JOURNALISM IS DEAD.

JOURNALISM IS DEAD.

That will be the last headline in the print edition of the New York Times.  In a final blaze of Dadaist glory, every other page will be left blank.  It will be all the news that was fit to print.  A commentary on the end not only of a profession, but also of an era in democracy. 

Most people will read about it on their Kindles. 

Afterward, the New York Times will be a collective of bloggers and columnists that consolidates content from around the web.  Even before the final print headline, the term “newspaper” will have long since stopped applying to them.  The Gray Lady will be a cauldron of experiments in social media, from monetizing user content to creating branded social networks.  It will “tweet” its updates to “subscribers.”  A precious few in the newsroom will still remember when those used to be physical stops on a paper route.[1]  Of course the newsroom will have also ceased to be a physical place.  It will be a chat room on Google Talk.

The Times, desperately clinging to its prestige, relevance, and “brand,” will continue to pay bloggers and columnists for content even as its competition continues to get content for free by employing writers that are less talented, but hungrier for exposure.  The market’s supply of this mildly narcissistic, pajama-blogging “citizen journalist” will never be exhausted, and the average reader will often fail to discern the difference.

As revenues continue to decline and debts mount, the overall quality of the “newspaper” dissipates, and the Times, after begging investors for another injection of capital, will be forced into chapter 11 bankruptcy.  Everything will be auctioned in a fire sale.  The last thing to go will be the domain name ‘nytimes.com.’  The purchaser will point it to a list of RSS feeds that generates money from AdSense clicks.  Most of these links will be to Viagra or amateur porn.  Not a single human being will directly contribute to the content of the site anymore, but it will be the highest profit margin in years.

That’s how journalism dies.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government
without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,
I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” –Thomas Jefferson.

The future of news has never been more uncertain.  Woody Lewis writes, “We are at one of the most kinetic inflection points in the history of mass communication.”  On February 27, 2009, after 150 years, the Rocky Mountain News published its last paper.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, after 147 years, also published its last paper.  Daniel told me all the time about staff and budget cuts at the Chapel Hill News after they were bought out by the News & Observer who turned them into its Orange County Bureau.  If you’ve ever loved a newspaper, this video will break your heart:

The newspaper industry isn’t merely in a state of contraction; it’s entering into its wild death throes.  The statistic quietly thrown around Carroll Hall that I was never able to confirm was that from my class of news-editorial sequence journalism students, only two had job offers at graduation.  The rest fell into “other” categories: a) no job; b) an internship that included a meager stipend, no health insurance, and an expiration date; or c) like me, they jumped ship into an entirely unrelated field.

UNC has a damn good journalism school that’s strongly committed to teaching its students the principles of good reporting, solid writing, and the ethics of the profession.  Unfortunately, they managed to teach me just enough to realize that there was no future in journalism.  It may be, at least up until this point in my life, my biggest act of cowardice.  I loved being a student-journalist, a student becoming a writer.  I had dreams of asking the tough questions of the people who needed to be asked.  Of telling true stories about my community, pulling threads together with words and connecting people’s lives together.

I wrote for two school papers: the Carolina Review, the conservative magazine on campus; and the Daily Tar Heel, the paper of public record for Orange County.  I devoted substantial amounts of time to each, but I never fully devoted myself. I watched as peers spent 40-50 hours a week in the newsroom, killing themselves to break stories and build their portfolios.  I admired them for what they did, but I knew I couldn’t do it.  I cared too much about class.  My love of journalism wasn’t monogamous.  I also love the law.  Your GPA doesn’t matter so much as a journalist, only your writing.  Your GPA does matter when it comes to admission to selective law schools.

Student-journalists have a lot in common with student-athletes. Journalist and student are distinct and separate roles.  You must somehow find a way to strike a balance.  I always saw myself as student first, journalist second. My parents weren’t paying $14,000 a year for me to write stories about school board meetings and study abroad enrollment. They were paying for me to get a liberal arts education.  So sophomore year, when I decided to major in journalism, I also decided to dedicate myself to learning journalism the craft and that I’d start journalism the career after I graduated, when school was behind me. 

