wrote on this yesterday in a thread. The truth is that not just newspapers but the MSM in general don’t give readers and viewers what they want. Propaganda and infotainment just aren’t a viable business model, guys.

The blogosphere came into existence largely because the MSM were seen as not doing their job, and so people began looking for alternatives. And not finding them, they began to create them. This should be seen as a good thing, right? Free markets and competition, hurray! Well apparently not if you are in the traditional media and faring poorly.

I find the Huffington Post lightweight and glitzy and its comments unreadable. For me, the dailykos is too often more mainline Democratic than progressive. But both of these have found large audiences and that is precisely what advertisers are looking for.

As for content, the dirty secret that anyone who opens a newspaper or watches a segment of Hardball knows is that most of the MSM’s product is crap. It’s not just propagandists like David Brooks and David Broder trying to pass themselves off as deep thinkers. The media sat through the 8 years of the worst Presidency in our history and never noticed. In fact, they were cheerleading Bush most of the time. The economy, foreign affairs, national security, healthcare, they have never bothered to cover any of them except in a he said/she said kind of way. Who cares about that zoning board hearing in Baltimore if the major media can’t even get the major outlines right of the critical stories of our times? And by the way, about that zoning hearing, it is increasingly likely that a blogger did cover it and that it was the Baltimore paper that blew it off.

In any case, how do you propose to save the newpapers (and 40,000 print reporters)?

How many people, sitting at their desks at work, will check to see what is happening in the world. Unfolding and spreading out a newspaper would go over real big.

That’s astute. You are correct again as usual. Bravo!

I see David Simon’s challenge and raise him The Uptake. They’ve been providing total coverage of Minnesota state legislative work, not to mention the tedious Franken-Coleman trials and tribulations. None of the newspapers in the Twin Cities has been doing anything near the work they’ve done.

Well said and I agree.

I’m lucky enough to have a community radio station that covers city council and county commission meetings but there are local bloggers covering them as well. Both also notify listeners/readers of meeting times and encourage attendance. Only the big issues get reported by the St Pete Times or local teebee, after all is said and done and in a he/she said manner.

Two observations which may or may not have been mentioned already.

1) I haven’t seen David Broder or George Will covering a lot of local news lately, so condemning bloggers for focusing on national stories is a pretty lame criticism.

2) John Kerry has posted at HuffPo on multiple occasions so presumably he will find time to say something in their defense.

People have already forgotten about Knight-Ridder and Merc Center.

It’s not like they ignored the intertubes, like all the self-appointed new media experts said all the newspapers did. They had an online newsgathering operations in San Jose with hundreds of employees in the mid-90s.

During the Iraq War, they provided some of the best coverage.

Knight-Ridder is dead.

The ability to link to other works or studies allows an online reader (at his/her discretion)to expand the amount of info that is available to them. The ability to comment and quickly view other perceptions without waiting for the letters to the editor to come in and go through screening.

If Knight-Ridder hadn’t told the truth they’d still be with us.

American papers don’t use reporters any more. They laid them all off to improve the bottom line. Lot of columnists, etc, but most of the “stories” are pulled off the wires.

I agree. There is this myth that the MSM are content creators but as you say a lot of what they put out comes from the wires or is based on them.

And there is the question of access. The MSM can come out with stories on government reports more quickly than bloggers because government gives them officially (with an embargo) or unofficially copies so that the MSM can have stories either before or at release. However once reports are out it is often bloggers, most recently like Marcy, who go through them carefully and catch what reading the executive summaries and skimming miss.

While bloggers are making some headway, as with the Libby trial, reporters from traditional media still get a lot of preferential treatment. They then act as if this is some kind of natural consequence of their higher standards being rewarded rather than an embedded privilege, of their being the only kid on the block for so long.

