Posted on 05/12/2009 6:44:38 AM PDT by abb
What would life without newspapers be like?
I avoid making predictions, because very few of my predictions have ever come true. I prefer, instead, to peer down the other end of the telescope, into the past, to inform my sense of what's to come. So when I consider the dead and dying newspapers of our time, and the post-newspaper world everybody is predicting, I can't help but think of the 114-day New York newspaper strike of 1962-63.
The strike (over wages and work rules), and the ensuing publishers' lockout, eliminated the circulation of 5.7 million daily and 7.2 million Sunday newspaper copies. That's a staggering number, considering that the greater New York circulation of the three major dailies still publishing—the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post—stands at about 1.6 million.
No conversation about newspapers' dismal present is complete without some anguished mention of how democracy will go off the rails unless the press is there to set it straight. (See last week's Senate hearings, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., for an example.) But even though the 1962-63 strike upended New York, neither the dozen newspaper accounts I've read about the strike nor the histories or memoirs from the era that I've pulled down from my shelf make it sound as though democracy and governance disappeared when the New York dailies' lights went out.
Instead, journalists and publishers improvised, and readers, parched for news, features, entertainment, and advertising, experimented with finding new sources. Giving up the daily newspaper habit proved easy for many New Yorkers, Gay Talese writes in his book The Kingdom and the Power: They "watched more television, or read more news magazines more thoroughly, or books, or discovered that New York seemed a more normal and placid place...
snip
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
ping
What’s a newspaper?
http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/
Newspapers: There is No Magic Bullet
I was in college in New York in that period. Before the strike I used to read ALL of the Sunday papers, the Times, the Herald Tribune, the World Telegram and Sun, the Journal American, the News, the Mirror, the (Saturday) Post, sometimes the old Newark News. Being a news junkie I read them all the way through. A golden age in newspapering.
BWWWHAAAA!!!
Yea.
"...who are too stuck in their roles to reimagine the world."
Well a toilet plunger of celestial proportions seems to have unstuck em this time, but good.
The plunging superforce is moving 'em all along down the drain of life. :^)
Yes. But the thing to remember is you still got to read only what they wanted you to read, for whatever reason.
Today, via the WWW, there is more information of all types more available to more people more widely than any time in the history of mankind. And it will only get better.
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1042103.html
What readers want vs. what they need
Life after liberal rags will be very nice indeed!
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/issues_ideas/story/1039244.html
At stake: The future of getting news to Americans
What the Sunday papers carry that will be missed are the comics. I have been reading them for some 60+ years. My grandchildren also like them. We read them over again and again (to teach them how to read).
Obviously, you don’t have a parakeet.
“No conversation about newspapers’ dismal present is complete without some anguished mention of how democracy will go off the rails unless the press is there to set it straight.”
Does anyone still think newspapers are democracy’s watchdog? Ha! What an absolute crock. They are the cheerleaders of derailed democracy.
I agree. Plus, I don’t want to wrap up my pretties in expensive papaer or plastic air bubble paper that I have to buy from the store. I think if these papers weren’t so damn liberal they would survive. Oh well.
That time frame was right in the middle of Camelot. I’m sure had they not been on strike, the papers would have been filled with Kennedy worship similar to the daily Obasms they now write.
...Birds hardest hit.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=163508
MediaNews execs: We’ll no longer give away all our print content to web users
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.