Why am I saying all of this?  Two jobs.  Out of several hundred students.  Print is dead.  But who cares, right?  Pew put out a report that only 33% of Americans said they’d miss a local paper “a lot” if it stopped printing tomorrow.  That number seems absurdly low.  Even so, newspapers aren’t actually all that important.  They are only one medium among many.   As Clay Shirky writes, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”  (“Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”).

I agree with Mr. Shirky.  The problem is, the two are irrevocably linked.  And the internet won’t stop with killing papers.  It’s going to take journalism down with it.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be.” –Thomas Jefferson.

The crux of my argument is this: Journalism requires two main resources.  One is money, the other is expertise.   The internet broke the business model of print journalism, and as the money goes, so too will the journalists.  They were the ones with the expertise who can’t make a living anymore.  Once they go, journalism goes with it.  Boom.  Death of Journalism.

Any idiot can tell a story.  True journalism is a skill set that takes time to develop.  A friend summed it up well in a recent email: “one of the early criticisms of newspapers is that they were ‘second hand accounts’ of happenings—but their importance lies not in ‘relaying events’ but analyzing them and contextualizing them, which bloggers, untrained in journalistic skills, who don’t cultivate sources, and just report first-hand news, can never do.”  Harsh, but true.  What does a “citizen journalist” know about open meeting laws?  About the difference between a principal and a spokesperson?  About timing your questions like a heavyweight fighter times his punches?

Printing presses had small monopolies over journalism for the last several hundred years.  The entry costs of a press are high, but once you have it, the economies of scale give you a small monopoly on advertising and classified ads, and thus a large return on your investment.  With the internet, there is no entry cost to publishing.  There are millions of blogs, and Google found a way to easily and efficiently outsource advertising to all of them.  This saturates the market and drives down the value of each visitor.  Which means that while more people are reading the New York Times now than ever before, each reader is worth substantially less to advertisers.  And those new readers aren’t paying the Times anything because online the paper is free.

Simple economics kills print journalism, but I don’t think it stops there.  Newspapers are merely the canary in the coal mine.  Read stories here and here about the decline of advertising, broadcast, cable, and magazines.  Newspapers may fall first, but they won’t be the last.  The internet made content free and spread it faster than anyone ever could have imagined.  It’s changing the ethics of the way people view intellectual property.  Read that article from Shirky again: “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

Who wants to pay for the New York Times and CNN after it’s been given away for so long?  No one.  And if no one will buy your product, that product stops getting made.  That product was the product of…you guessed it, JOURNALISM.  If nobody buys what journalists produce, they’ll stop producing it.  If they stop producing it, they aren’t journalists anymore.  If there are no more journalists, there is no more journalism.  Boom.  Journalism dead.

And will someone please please please tell me why, with such fervor, is it simply assumed by techie media geeks that a new business model will take the place of print’s model?  I’m sick of everyone who glibly pulls out the hackneyed image of horse and buggy being replaced by Ford’s automobile.  People, IT’S A FALSE COMPARISON.  The internet doesn’t replace print in the same way the car replaced the horse and carriage.  The business model for the car wasn’t different from the business model of horse and carriage.  Instead of raising horses and selling carriages, you manufactured and sold cars.  With print you sold papers.  With the internet, you sell nothing.  Well, you sort of kind of almost sell something: ad clicks.  But these are everywhere on the internet.  The small monopolies tied to the specific geographic locations of printing presses don’t exist in cyberspace.  And so, with Google Ads ubiquitous, ad clicks become so watered down in value that you might as well be selling nothing.