Per Engadget yesterday:

Just as with the Kindle 2, Amazon posted the Kindle DX product page while the launch event was underway. Specs-wise, there’s not much here we didn’t know: the big changes are a larger 9.7-inch screen that rotates to landscape display, a PDF reader, and more storage space at 3.3GB. The big news is actually the flat $489 price tag, which seems on the high-side of realistic to us — although the subsidy-pricing rumors weren’t totally inaccurate, as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe will offer subsidized on-contract Kindles to customers who can’t get at-home delivery when the DX ships this summer. (Yes, that’s a pretty lame restriction.) Amazon’s also announcing a wide range of textbook publishing partnerships, with tomes from Addison-Wesley, Wiley Higher Education, Longman & Prentice Hall and many others available — and what’s more, Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia have all signed on to distribute “hundreds” of Kindle DXs to students this fall. We’re hunting for more info, stay tuned. [Emphasis added.}

This may be a modern way for dead-tree media to distribute their product.

Newspapers are but one example of changing times. GM is dead, Chrysler is dead, hardware stores are gone, Walgreens is a convenience store with a drug counter attached,auto dealerships are about to tbe phantoms of the mercantile past, etc. Just look around.

Saving the newspapers is pure nostalgia. People want desperately to live in last week, last month, and last year, when everything (or most of it) was predictable, planned for and routine. The paradigms of daily life, the universal economic models and the routine patterns that governed most of the last century are in a state of flux and metamorposis. Stopping or preventing these changes would be as difficult as getting a snake not to shed its skin or preventing the sun from rising in the morning. It is all evolutionary and Darwinian and denying the reality of it all is counter-productive, counter-intuitive and self destructive.

If we do not learn to be adaptive, we will be dead. John Kerry is a Rip A Van Winkle who has not yet woken up. If we continue attempting to satiate ourselves with the latest technology (this is much too long for tweeting) without effectively discarding the obsolete, we will have proven ourselves to be insane.

I get my news here -fresh and truthful. I haven’t watched tv news (except campaign speeches and debates) in probably 2 years. I quit reading the papers and have now dropped my subscription. If they had something real to tell me, I would watch and read.

Blue Texan has a nice new offering: “Jeff Sessions Claims He Doesn’t Know What Empathy Is”

I would go tell Marcy that, but the comments are closed over there…

Yes, indeed. This is why Warren Buffet recently said he wouldn’t invest on a newspaper on a dare.

Oh, looky here! Rupert has a cunning new plan! I’m sure it will be a huge success!

“News mogul believes media sites can’t survive failing business model

The billionaire CEO of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, is sounding the death knell for free Internet news delivery.

At least for Fox News and the many other online media outlets Murdoch controls.

With traditional print newspapers on the decline as ad sales plunge and readers turn to the Web for news and information, media companies are struggling to find ways to profit.

Murdoch feels that, despite the global economic turndown, charging for access to news is not only the right thing to do, it’s the wave of the future.

This despite the global economic turndown, which Murdoch feels is on the wane.

“There are encouraging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous declines are done, and things are beginning to look healthier,” he says.

Murdoch is so bullish on the near future that he expects moves to charge readers at the websites of Fox News, The Times, The Sun and others within a year’s time.

“W’re absolutely looking at that,” says the Australian-born media titan.

“The current days of the [free] Internet will soon be over.”

Murdoch cites success with “booming subscription revenues” at the online version of The Wall Street Journal, whose parent company News Corporation recently purchased.

“That it is possible to charge for content on the Web is obvious” from the Journal’s experience, he says.

Some might argue that Murdoch is grasping at straws as his vast portfolio flounders.

News Corporation’s operating profits dropped 47% in 2009’s second fiscal quarter, compared to the same time last year.

The conglomerate has also cut thousands of jobs over the last year, though Murdoch says “creative” personnel were largely unaffected.”

Newspapers haven’t failed because of printing or because of blogs. Newspapers have failed because they were bought by corporations, changing them from tools of journalism into tools of marketing. Normal people, even ones unaware of the underlying social and financial root causes, just aren’t as interested in reading marketing material as they are in keeping up with issues of direct concern to their lives. The appeal of newspapers was waned as they have been taken farther and farther from journalism itself, and turned more and more into corporate communications tools for the companies that own them. Whether because experienced staff are dismissed in the name of efficiency and profit, or because in the end the goal of the paper is to endorse corporatist living (cubicles, overtime, CEO pay), the end result becomes something that the average person stops reading.

