Posted on 07/26/2007 2:10:09 PM PDT by abb
Newspapers are dying. At the Washington Post Co., CEO Donald Graham is banking on the Internet to save serious journalism. If he can't figure this out, nobody can.
Barry Svrluga, a 36-year-old baseball writer for TheWashington Post, was on his way to the barber when an e-mail pinged his BlackBerry telling him that the Washington Nationals had sent two struggling pitchers to the minor leagues. Svrluga detoured to Starbucks, wrote a 572-word commentary on his laptop and posted it to his blog, Nationals Journal at washingtonpost.com. After his haircut he swung by the Post's newsroom to do a live question-and-answer session online with fans. That night, after filing a story for the newspaper, which he calls the "$0.35 edition" in his blog, Svrluga recorded a ten-minute podcast for the Web site, with sound bites from team officials and players.
Like most reporters at the Post, Svrluga has become platform-agnostic, which is a nice way of saying that his bosses are no longer big believers in print. Today a small army of bloggers, podcasters, chatroom hosts, radio voices and TV talking heads, as well as a few old-fashioned ink-stained wretches, populates the newsroom at the 131-year-old Post. They understand that Donald E. Graham, the chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Co., is hurrying the paper into the digital future. "If circulation is dropping," Svrluga explains, "and we're trying to figure out how people are going to get their news, who am I to say no to trying out new avenues?"
That's the story of the newspaper business right now. Alarmed by declining circulation, advertising and profits, America's newspaper publishers - as hidebound a collection of businesspeople as you can find - are thrashing about to see whether they can separate the news from the paper and still make money.
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(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
ping
Lets hope NOT!!!
Maybe you can try separating the pure liberal bias from the actual reporting and folks will read you again.
The ads and inserts get tossed and we never read further than the headlines. Except for the sports page in the "porcelain library" nothing else gets so much as a second of our time.
We have also found that local TV news has stories that we have already read, commented on and thoroughly dissected on FR three days before they air a 30 second newsbit.
Weather is interesting, but in Central Florida we had 351 days of sunshine last year, so variety is not the norm. Just a casual perusal of the weather for any and all tropical activity and if the chance of rain is 50% or higher, take the umbrella to the golf course (to cover the bag and clubs) or play in the AM.
Dinosaur Media, indeed. The local library archives for newspapers is the LeBrea Tar Pits of the 21st Century.
I will dance on the grave of the Washington Compost!
The internet is causing lots of change in the news business. They will either adapt or go out of business.
The article says how hundreds of newspapers have gone under since the 1940s, due largely to afternoon papers going under due to TV competition. The internet could put other papers out of business.
And certainly part of it is that people don’t want to be spoon fed liberalism.
I didn't see anywhere where an editor was inserted into the process to prevent falsehoods or just plain bad journalism. (like it's good now...)
-PJ
What can I do to make sure it dies and never gets up again?
It's the FR stooooopid! Byeeee!
It's the FR stooooopid! Byeeee!
everyday another article of a lib/dem newspaper circling the bowl....
one would think they would grasp the concept of reproting news not editorial opinions....who knows...people might just buy and read the papers again!!!
Who gives a damn?
Interesting that the article failed to mention all the WaPo staffers, including several of the paper’s stars who just quit and joined the Politico.com...hardly a vote of confidence for the future of the paper..in multimedia or any other form
here's looking at you WaPo...
In fairness, and honesty, the Post has the best Web site of any newspaper in the country. It’s well done, constantly updated, the chats with reporters, editors and the odd celeb are great, the “blogs” well done (mostly) and the comments sections are largely unedited for any political content.
They’ll find a way to make money with it, because they’re innovative and have a quality product. I can’t think of any other MSM outlet that’s close to them on the Web.
Great! Earlier today it was the NY Times and now the same symtoms and disease diagnosis for the Washed-up Post.
Let’s hope in becomes a horse race to the grave yard...the Times, Post, L.A. Times and all the usual suspects that have tried to hijack this country’s future
Even better, on the internet We the People can give feedback directly and immediately rather than the cherry picked, short, and likely heavily edited letter to the editor appearing a week or more later when most people have already made up their minds. Now we can confront their BS right on the spot, watering down it’s impact. Hey, they said that wanted Democracy. Be careful what you wish for I guess.
Buffett said declines in circulation result from readers turning to alternative sources , such as free Web sites and television. And he said owning the dominant news Web site in a region is not enough to guarantee sustained profitability for newspaper firms.to tout a neoauthoritarian strategy of trying to put the paste back into the tube with media monopoly restoration
As an example, he cited Buffalo, where Berkshire owns the Buffalo News and Buffalo.com, which he described as the most popular news Web site in the city. "We've got the best position, but it isn't remotely like owning the paper 30 years ago."
Buffett said buying newspapers was once an excellent investment because the dominant paper in any city could count on steady advertising revenue and could raise ad rates, often as much as it wanted, every year. With circulation dropping, that is no longer the case, Buffett said.
Buffett muses out loud: "The ideal combination would be if The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Post had a joint Web site, and you couldn't get any one individually. That, you could sell for a fair amount of money, and it would have one hell of a readership.Meanwhile USA Today's Chuck Raasch defends MSM opining that supposedly stellar MSM "cargo" outweighs monopoly ownership of information pipes in the politics of news.
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