Another Reason Newspapers Must Never Die

this all has an air of "John Henry" to it. The machine may lack the personality and heroism of the human, but it is better still. Or as musicians like to say, "how many drummers does it take to change a light bulb? None, they have a machine that does that now."

Agreed KT. We got a special edition issue of the Post (Wash) sent to us by a friend and it will be cherished. The blogs are a wonderful alternative but we need very good papers for more in depth analyses. All I ask is that we leave Krauthammer, Kristol and the Kagans out to pasture ( I have a long list but have no stomach to be mean today).

Speaking of ironic, or, dare I say, timely...

"The blogs are a wonderful alternative but we need very good papers for more in depth analyses." Actually, blogs need traditional media to do most of the reporting that gives them material to analyze. The relationship is synergistic, not strictly competitive.

I think this Eric Alter piece pretty much said it all:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman?currentPage=all

To paraphrase Kos, let's have More and Better Journalists!

My husband brought home a copy of Time a few weeks ago and I was shocked by how thin it was. I have not read it in twenty years. I don't see how it can keep going withot ads. That being said I ould not get through my daily commute without the New York Times.

Of course, the managers of my 401k aren't thinking like that, they just want TWX stock value to go up.

Eh? Seeing as how about 80% of every sheet of every newspaper I've bought over the past couple decades has been completely void of anything even remotely useful (excepting the comics, where the percentage drops to only about 50%), I'd have to disagree. There's plenty of self-important drivel available on the internet, and it gets refreshed each day. Information is better gained from a variety of sources whenever possible, and getting only a single newspaper soon has us drowning in piles of expensive newsprint. As for magazines, no matter how many times, and how thoughfully, a cow chews its cud, it's still merely a ball of partially digested grass.

"how many drummers does it take to change a light bulb? None, they have a machine that does that now."

But as our esteemed moderation anti-spambot makes clear, you can never trust a robot to do the job of a human. Besides, I find it so endearing when the drummer speeds up.....

At Sully's place today, he posted a great point. Nate Silver didn't take all those polls. But he came up with an algorithm to weigh them properly and was spot on in his predictions of states and final numbers, save Indiana where he thought Obama would barely use.

Traditional orgs did the polls, he crunched all their numbers. Synergy.

wvng: agree completely. Journalits who do their jobs well and bloggers who do theirs well help one another. We need both: one for depth, the other for immediacy. We need each other.

More shenanigens with Sarah Palin and Bill Kristol
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-07/palins-mole-at-the-times/1/

Can anyone point to anything Bill Kristol has gotten right?

If in the future we are all reading on Kindle equivalents, will books have "died?" Print newspapers are just a distribution channel for writing and reporting - an expensive one which requires printing presses and delivery people. I look forward to a future where newspapers ARE dead, and reporters and writers have stable, better paying jobs that are not dependent upon a failing economic model. KT, you're talent should not be held hostage to the inefficiencies of print home delivery.

Bill Kristol did find the right way to get gigs at Time and NY Times even with his horrendous record. It still does bug me. He is horribly wrong in ways that people die from. He never is held accountable.

kristol wears nice ties...does that count?

Newspapers are committing slow suicide.

Having shrunken the comics and everything else to an eye-squinting minimum for a broadsheet, the Gannett Westchester-Putnam-Rockland Journal News raised its price from 50 to 75 cents this week, and my wife and I agreed that this Wednesday's papers (for obvious reasons) would be the last daily newspapers (we habitually bought both the Journal News and the NY Daily News every day) we buy. We'll still pick up them and the Times on Sundays for the forseeable future, but I can't remember the last time I found a better report on a subject I cared about on a printed page than I have found on the Web.

OK. I'll give Kristol his ties. They are lovely. But I remain convinced he got his gig at the Times because he has photos of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.engaged in the nasty with underage goats.

There can be no other explanation.

I haven't been able to find a copy of TIME here.

[sob]

gonna look again tomorrow

Deborah Howell has an article in this week-end's Washington Post that exemplifies everything that is wrong with the quest to be fair and balanced. She determines that since there was not the same amount of positive and negative coverage of McCain/Obama, the coverage in the Post was flawed.
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Facts are irrelevant. Reporting must be exactly balanced to be fair. If one candidate has more negative things happen with them, you can make up negative things to cover about the other to "balance" your coverage. Epic fail.

I'll admit I went right out and got my copy of the NYTimes, and will buy at least the Newsweek election copy, which is always outstanding. But I find they're unwieldy, and I no longer get my local paper. The $180 a year I save makes a sizable dent in my comcast bill. And no, I'm not nearly as well informed about local issues.
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A friend gives me her copy of Time every week, and I'm amazed at how much I don't see by reading only online. So I'm happy to have it in my hands to read, but don't feel I can afford the luxury of buying it. For other less time-dependent magazines, I borrow at the library.

Oh - and I still buy the Boston Globe on Sunday because the coupon sections let me recoup the cost of the paper.

I'm not sure that people approaching newspapers like The Franklin Mint is a long-term solution to its failing economic model.

I think Time is probably losing money on bad customer service. When I unsubscribed a few years ago, I kept on receiving the magazine despite a few calls to customer service. This went on for about six months. And I definitely wasn't paying for it.

Sorry, this kind of pisses me off. Actions have consequences. We have gone through 8 years of unimaginable corruption and malfeasance and how much of it did the newspapers get? And when bloggers started finding muck under the rocks, the MSM pushed back against it and said it was nothing. So was the DOJ used for political purposes or not? Were there any voting shenanigans in Ohio in 2004? It doesn't seem like fishy banking transaction were actually behind Eliot Spitzer's fall....what was? Downing Street Memo? What exactly has our esteemed print media gotten to the bottom of....or even tried?
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If newspapers hadn't shirked their duty, we wouldn't have gone to another source to be informed in the first place. I'm not saying there are things of value in today's newspapers, I'm saying there's not enough of it. So stop telling us that newspapers shouldn't die because of some heart warming story or cute article, that's not why I read newspapers.