Everyone is excited about “social media” being the saving grace of the industry.  They say that the new form of journalism will have a social media face, mixing reader contributions with the personal brands of staff reporters and the brand names of the “newspapers.”  But nobody’s ever explained to me why “social media” is akin to salvation.  Even Shirky’s conclusion rang false:

“For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

He’s essentially saying we don’t know what “new” journalism looks like until it gets here.  So we just have to sit back and wait for everything to sort itself out.  By defining your “solution” after it has already happened, and by claiming prior to the fact there was no way to know what the results would be, he’s established himself a nice little tautology.  I agree that there will be “overlapping special cases” – blogging collectives and NYTimes citizen journalist initiatives.  But when the dust settles, whatever does come next, it won’t be “journalism.”  We might still call it that, but the word will have lost all its prior meaning, diluted like the ad clicks that failed to support it.

Social media is good at sharing trivial information and keeping in touch with your friends.  At its best, it can be a useful tool for disseminating “real journalism,” like this great personal essay in New York Magazine about collateralized mortgage obligations that I might not have seen if a friend hadn’t posted it to his feed.  At its worst, social media raises its own separate issues of privacy and right to reputation as rumors and gossip now have the ability to race around the world at breakneck speeds.  But what social media isn’t, and it pisses me off when people insinuate that it could be, is journalism. 

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” -Shirky

We need journalists: trained, dedicated, honest, faithful professionals.  People dedicated to fairness and accuracy in reporting.  People engaged in the synergy of a newsroom, where writers and editors meet, where new ideas for stories are born out of careful deliberation.  There may come a time where there are no more newsrooms.  But there will still be news.  However, economics does not necessitate that there will be a conduit there to report on it.

There is no doubt that as newspapers contract and die, social media is taking off at a record pace.  Not just the blogosphere, but social networking as well.  Facebook will reach 200 million users this week.  If it were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world, between Indonesia and Brazil.   But as Bob Garfield explains, audience doesn’t equal money.  Facebook’s 2007 valuation of $15 billion has been reduced to $3.7 billion on just $300 million in 2008 revenue, spurring rumors that the company might start charging users for its services.

Garfield concludes, “[T]he mantra: ‘We have the audience. All we need is a business model.’ As if adequate revenue were somehow guaranteed by physics or heavenly deity. It isn’t. I’ve pored over Isaac Newton and the Ten Commandments. There is no ‘Thou shalt monetize.’”

Everyone says journalism will come back, it’s just going to be bad for a little while as it transitions.  I’m not so sure.  I’m doubtful because of the new ethic of the internet that promotes free content over paid content.  There’s a whole generation of us who grew up downloading pirated mp3s on Napster.  We have limited conceptions of the criminality of copyright infringement and of intellectual property generally.

In the future, there might not be anyone willing to pay for the intellectual products of others.  There won’t be any newspapers to read, only blogs filtered from microblogs filtered from micromicroblogs filtered from 14-year-old kids with camera phones.  We’ll reach this world by Twittering each other into a deluded sense of satisfaction with ourselves, admiring our collective stupidity.

That’s where I believe social media is delivering us.  Not to some imagined plateau of citizen journalism.  But to a valley of overabundant, self-absorbed, meaningless sound bytes.  When we get there, Jefferson will roll in his grave.  His horse and buggy, too.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

Comments

• 

  By h, March 31, 2009 @ 9:02 pm

  Very interesting and thanks for writing this.

  Local newspapers are screwing up. At a time when there is competition that provides similar products at a lower cost and (sometimes) higher quality, papers are responding by increasing their prices while lowering their quality.

  I think there is a model for newspapers that will work. Just throwing some ideas out there, but I’d suggest a two-prong plan.
  1) Restore faith in the institution.

  People often say that the op-ed page at the Daily Tar Heel was the most-read page. I think there are two reasons though that the benefit doesn’t translate the same benefits to regular newspapers: 1) the Daily Tar Heel is free (and has essentially a captive audience), and 2) the campus is of the same general demographic. Written for kids by kids.

