Posted on 07/16/2007 10:58:31 PM PDT by goldstategop
Having just authored a book called "Stop the Presses! The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution," I could hardly have asked for a more timely plug from BusinessWeek magazine.
Its July 24 issue will feature a column titled "When Do You Stop The Presses?" – which, not surprisingly, by the time you read this, has been available online for a solid week.
The column by Jon Fine asks the question: "Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?"
Why is he asking?
"This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression," he explains. "The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads."
Take Fine's perhaps surprising nominee for the first paper to fold – Hearst's San Francisco Chronicle. From 2000 through 2006, it bled $1 million a week in red ink.
Or how about the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which lost $20 million in 2006.
Or how about the once-vaunted Boston Globe, which is reportedly headed for unprofitability.
(By the way, what do each of these candidates for demise have in common? They all face competition from much-smaller, but feisty alternative dailies with a more "conservative" view.)
"Executives might be better off wondering at what point the Globe's Boston.com or the Chronicle's SFGate.com – with unassailable market positions, excellent editorial and massive traffic – will be worth more as a solo digital play than attached to a print newspaper," writes Fine.
To put this in perspective for those readers already inclined to the digital, all three of these major papers with "massive" online presence are considerably smaller than the DrudgeReport. One of them, the Post-Gazette, is massively dwarfed online by WND.
Bob Dylan told us the times they are a changin'. With regard to the media, he was just slightly ahead of his time.
But we are truly entering the "Stop the Presses!" era. Nearly every single major newspaper in America is losing circulation – that includes the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
And it's not just newspaper economics that is driving this freight train. All three major network newscasts, once the staple of American news consumption, are losing viewers. It's not just poor Katie Couric. The pie sliced by all three is just plain getting smaller.
It's enough to make me feel like a prophet having written the book "Stop the Presses!" and released it in this critical year of change for the old guard of the news media.
It's no longer a question of if some major market daily newspaper is going to fold its print edition and go digital only, suggests the BusinessWeek piece, it's a question of when.
I do believe I alone hold one distinction in this history of the New Media. I think I can safely claim that I am the first daily newspaper editor in chief to launch an independent daily news source on the Internet. I did it 10 years ago – and you are reading it right now.
In fact, I'm not sure any others have yet followed my example.
But given this grim report from BusinessWeek, I don't think I'll be alone in that category much longer.
If you want to know the complete story of this trend – the who, what, when, where, why and how of it, if you will – you can get it in the first book by a media insider who crossed over from the world of so-called "mainstream" journalism to the wacky and wild world of the Web.
That's me. And that's "Stop the Presses!"
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
The downside of this is, electronic media is so instantaneously rewritable.
There are benefits to hardcopy publishing.
The Pharaohs were into revising history too but they had to hire masons with hammers and chisels.
All the MSM needs to do is to purge its archives.
Posterity needs better than a virtual, editable, censorable audit trail through the ages.
I don’t think it’s the liberalism that’s killing the newspapers. They have been liberal for generations and they tend to cater to a liberal urban audience. What’s killing them is that they’re an anachronism. Anyone under 40 and quite a few people older than that just don’t need them anymore. We’ve got the internet and we know how to get more news online than we ever could out of a daily paper, so why should we pay for something that clutters up our homes day after day? The fact that many of us don’t agree with their editorial slant is just one more reason not to subscribe, but my guess would be that the profits at the few conservative newspapers out there are down too.
Unfortunately the OS has lots of bugs.
The new media cannot fully trust the services of the OS but without it where would the majority of the new media be? A few new media applications have taken over a lot of the work that the OS is suppose to do; but most new media applications still depend upon links to the MSM -- the links include multiple sources until "the rest of the story" is found.
Through the efforts of the new media we finally have a free press again. Not since the days of multiple newspapers in most cities have we had a free press IMO -- a time before TV.
Besides bugs the OS also has myriad viruses (liberal biases), worms (MSM employees who "want to make a difference"), trojans (activists posing as "reporters"), and just plain lazy dolts.
Long live the the new media!
BTW, I first accessed WorldNetDaily about ten years ago. Mr. Farah and his wife were running WND from their home in the Sacramento area if I remember correctly. I felt compelled to email the WND web site to tell them that they had a winner. Mr. Farah responded with a nice reply with a little info about his efforts.
For instance, the Democratic Socialists of America used to proudly list Pelosi and other Democrats in congress as members. Then someone possibly noticed a strong similarity to the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany and tried to sanitize the DSA website by removing all references to Pelosi and other prominent Democrats.