There’s also the fact that in the name of cutting costs, newspapers have throttled innovation. Instead of BECOMING the blogosphere, they resisted it. Instead of being flexible and dynamic and risk-taking, they are beholden to the quarterly-profits-driven gestalt of corporate ownership, and become entrenched in the dwindling but predictable income of convention.

I seen no reason to mourn the passing of print media. What we’re really nostalgic for is journalism, and frankly that died years ago. However if you want to meet journalism’s grandkids, just drop by FDL or Huffington Post.

Here’s the problem: to this very day, apparently, she has no means to support herself in fulltime work doing precisely what she wants to do and is celebrated for doing: reporting on major political news.

Here’s the problem: there are lots of worthwhile occupations, which many people pursue with great passion without making anything like full-time livings at them. See for example this study on American composers. Perhaps the implication is that journalism is becoming an art rather than a profession?

Dinosaurs blaming the small mammals for the sun getting dimmer isn’t going to save them.

Oh so true…

and:

The people who really killed the newspapers are at Craigslist; that killed their very lucrative classified ads revenue.

Online classifieds are HUGE factor in all this.

so is this:

…newspapers are ‘going out of business’ because those who own such periodicals no longer can make their 20+ per cent yearly profit on them.

It can be reasonably argued from a purely capitalist view that you charge what the market will bear. But when you get into a highly competitive market, profit margins drop in order to price the product to sell. In this context, the Internet is so dirt bloody cheap that traditional (or should I say “legacy”) information distribution methods (newspaper, TV, magazines) are being forced to compete like never before. They might survive by taking fewer profits but that’s difficult because the “owners” are corporate entities controlled by outside financial interests as beautifully stated by the venerable Walter Pincus in a great article today:

Beginning in the 1960s, papers large and small started being bought for large sums, first by newspaper chains, which in turn became controlled by outside financial interests. A few papers remained privately owned, but eventually almost all sold stock to the public. With that financial change came monopoly ownership, one newspaper per city or town, and the notion that the newspaper that survived should be neutral, presenting all points of view in each controversial story. As I said, the fairness doctrine has been transferred from radio and television to the newspaper. How ironic is it today, then, that there are dozens of competing electronic voices in almost every city, most of which now have only one newspaper.

Equally important:

It can apply to a lot of things, not just newspapers. Politics, media, Hollywood, the music business.

but I disagree with:

Top-down management isn’t working anymore.

because in my view “top-down management” is not the problem at all. In fact, even the ownership concerns are not the source of the problem although they exacerbate it.

No. the real problem is, as so well stated above:

The printing press is just becoming less relevant, and newspapers are structured around those machines.

But now we have the internet, which can offer the instantaneous communication that radio and TV could (and actually over the entire world), but also the perusal and recall capabilities of newspapers.

True, and throw in a really cheap Kindle (not there yet but soon) and you’ve got Arthur C. Clark’s “newspad” see wikipedia.

But I disagree with this:

This is why, finally, newspapers can’t compete.

They will have to produce better content, and a lot more of it to compete. They have the organizations and access that only the top bloggers have obtained so trad media actually have a huge competitive edge already, and will be able to sell original content, just not for as much – but no need to maintain presses so it’s cheaper to distribute.

“The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing,” added the casually clad Simon, “is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of balance.”

Dude, the HuffPo is as likely to cover Baltimore zoning board meetings as is the New York Times. Or do not the words “national focus” register with you?

You want to see a blog covering Baltimore zoning board meetings? Check out the bazillion local blogs over at http://www.blogtimore.com. One of their featured blogs is an outfit called The Dagger (http://www.daggerpress.com/about/) — and guess what? They’re looking for people like you to go cover local news:

The Dagger is looking for…

Writers, reporters, bloggers, critics, photographers, videographers, comedians and neighborhood busybodies who are interested in telling the rest of our community what you know. While our home base is the Central Maryland region, we are always looking to grow and are interested in expanding our horizons and minds. Email us for more information, or drop us a note using our contact form.