  One of the things that I noticed when I read the comments on articles in McClatchy papers about the cuts was the cries of “good riddance!” from people upset by the paper’s bias. “The N&O is a liberal wasteland,” etc. When people talked about what made them the maddest (so mad that they canceled their subscriptions and just read the content online) it was the editorials, endorsements, and columnists.

  When people talked about who has run out of ideas and generally just mailing it in (with associated pleas that they be cut), it was the columnists. Sure, some have their loyal readers, but I think the net utility to newspapers of the columnist and the editorial is just not there. The opinions of the columnists and edit boards are ascribed to the publication, and cynicism and bias concerns start to ring true. In a lot of instances, the paper can take on an agenda. While there’s certainly an interpretive role for journalists (sorting through the facts, weighting some arguments over others, deciding which sources are most legitimate and which voices need to be heard), I don’t think that the newspaper needs opinion pages. Letters to the editor are about as far as I would go. Readers can formulate their own opinions if you give them the facts. Bloggers and online forum commenters have it covered locally in lots of places; for everywhere else, barbershops and diners work just as well. And local columnists covering national news is redundant and not helpful.

  So I say that local newspapers can reduce costs by cutting opinions. Opinions are better placed in magazines, online, and targeted audience Indy Week-style publications.

  2) Reevaluate the structure. Drastically cut costs by providing only the things that people can’t get elsewhere. Local newspapers are no longer the sole, or even the major, source of news for many consumers. They should offer quality niche reporting over quantity of pages and stories in order to keep costs down.

  A completely unscientific study of myself tells me what people want in a local newspaper:
  - Local sports team coverage. (hometown favorite, high schools)
  - Local coverage of politics.
  - Local arts and entertainment coverage.
  - Local business coverage
  - Local lifestyle coverage (church events, high schools, human interest, local home design)
  - Crime beat stories
  - Obituaries, weddings, and schedules of events.

  In other words, they want gossip about people they possibly know and information about issues they can actually do something about.

  What people can get elsewhere: (And yes, some old people don’t use the internet. Oh well. They’ll die off someday.)
  National and international news without a local connection (use wire sources for major stories)
  State coverage (use wire sources or pooled resources for big stories)
  State sports (use wire sources or pooled resources for big stories)
  Stock prices, national business coverage
  Classifieds
  National books, fashion, arts & entertainment, gardening

  “Someone reads every page,” but this is all information that is available elsewhere—usually at a cheaper cost and in greater quantity and with greater quality. As the older generation dies off, there will be very few people who don’t know how to access this information from other providers.

• 

  By David Hodges, March 31, 2009 @ 9:51 pm

  thank you, h, for your very thoughtful comment!

  that’s an interesting point that newspapers don’t need opinion pages, and that they are a root cause of readers’ unrest at ideological bias. i know newspapers take great pains (at least the DTH did) to keep the opinion page separate from the rest of the paper. some of the articles that i read about the demise of newspapers suggested that they become nonprofits and that their endowments could sustain them where revenues could not. this is an interesting argument because the biggest drawback would be the paper could no longer give endorsements. as a 501(c)(3), like religious institutions, they are barred from a seat at the political process. would they still be able to ruthlessly cover elections as reporters? i don’t know, but i think so.

  i dont think i linked to this article, but it certainly influenced my post: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090406/nichols_mcchesney

  and i like what you say about cutting the fat to make newspapers more attuned to local coverage. community journalism was a hot topic at unc’s j-school. gone are the days when every paper could afford to send tons of staffers off to washington to cover national events. you’ve got to know your community, their interests and needs, and serve those as best you can.

• 

  By Amanda, April 1, 2009 @ 12:57 am

  This is a solid, depressing argument. Well-written and well-researched, as always.