However sites such as the Waybackmachine keep a running record of what appears on a given website enabling FReepers to retain a pertinent DSA page as it existed earlier.
I have posted before that the new media has taken us back to the "newspaper on every corner". The truth will get out.
Here is a good start I believe.
However, don't forget that the $$$ really isn't an issue to these lefties, as they are smaller cogs in giant corporate wheels, and the corporations, to satisfy their white guilt, allow them to lose money so that they can be sufficiently liberal at their cocktail parties. I don't see that changing.
IMHO not so, but it is a thought-provoking attempt.More fundamentally, the OS is the Constitution and Society at large is the "hardware" it runs on. "The MSM" - I prefer to call it "Objective JournalismTM" and emphasize its singular number since it is not internally inconsistent, and if you have read one of its organs, you've read them all - is just one way that it receives in information.
Drudge is an example of an input conduit. I do not assert that Drudge is 100% correct - but then, journalists who claim objectivity for themselves (and for those who agree with themselves) are not correct all the time either. In fact they are heavily biased by the fact that they can take their own influence for granted, as long as they stick together to promote themselves and denigrate anyone who would compete with them without joining their consensus.
Free Republic is an application which runs, no so much on its (admittedly crucial) hardware/software, as on and for FReepers. FReepers who find articles of interest, and post them - and Freepers who read, analyze, and critique those articles and other Freepers' responses to them (including, importantly, the mods). But ultimately the FReepers and lurkers who read the threads decide - each for himself/herself - what is interesting and what is trivial, what is sensible and what is nonsense.
The value of FR is tempered by the ever-present possibility of deception by its anonymous posters - but that is also a strength, since that leads its readers to employ their own critical faculties. FReepers do not take things at face value, as Objective JournalismTM counts on people doing.
The MSM is dying, but Joe Farah is an idiot. He got an early head start in the New Media, but then he locked WND into a tiny niche that is shrinking even now.
I am no historian but I bet that there was never any thought by government (perhaps not even by anyone) to make all but one of those newspapers illegal.
Nor would anyone have said, as I heard the author of the book Republic.com say that reading just one of those newspapers was a danger to our democracy.
I am however puzzled by the word objective vis-a-vis the MSM. Isn't that oxymoronic?
True, the MSM should be objective. Some say that that is not an obligation to explain the Truth but to make the Truth available.
It's a good point that in lieu of what the MSM should be they get by as long as they stick together to promote themselves and denigrate anyone who would compete with them without joining their consensus.
That's why the new media are "patches" to the MSM application to correct the bugs and counter the viruses.
More fundamentally, the OS is the Constitution and Society at large is the "hardware" it runs on. "The MSM" - I prefer to call it "Objective JournalismTM" and emphasize its singular number since it is not internally inconsistent, and if you have read one of its organs, you've read them all - is just one way that it receives in information.I am however puzzled by the word objective vis-a-vis the MSM. Isn't that oxymoronic?
It would be, if taken literally - but my TM is intended to denote the fact that journalism uses the term "objective" as a sort of brand or label, like "arm and hammer" was a brand of baking soda. It's a label which represents no reality at all.True, the MSM should be objective. Some say that that is not an obligation to explain the Truth but to make the Truth available.
I do not even accept the premise that journalism should be objective. The First Amendment runs exactly to the contrary; it prevents the government from complaining that a journalism is not objective - whether or not the complaint might be well founded.The reality is that objectivity of the sort that journalism boasts of isn't actually much of a virtue. It sounds wonderful, but when push comes to shove they only claim that they "objectively" follow the rules of journalism when they make their stories. But that begs the question of what those rules are, and what those rules are designed to do.
And the answer to that is that the rules are "If it bleeds, it leads," "Man Bites Dog" is a better headline than "Dog Bites Man," and "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper." And those rules have nothing to do with political objectivity and everything to do with attracting and holding an audience. Promoting those rules to the level of definition of the public interest, when they are about the very different issue of interesting the public, is a bit rich.
I get it now and it is an appropriate parody. Thanks.
I am glad that you pointed out that you "do not even accept the premise that journalism should be objective."
I agree because for me to disagree I would, in my mind, be contradicting my praise of "the way it used to be;" to wit, many sources of news via many (often biased) newspapers.
Perhaps I should have worded it a little different "True, the MSM should be objective if they are to be the virtual sole gatekeepers of news and issues. I agree, the MSM can only claim to be objective; and yes that is their right.
Some MSM employees may feeeeeeel that they are "objective;" or, as they used to respond to my complaints in the 1960s, "We're professionals and you're not."
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