How is The Dagger different?

Citizen Journalism. Although most of us at one time worked as professional journalists, most of us are not presently employed in the media industry. We like to think we’ve retained the best the newspaper world has to offer (objective reporting, biting writing, quality storytelling) while being able to jettison some of the problems of the profession (attachment to media conglomerates, refusal to adapt to modern technology/society, stubbornly wrong-headed traditionalist thinking).

What’s more, we’ve torn down the boundary between reporter and reader. We are all citizen journalists. There is no longer a need to filter information through a reporter and editor. No one can tell the story like someone who lived it. No one can report on community happenings like someone who resides there. Our readers are our writers and vice versa. Through submissions, open commenting and our forum, there is nothing preventing you from telling your story anymore. No deaf-eared editor will tune you out and effectively mute you.

Tell us. Join us.

Rather timely to this discussion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medi…..g-websites

Rupert ­Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ­”malfunctioning” business model.

Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.” Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

I forgot that Kerry does post at Huffington occasionally.

I guess he was for blogs before he was against them.

Again, WTF is Kerry thinking? At least Gore WON the popular vote.

I agree with his point on people just using snippits or lines out of context. I commend you for going through and explaining the difference between the sham that MSM is as opposed to the truthiness of online sites such as yours. But you basically just proved his point about people only using snippets. Sorry to say

The people who really killed the newspapers are at Craigslist; that killed their very lucrative classified ads revenue.

Which is why the current effort to force Craigslist to stop with the naughty ads (even though the Minnesota woman who was killed wasn’t answering a naughty ad) should be called “The Newspaper Salvation Act of 2009″. Because of course answering a classified ad in a print daily never hurt anyone, right?

Well said. If people want nostalgia, they have to be willing to pay for it. But they usually aren’t, and besides nostalgia glosses over a lot of realities that we would sooner not remember. So maybe newspapers are modern security blankets but if we actually read them instead of feeling all warm and cuddly about them, they’r still mostly poorly written poorly researched garbage.

The Times is the only semi-worthwhile one of the bunch, and it’s little better than tab status now. I never visit a Murdoch site if I can at all avoid it, and this just makes it easier.

The Grauniad’s site is far and away the best of the websites set up by the UK TradMed’s print division (though the Beeb’s site is also v. good).

Murdoch, another dinosaur who should have retired while his myth was still intact.

Hah well said.

That blue stuff you see in the post, those are called links. You want more context, click on them.

And that whole “truthiness of online sites such as yours” thing, I think your bias is showing. If you are going to make a charge of truthiness, you should be ready with more than a misreading of the post and an apparent ignorance of even the most basic aspects of html.

Kerry said he does not like when people just talk about statements or soundbites. I love this site and Hamsher and she does a great job explaining how online news sources often have great facts supported by numerous sources and how MSM is shallow, misleading and sometimes just plain wrong. But she did write a whole column based on what John Kerry calls “snippets”. I like this site alot, it has way better info than the MSM, but this article just had a little bit of irony to it.

Kindle is another walled garden. Amazon, in spite of having not only some of the most sophisticated IT infrastructure but IT offerings like hosting on demand, is utterly deaf to pleadings for open WiFi on its Kindle devices.

No gawddamned way in hell am I going to spend nearly 500 smacks on a device that only allows me to get a fricking book or newspaper from a limited range of providers.

Not when I know there’s better stuff in the pipeline which not only provides content of my choosing over WiFi, but much better display capability like this prototype dual-touchscreen device from Asus.

I already have a netbook, an Asus Eee 900, bought it for $259 dollars, WiFi enabled, can surf the entire net with WiFi access or download books as desired to read offline. Much more value, and I define my consumption, not the content provider or the hardware platform provider.