  I think you are missing a whole world of journalism: television news and online multimedia. While newspapers are most certainly dead, journalism is still very much alive in these two mediums. Yes, TV news shows are not as in-depth and hard-hitting as newspaper articles, but they present news with the same journalistic integrity and aim. Look at 60 Minutes: Here is a hard-hitting news show that can rival almost any typical newspaper’s coverage of specific events. CNN runs 24-hour briefs that give the viewer enough information to understand what is going on, and consult another news source if they really want to now more.

  Yes, journalism is traditionally writing, but the internet has thrown everything off. The face of journalism is changing, not dying. It’s becoming an interactive, audio/visual phenomenon. I will venture a guess that the multimedia program at UNC sends at least 70% of its graduates out with jobs (I’ve heard similar stats from the professors in the department). UNC’s journalism school is nationally known for its multimedia program (an accreditation team member confirmed this when he said to me, “What UNC does best is multimedia. Keep focusing on that.”) Photojournalists are probably coming out all right too, especially since they are such an important part of multimedia.

  And those are things that you can’t get through a blog reader, thus still guaranteeing ad exposure.

  It’s similar to the old traditional story form v. alternative story form debate. Journalists don’t like to admit that the average reader probably won’t read past the fourth graph. And they especially don’t like to yield to the newer idea of ASFs– timelines, graphs, bulleted lists, etc that tell the same information in a more visual, quicker way. Yes, the craft is somewhat lost when taken out of traditional form, but research shows that readers are much more likely to retain the information, and that is the crux of journalism: to inform.

  In the same sense, journalists don’t want to imagine a world without newspapers. Maybe multimedia is laughable to them. I’m recently converted: As a fan of having something tangible, I didn’t give much credit to multimedia. Yet again research one-ups me: people retain more information when audio and animation are combined than when a block of text is put in front of them. Human information intake is changing because of the technology explosion. We want information that is up-to-date, we want it fast and we want it now. I blame television as the first nail in the coffin for newspapers. Portable wireless devices such as iPhones might just be the last.

  Trust me, I’m in the same boat as you. Online journalism is a scary thing. I really just want something it doesn’t matter if I spill coffee on when I read it at the breakfast table.

  Here are some examples of what I see as the new face of journalism:

  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/30/nyregion/20080530_CRANE_GRAPHIC.html

  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/28/us/politics/20090328-biden-multimedia/index.html

  http://nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html?ref=multimedia

• 

  By Patrick, April 1, 2009 @ 1:09 am

  Thanks for the post.

  Journalism is the essential check on power. But this piece focuses only on the disastrous effects stemming form the dilution of that check. What about the dilution of power itself? If every writer can reach a global audience, does anyone have influence? If every borrower can find a lender, is there such a thing as equity? Extrapolate this to governments, military forces, and it starts to get a little frightening.

  Think of what it means to securitize something. Things which are not on their own uniform or transferrable are pooled together and chopped up to create products. CDOs are securitized loans. CDs are securitized sounds. Newspapers are securitized pieces of information. Government is securitized power?

  The view from 2009 seems to be that we’re going to destroy ourselves, right? You run the regressions in your head on how these events are going to play out, and at the end, your internal calculator reads “DNE.”

  I guess I’ll just keep checking the formulas until I find my error…

• 

  By David Hodges, April 1, 2009 @ 10:13 am

  amanda: i like those multimedia presentations, but they cost money to produce, and the nytimes is just giving them away on their site. i dont think ad revenue alone can pay for them. newspapers need something sustainable.

  with regards to tv news, broadcast viewership of cbs evening news and the like have been in decline for years. and as for cable, cnn is a joke. see recent cramer v. stewart clips for evidence that msnbc is also a joke (in an earlier draft of my blog post, i touched on tv being lame-ass journalism but decided it was too tangential so i might jam on that at a later date). back to cnn though, have you seen lou dobbs and o’reilly, its prime time news anchors? they’re selling fear and hate, and making a killing off of it as entertainews, but doing a piss poor job of, you know, actually informing the electorate. anderson cooper is someone i can get behind though, so maybe it’s not ALL bad.

