DE BORCHGRAVE: Digitized news

The Washington Times ^ | March 26, 2009 | Arnaud de Borchgrave

[Scanian]

Long gone are the days when President Kennedy used to say he got more out of the New York Times than out of the CIA.

The print media are besieged. Foreign bureaus of newspapers and national magazines have been closed by the score all over the world. Washington's National Press Building has dozens of offices for rent. Daily newspapers are dying in print and reincarnated online, where they compete with everything from free blogs to free social networks - e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed.

Newspaper bankruptcy attorneys are prospering. And few people can remember accurately what they caught on television news as they get the children ready for school - or stagger home from an exhausting day at the office. Untold millions get their news fix online while at the office. Out of 338 million people in North America, 247 million are online - a 73.1 percent penetration. (Asia has 650 million on the Internet, which is just 17.2 percent.)

The newspaper Politico reported, “For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.”

Sounds like the kind of place where dominant media culture gurus meet to set the agenda?

[Scanian]

"Newspapers' collapse threatens democracy"

[ComputerGuy]

Parrots and canaries will be forced to live in unlined cages.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Why can’t newspapers and Amazon.com’s Kindle come to a partnership. The papers would sell for much less than typical Kindle content, but would have the advantage of not having to live in a web browser environment where they share equal access with any old blog.

[Nick Danger]

Why can’t newspapers and Amazon.com’s Kindle come to a partnership

Good idea. Let's use The New York Times for kindling.