What’s missing in the question of moving from brick-and-mortar newsprint to online media is the business model; most of the content on the internet is paid for by a combination of advertising and subscription, and we already know it works as demonstrated by Salon.com. Salon’s been doing this for years now and in spite of numerous obituaries by MSM types, it’s still here.

Fundamentally, there’s a problem with traditional media’s business proposition: they think it’s enough to offer 1) regurgitated national content like AP, 2) ignore having a direct relationship with readers, 3) believe content is the end-all-be-all. Amazon’s Kindle model freshens this only slightly, serving it warmed up on an electronic device. Salon, however, has constantly experimented with their user experience, values their community; Table Talk grew to include Salon Blogs for a few years, added The Well, and now includes Open Salon. They also provide original content while being platform agnostic WRT delivery.

New online media outlets must offer real and new content, not just analysis; it must offer a relationship with its readers so they feel they are being heard and have an emotional vesting in the outlet; readers also want an experience, not just a passive pull-only relationship with their outlets. (Ask yourself why American effing Idol is so popular — how much of it is the participation of the audience in voting, which often exceeds voter turn-out at local polling places…)

If I were in a position to advise media outlets, I would tell them to consider more broadly their placement options beyond Kindle, avoiding proprietary walled garden delivery systems.

Or find a way to buy their own delivery which gets around the problems of the walled gardens and provides more value to consumers. Here’s one option, a Peek emobile email device; it runs between $30-$50, offers unlimited email AND TEXTING service for between $14-20 a month, and the developers are bend-over-backwards friendly and accommodating, talking with their users every day to improve their product. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a volunteer “crash test pilot”, receive only a free cable to upgrade my test system in exchange for my feedback.) A really smart online media outlet could talk with these guys right now, figure out how to work with them on a content-by-email delivery system and a price point for a subscription service and bingo, the new newspaper in hand with a bunch more functionality for the user and a new income stream.

But I guess I can see where the old school newspaper guys are going to have a problem with grokking this; many of them still can’t figure out Twitter let alone this newfangled WiFi stuff.

That is all well and fine if Murdoch’s plans were an isolated case. But, if it is the leading edge of a trend; whereby, you have to be a paying subscriber to each and every news and news-related site, that is something else.

Maybe, I would consider paying for a ‘passport’ that gained me access to multiple sites. But, if I want to read a newstory or an opinion column, I’m not likely to sign up for a subscription for a one-time read at only one site.

What Murdoch doesn’t understand is that the wilful manipulation of facts to suit a pre-determined ideology isn’t journalism. Rupert’s idea of journalism is about the control of information to the masses.

For many years people have known this, but until the Internet offered us another news delivery system, we were stuck.

Now we can say “no” to Rupert and the other media moguls and get our news on the net.

Unless this happens:

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

The big phone and cable companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to gut Net Neutrality, putting the future of the Internet at risk.

It’s still not going to work. As Jane mentioned, they tried that with Timeselect and it died like a dog. Now granted, when the WSJ tried it, they did it the smart way: The Op-Eds were free, the actual journalism was not. However, that was before Murdoch bought them and consequently trashed their newsroom, which is rapidly devolving to be just as sucky as their editorial page.

What’s killing print newspapers is that they have huge expenses that are part and parcel of putting ink to print, and their revenue streams are no longer up to the task. Those papers that can fully migrate to the web and/or find more revenue will survive. Those that can’t, won’t.

A good wanker can wank someone and that person doesn’t know they are being wanked. Repubs like the way a good wanker journalist makes them feel, until the next morning..and the bill comes due.

It sounds to me as we’re comparing two different things. It’s like comparing a buggy whip to an accelerator – two different technologies with the same purpose. Newspapers have the word “news” in the title but that’s about all. To compare what Marcy has done to “news” would be mocking her. Newspapers and blogs are not the same.

Newspapers will go the way of the buggy whip, it’s old technology with a broken form of funding. No one will look at girdle ads to see the box scores online. Blogs are to newspapers as cuisine is to food. How we end up paying for it is question. It’s not the internets’ fault that newspapers are dying.