  patrick: power might be diluted but i don’t know if it’s totally democratized as you imply (or that it’s moving that way). technology might give every writer the tools to find “an audience,” but some audiences are bigger than others. every borrower might be able to find a lender, but some loans are bigger than others.

  it is scary though that smart people, not all of whom were greedy or deplorable, lead us down the road to the current financial crisis. and when the subprime mortgages go bad, and the credit dries up, and the whole global economy freezes, and nobody has the understanding or the ability to wave a magic wand and fix it, that to me is scary. i think it’s less that power is being diluted as that society, governments, and economimes are becoming so large and complex that nobody really knows what’s going on. it’s an information overload.

• 

  By mika, April 1, 2009 @ 10:14 am

  here’s the one thing that gives me hope that journalism will last:

  citizen journalists are still mostly regular citizens. to me, lots of bloggers are more like the social media users you described–good for disseminating info, but they aren’t the ones on the ground in afghanistan, in myanmar, in madagascar, in sudan. bloggers don’t have access to the white house press room, they won’t be at the g20 conference on the economic crisis. besides not having the money to cover this stuff, they don’t have the sources, like you mentioned.

  a lot of people are content to get news from blogs, but the blogs themselves need journalists to do the legwork, and i think there are enough smart, well-read citizens out there that some sort of pay model will eventually emerge. if i have to pay for decent coverage, i will.

  i think people aren’t willing to pay for good news right now because they can still get ny times quality coverage for free. but when they are faced with the very real, very depressing choice–all blogs! all free! but no real journalists! vs. pay a little! quality reporting is worth it!–i think people will be willing and able.

  for example, the wall st. journal and financial times both have subscription models and seem to be doing pretty well with them. FT and other specialty finance papers can be confident that they have readers who really value their reporting, because it’s really valuable info that they can’t get elsewhere.

  when all we’re left with is tweeters and bloggers, i think the rest of us will sorely miss real journalists and will be willing to shell out for it.

  also i don’t want journalism to die because i want to go back to school for it. D:

• 

  By David Hodges, April 1, 2009 @ 10:28 am

  “i think people aren’t willing to pay for good news right now because they can still get ny times quality coverage for free. but when they are faced with the very real, very depressing choice–all blogs! all free! but no real journalists! vs. pay a little! quality reporting is worth it!–i think people will be willing and able.”

  mika, this is a great point. chris roush pointed out to me in an email that FT and WSJ were doing really well with online subscribers. while those are “niche” markets of business news that corporate types (like my law firm) rely on as part of their profession, i can see a corollary that when “free reporting” finally gets so terrible that people are willing to pay again, then maybe some pay system will emerge.

  the in between time is still a dark and scary place, and the internet’s culture of “free content” is still scary as hell.

• 

  By mika, April 1, 2009 @ 6:48 pm

  i know, i don’t like the in between time. ALSO. ok, to throw some more shit in the mix:
  i’m sure you’ve read the pieces about how people claim they want fair and balanced but they’re really just looking to reconfirm their own biases, so conservatives hit up fox and limbaugh and liberals spend all day reading commie blogs.

  i think that trend is probably also part of tradtl journalism’s problem.

• 

  By David Hodges, April 1, 2009 @ 10:20 pm

  yesss. self filtering the news is so dangerous. you can read daily kos or watch bill o’reilly and believe that the world is just as your ideological bias tells you it is. really hate most political blogs. a bunch of noise that needs to be tuned out i say.

• 

  By Liz, April 2, 2009 @ 10:46 am

  So many replies….congrats on writing a very thought-provoking blog.

• 

  By David Hodges, April 2, 2009 @ 11:01 am

  thanks liz. i think i hit a nerve with some people. so far it’s been a mixed bag of positive feedback and respectful disagreement.

