I bet they do.
Posted on 02/26/2009 7:58:18 AM PST by SmithL
A couple of years ago, when speaking to a local group, I mentioned that The Chronicle was losing money. A couple in the back of the room rudely applauded. How thrilled those two must have felt when - if - they learned of Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega's announcement Tuesday that the Hearst Corp. will implement "significant" workforce cuts. If the cuts don't pay off, then the Hearst Corp. will "offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether."
Bloggers and e-mailers are crowing. If The Chronicle is shuttered, they'll be dancing a jig.
Many conservatives feel a warm glow at the possible demise of an institution that they believe to be failing because of liberal bias. On the far left, that same glow will satisfy those who think newspapers are not liberal enough.
As for those who only read their news online, here's a news flash: News stories do not sprout up like Jack's bean stalk on the Internet. To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up.
Reduced ad revenue and falling newspaper circulation mean that there will be fewer people to cover the same number of stories. In the middle of an economic crisis and President Obama's federal spending bonanza, there will be fewer watchdogs to guard the shop.
So to those of you who argue that the demise of liberal newspapers (The Chronicle in particular) is deserved, I offer a caveat: Be careful what you wish for.
Remember the ugly consequences of San Francisco's sanctuary city policy for juvenile offenders, who were sent abroad instead of to jail? Or Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums' failure to tackle crime in Oaktown? Or reports on corporate bonuses for execs at bailed-out banks? Imagine....
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Die already. Just die. I’m proud to say I canceled my subscription many years ago.
Many conservatives feel a warm glow tingle going up their leg at the possible demise of an institution that they believe to be failing because of liberal bias.
Oh wait. That was chrissy matthews talking about Barry Insane Osama.
I stopped reading right there. As a former journalist myself -- one who worked for the New York Daily News before moving to California and getting into a different line of work -- I know from personal experience that there are no such standards and never have been. The news business has ALWAYS been about getting the story in any way possible and scooping the competition.
Getting the story means taking a bit of information from here, a bit from there, making some inferences (correct or incorrect matters not), and cobbling together a TALE (synonym for story). Once a reporter gets past the six basic facts of who, what, where, when, how and why, anything is considered fair game.
The way the news business has always operated is akin to how Macbeth describes the queen's death in Act 5, Scene 5:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
It’s not just Dem politicians or the Dem party....it is a pervasive love of government in all forms.
If you’re like me you’ve read hundreds of not thousands of op-eds on this subject but this particular article has always stuck with me....
http://www.carolinajournal.com/mediamangle/display_story.html?id=2397
Hah!!!
This morning the above the fold headline is "Obama cuts Yucca budget to bare bones." Most mornings it is the same thing: he'll read an AP article then say, "Did you know ... " and I'll reply,"I've already read about it on the laptop."
The main reason we get the newspaper is for local news. Sweet Hubby also enjoys reading aloud his favorite comic strips to me: For Better or Worse, Zits, The Family Circus, and Alley Oop are his favorites.
The Bachelor Boys (3 wild mustangs) left their calling cards on our driveway and lawn again this morning.
Sorry Debra, but in a societal cost/benefit—factual lie/truth analysis of the Chronicle and similar rags, it is not even close. I hope it dies sooner rather than later. Good luck finding a new place for your columns...
Standards?? You have no standards. Think of the reporters in Iraq who would sit in their hotel rooms, looking out the window, plodding thru internet sites and then filing a report about some explosion so far away they never even heard the echoes? Or maybe the AP reporters who would go to get a story, then at the urging of AP's brilliant Ron Fournier would write the story based on what the reporter felt the reader could understand, or to write the story to reach a specific conclusion?
It's little things like that which end up causing such applause. The author should take note of something; you folks are trusted less than a 3 card monte dealer.
There are two things you need in order to be a journalist, neither of which requires four years at a J-School.
The first is an ablility to write grammatically correct sentences, the other is knowledge of the two rules of journalism:
1) The 5 Ws and an H
2) The inverted pyramid.
In the last 20 years, the rules have gone out the window.
“To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up.”
Not being able to find that in our newspapers is why we dropped our subscriptions.
Regardless of what the future holds for us as far as receiving information the newspapers killed themselves, there was nothing that we could do about it, we complained for a couple of generations, many decades, and they ignored us, mocked us, and even in current articles laugh at our “bias fantasy”.
Doesn’t Mark Morford write for them, or did he die of AIDS?
That seems to be a big part of their problem. Many with computers and digital cameras in their cellphones and the like are in fact reporting news more accurately than the so-called professional journalists.
Newspapers are dying because, by and large, they are not researching, reporting, and writing on what happened. They are instead using the veneer of "journalism" as a cover for publishing stories written to further an agenda, not the truth.
The newspapers as they exist can't die fast enough in my opinion.
Real reporters will still find a way to get the news out. The vehicle may change, but the truth will out... it always does eventually.
Debra, I hear what you’re saying. BUT...one of the news industry’s biggest current problems is that the journalists and media outlets who could and should have, by their example, set the standards high aren’t doing it, and are in fact some of the worst at breaking those standards.
If you only read/watch the MSM, you are woefully misinformed.
There's always Pravda.
Seriously. Pravda accurately reports where the MSM ignores. (Who would have ever thought one could use "Pravda" and "accurate" in the same paragraph? *sigh*)
Still a lot of chaff to sort through, but...
Did everything come out all right?
Yeah, the Morfordite is still at the Comicle, and he misses having President Bush as his inspiration. You can look him up on the columnist page, but the Management here requested that I stop posting his rants.
Did anyone mention the English language skills of their affirmative action reporters and editors? How about the daily barrage of front page news on the “victims of society” to the exclusion of news stories from the world outside of our borders?
I bet they do.
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