Omg, wait, like a free market? If their product is not viable they fail??? No!!!!!!!!!!!!

French intellectual papers have definitely gone down hill. Liberation is on its last legs, and Le Monde is a shadow of its former self, though slightly improved from a couple of years ago. I used to look forward to picking up my copy on the way home from work and on the way to my favorite cafe. Now it’s mostly work, and the book review section would be a Racine tragedy if it had any style. So I think the decline is general. Maybe German papers have held up better. I dunno.

I agree completely. Once the sharp-pencil guys out of business school got a hold of the papers, they ruined them, just like they’ve ruined just about everything else in American industry.

Anyone – regardless of political affiliation – who thinks the advent of the Internet is the sole culprit in the demise of newspapers is sorely misinformed. Without a doubt, newspapers lost a lot of classified ad revenue to the Internet. But downturns in the automotive and housing industries also are driving a stake through the industry’s heart because those industries have cut back on advertising.

What has happened is simple. The economics of print publication and the unrestricted mergers and acquisitions of the last 30 years created a de facto monopoly over news publication that the newspaper industry mistook for de jure “property rights”. The TV, movie, and music industries did much the same thing. But the newspapers have even less justification. Contrary to MSM opinion, information is free in the US. Copyright protects copies, not contents.

Now, the technology has changed suddenly, and almost everyone one that wants one has his or her own press. Fifteen years ago or so, I went from editing, printing, and distributing a lovingly produced but necessarily minimalist journal four times a year for someone else to publishing my own full color monthly for less than postage needed to mail one issue of the print publication. I could distribute for free and not have to hire a billing manager to keep us breaking even. My circulation was 10X greater and the articles were all on subjects I was interested in.

For the MSM, the dreary fact is that information is suddenly too cheap to bill. Their elaborately constructed monopoly falls apart just when it should be paying off big. In fact, the canny moves that built the monopoly–the political ads and product placement masquerading as news, the cozy relationships with the rich and powerful, the methodical elimination of diversity and controversy–turn out to be cutting their own throats. They no longer have the content that the readers want, they no longer have the readers that the advertisers want, and charging the reader is not a real option (running a periodical on subscriptions alone–as my print journal did–was never really viable anyway). The comparatively well paid professional TV anchor or big-city newspaper editor is becoming a thing of the past, like the steel worker, the key-punch operator, or the gas-station mechanic.

So the mainstream media types are mad and are lashing out. This wasn’t supposed to happen to them, because they played the game of the last 30 years “right”, according to the “rules” that they read in business and journalism schools. Like auto workers, they are asking, “How could this happen?” And the answer is, of course, that it just did, helped along by their own short-sighted self-interest and their readiness to play with con men just a little smarter than themselves.

Now, to be fair, I saw David Simon on Moyer and he is pretty impressive. He railed against the monopolization of the media. He treated the subject splendidly in the Wire (which I love), and he put the blame closer to home than he did in any remarks about bloggers: captive newspaper markets, corporate greed, and a star mentality among reporters. All good stuff. But nobody likes to see something they loved from the old days wither away, especially in a place like Baltimore. It makes people irritable. I can’t blame him, and I wouldn’t take it personally.

The bottomline is that the legitimacy of the free online press is established by what it has done and continues to do. Being thin-skinned about the remarks of those who don’t understand it and resenting lack of recognition by “real journalists” just makes the MSM point seem more plausible. Give credit where due, fight any extension of spurious “intellectual property rights,” and ignore the rest.

Journalism is becoming a humbler, more distributed activity, with fewer stars and less credit given. Madam Wheel is our star of the moment–and rightly so–but she is, if anything, a sign of the times. As near as I know, she did not achieve her successes by risking life and limb on foreign battlefields or by getting a scoop from an explorer in some equatorial jungle or by broadcasting from London or Bagdad during this or that Blitz (forgive my ignorance if I’m wrong on this). She wasn’t the face of a wire service’s Paris bureau for 20 years. She “just” read the material available, used her mind and her memory, drew the conclusions and unravelled the threads that led to truth that no one would have found with a Paris bureau. That’s what the MSM has trouble grasping.