• 

  By Jeff, April 2, 2009 @ 8:17 pm

  As a still-working newspaper columnist, I’m oblged to challenge h’s assertion that columnists an opinion writers are extraneous to newspapers and even responsible in some measure for their financial struggles. For every reader who has cancelled a newspaper subscription because of something I wrote, I’ve had dozens tell me how much they love my column and — sadly — that it’s “the only thing I read in the paper.”

  I am not saying this to brag – just to point out that good columnists pull people into a newspaper by giving them personality and punch. Similarly, a quality editorial lends perspective and nuance to complex issues, encourages discussion and provides the possibility of change because it is read by community leaders.

  Done right — and I agree that many editors have allowed too many columnists to hang on past their prime — commentary connects people to newspapers by giving them a human face and a human heart.

  For sure there will always be censorious adult children who will cancel a subscription because of a particular column or opinion. But in my experience such readers are few and far between and of little value anyway because inevitably something in the newspaper will offend them (a cartoon, a news story, an ad) and produce the same outcome: a cancellation.

  The real issue here isn’t opinion writing. It’s the lack of choices available to newspaper readers. A healthy industry should be able to produce at least two vibrant daily newspapers in major markets so that even those inclined to boycot have an alternative to embrace.

• 

  By David Hodges, April 2, 2009 @ 8:44 pm

  jeff, agree with you that a columnist can draw a reader into a paper. when i was in high school my dad always used to leave the front section of the greensboro news & record behind after he’d gone to work, so i’d read the headlines and then flip immediately to the opinion page where i read almost every word before i went to school. long before i read the nytimes or washington post regularly, that was how i got acquainted with friedman, dowd and parker’s syndicated columns. as well as the local flavors like rosemarie roberts.

  also agree that censorial adults who cancel their subscription are worthless readers to begin with. but back in the days of newspaper monopoly, at least some of those people would have kept reading, despite being “offended,” because otherwise they’d be uninformed. but like mika pointed out, now they can just go read ideological blogs that fit their slant and be totally happy and unoffended. thats part of what’s killing papers, too, and it’s definitely tied into what you said about major markets no longer being able to support multiple daily options for readers to choose between.

• 

  By The Ninth, April 27, 2009 @ 7:41 am

  Over the past few years, my newspaper of choice has been the public library. As in “books.” As current as I can get ‘em.

  Now catching up on Ronnie Reagan’s fraudulent life in “The man who sold the world, feb, 09″.

  Books are the daily journalism I want to read. And I’ve been getting into Adam Smith & his 1763 lectures on Jurisprudence–after Howard Zinn quoted from one of the lectures where Smith said “Adam Smith-1763, Feb. 23, Tuesday Laws&Jurisp.
  “Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.”

  Is this really from the so-called “father of the free market” and “th invisible hand of free enterprise”?

  Either the man changed wildly in 12 years (1763-1776, pub date of Observations, etc., on the Wealth of Nations”) or the man’s been misinterpreted (or misquoted) for a couple of centuries. Which one could it be? There’s a Justice Online site that has Smith’s complete works, both in PDF-text and PDF-page-scans/text-in-background. So you can search text in both formats.

  How nuts is it to claim that books are a better form of journalism than the “daily snapshot”? Well, when you really want to get this highly touted “context” (I’m sorry, but newspapers don’t provide it. Never have. Even the best. And there’s no index–and barely a table of contents (yeah, yeah, there are sections–Newsday even has/had thumb-tabs or thumb-notches invented by Howie Halpern, I think–he knew about perforating from his philately background/hobby/day-job.

  It’s true that I’ve been outsourcedly retired and have time to munch on several books at a time–sometimes reading the best of them, or the most fascinating-to-me of them in one marathon sitting, standing, walking, sitting, snoozing, reading. But read a book, then the books “around” it–come in from any point–Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty in the 6-day war, killing 130? was it, US sailors, The Lemon Tree, and dozens more, from both sides. (Even maps help–search for The Incredible Shrinking Palestine for the four maps that’ll turn up).

  What I want to read is a story, link back to the original documents, original sources (like, sometimes you have to refer to the US Constitution on the problems Nixon and Bush and Cheney have/had with the “laws being faithfully executed” but not “faithfully executing POWs.”) I keep the Constitution on a “hot key” — now the side-squeeze of the MightyMouse. On the road, I keep it in my pocket, a 1962 version that DHEW sold for 10¢–it is missing the last four amendments, but that’s no biggie, the last, XXVII being “no pay raise until the next session” (proposed in, what, 1789 and ratified in 2001 or so? The pocket versions don’t have all the background, but are still useful).

  check out a very short book, Guantánamo: What the world needs to know, by a lawyer/organization that’s defended/defending some of the POWs. The appendices have the source documents of interest–1902/3 lease w/ Cuba–$2,000 per year in gold coins. Cuba hasn’t accepted payment since the Castro takeover, but just think of it: $2,000 in US Gold Coins. Wow. That’s all the Constitution allows (along w/ silver) for currency. So all the greenbacks in your wallet, or bank, are “unconstitutional.” (but who follows the Constitution in our government these days, anyway?).

  Who writes about the fact that the Massachusetts House votes and votes and votes with about 10 people sitting in the House chairs. I think the house is 260 or so persons, so 10 isn’t a quorum, I don’t think. A capitol reporter I asked said, “Oh, they always do that–they’ve already figured out what the decisions are in their caucus beforehand.”

  I probably missed something–wasn’t there from the start–but of course the bills & such are read at such a breakneck speed, over a really wretched audio system (how do you spell echo oo oo oo oo oo?) who could tell what’s going on. (Ayes? silence. Nays. silence. The ayes have it. Hunh?)

  I digress. So how do you get books out of a newspaper? I’ll whisper you one word: morgues, son. The future is morgues.

  And Millicent (DEC working group on micro-payments. Way back in the 1990s. Imagine that.

  And a new editorial front end. My mantra is/was “Publishing is the process of marrying form and content.”

  So, tell me how many classes of attributes you see in that mantra.

  a) 1 b) 2 c) 3 d) 4 e) 5.

  Correct answer is (d)–four. Form, content, process, & marrying (relationships/hyperlinks).

  As for the much-vaunted skills of “journalists,” [Simon's klaxon].

  While the WH press corps was sitting in on morning and afternoon “gaggles,” like the silly geese they are, there sat Charlie Savage, on http://www.WhiteHouse.gov, reading through signing statements, probably referring back to the laws which they proposed to amend/repeal. Got him a Pulitzer and a move from Beantown to the Silver Ladder (Dunno what you call that ugly atrocity the NYT put up on 6th or 7th or 8th? avenue, but it looks like a ladder to me–and apparently has been used as one by a couple of building-climbers recently).

  One Mass rep claims to have “tipped Charlie off” to the signing statements–don’t know if that’s true or not; who would trust ANY legislator these days , esp. when they can’t even remember their oath of office. So help me god. No, so help ME god. No, so help… fergit it. Who in god’s name put that bit in an oath of office for a position in a non-sectarian government, what separates “church” ‘n’ “state” anyway? Guess that’s why Roberts said “…so help you GOD?” to Obama–probably daring him to say “So help me, nobody, ‘cuz that’s not in the Constitution. Didja want me to say So help me Visnu? Krishna? Muhammad? Ralph Waldo Emerson and All You Transcendentalists Immanent Everywhere?

  But anyway, it wasn’t any WH correspondent who got the Pulitzer for surfing the web.

  sorry forthe rambling. poison ivy’s got me in its thrall.

• 

  By David Hodges, April 28, 2009 @ 12:40 am

  that was the most bad-ass, tangential, digressing comment of all time. kudos, and thanks for the post!

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