We can see exactly how horseshoe makers felt when the automobile was invented. But somehow, I doubt they WHINED so much.

Beautifully put….

I think the good, incredible, investigative reporters will be ablle to write their ticket.

Technology has, like so many things, left ‘old’ school behind-

Sort of like our Big 3~car companies!

Good journalists will be wanted- they just need to figure out their venue.

I’m in complete agreement.

The problem for newspapers is that they are never going to have the local monopolies on access to eyeballs that they once could offer. That monopoly is gone forever and, with it, their ability to pedal their twisted spin on their readers’ perception of the world. Good riddance.

Wow, this lady is amazing, how many hours a day do you work?

question: I understand that Kerry had 50 million dollars in campaign money left after he lost that election. (don’t know if this is true or not)

If true, what happens to the fifty million, anyone know?

simon specifically said the opposite of the title of this post. he did not blame online news for destroying the newspaper industry. from his prepared statement:

Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was bought out of my reporting position in 1995. That’s fourteen years ago. That’s well before the internet ever began to seriously threaten any aspect of the industry. That’s well before Craig’s List and department-store consolidation gutted the ad base. Well before any of the current economic conditions applied.

In fact, when newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, their industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street money . We know now – because bankruptcy has opened the books – that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters in an era when the paper was achieving 37 percent profits. In the years before the internet deluge, the men and women who might have made The Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary – something so strong that it might have charged for its product online – they were being ushered out the door so that Wall Street could command short-term profits in the extreme.

Such short-sighted arrogance rivals that of Detroit in the 1970s, when automakers – confident that American consumers were mere captives – offered up Chevy Vegas, and Pacers and Gremlins without the slightest worry that mediocrity would be challenged by better-made cars from Germany or Japan.

In short, my industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered, free-market logic that has proved so disastrous for so many American industries. And the original sin of American newspapering lies, indeed, in going to Wall Street in the first place.

When locally-based, family-owned newspapers like The Sun were consolidated into publicly-owned newspaper chains, an essential dynamic, an essential trust between journalism and the communities served by that journalism was betrayed.

Economically, the disconnect is now obvious. What do newspaper executives in Los Angeles or Chicago care whether or not readers in Baltimore have a better newspaper, especially when you can make more putting out a mediocre paper than a worthy one? The profit margin was all. And so, where family ownership might have been content with 10 or 15 percent profit, the chains demanded double that and more, and the cutting began -long before the threat of new technology was ever sensed.

But editorially? The newspaper chains brought an ugly disconnect to the newsroom, and by extension, to the community as well.

A few years after the A.S. Abell Family sold The Sun to the Times-Mirror newspaper chain, fresh editors arrived from out of town to take over the reins of the paper.

They looked upon Baltimore not as essential terrain to be covered with consistency, to be explained in all its complexity year in and year out for readers who had and would live their lives in Baltimore. Why would they? They had arrived from somewhere else, and if they could win a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain.

So, well before the arrival of the internet, as veteran reporters and homegrown editors took buyouts, newsbeats were dropped and less and less of Baltimore and central Maryland were covered with rigor or complexity.

In a city in which half the adult black males are without consistent work, the poverty and social services beat was abandoned. In a town where the unions were imploding and the working class eviscerated, where the bankruptcy of a huge steel manufacturer meant thousands were losing medical benefits and pensions, there was no longer a labor reporter. And though it is one of the most violent cities in America, the Baltimore courthouse went uncovered for more than a year and the declining quality of criminal casework in the state’s attorney’s office went largely ignored.

more (links and discussion) on pw’s thread of the same topic:

http://firedoglake.com/2009/05…..nt-1894855

p.s. depending on wapo’s milbank to accurately report on what simon had to say was imo probably a mistake. but trying to work through the logic of a blog post critical of the msm while depending on the msm’s flawed reporting to make some of the key points is just too weird for me to try to think through right now.