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Less because the "publishable" population has gone from a few to almost anybody. A smartphone is a personal publisher-editor-printer-distributor. We do not hav

Less because the "publishable" population has gone from a few to almost anybody. A smartphone is a personal publisher-editor-printer-distributor. We do not have to rely on the newspaper to be the 1st ordinal of "news" I can be a news seeker much easier now Newspapers are important just less so than in 1976, say

FussyZeus 10y ago
That's a nice thought but the majority of what "anybody" posts is mindless nonsense with the added benefit of not even pretending they're trying to be informative. It's like how cell phones put a camera in everyone's pocket so now when we have natural disasters or a 10 car pileup we get photos, but about 3/4 are idiotic selfies.
- losteverything 10y ago
  I wonder if we will ever grow out of that, now that cameras are everywhere. The sense we have to capture news. I grew up wanting to be the next (accidental) Abraham Zapruder.(0) to be the source, the Deep Throat so to speak, of something so important -to be validated by the news. (0) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kq1PbgeBoQ4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kq1PbgeBoQ4
abakker 10y ago
I'm sorry, but I can't disagree more. Newspapers are far from being a distribution channel, and to think of them that way is as reductive as thinking of social networks as address books. Newspapers are organizations that are first and foremost investigative, backed up by quality control, editorial, and research organizations. If you replace this with a smartphone and shift the delivery model out from a newspaper, then the role of being a fact-checker, editor, researcher, and expert falls on the reader. This is a bad idea, not only because it creates more work for the reader, but also because it increase the extent to which personal bias of the readership can increase the incorrect interpretation of facts. Obviously, no newspaper is a perfect example of this ideal, but they are a great deal further along the curve than almost any individual. As a result, they act as a force against filter bubbles by promoting a whole set of stories and ideas that force people to participate more broadly with real world events and ideas. The mere fact that we worry so much about editorial bias in newspapers is a symptom of the importance that they play in guiding their consumers. The solution is not self-guidance and self-filtering and self research in order to wade through a sea of unqualified, unedited BS. Furthermore, by being a news seeker, you are admitting that you are still seeking to know what is out there? Is there a particular reason you do not want to consume news through a qualified source? If you want to read the panama papers by yourself then you will likely do that to exclusion of all other reading for a period of days to weeks, and you will need to spend twice that doing research to understand what it means. If you go through a newspaper, they do that work for you. Newspapers are not broken in any fundamental way. The only reason that this discussion is even happening is that news was traditionally funded by advertising, and that advertising is a shifting business, dragging news along with it. Discussions that center on the decline of newspapers without acknowledging that the shift in advertising revenue is really the problem ignores something very important: that the business of generating news is not at fault, the business of paying for it is. That is the real discussion worth having.
- losteverything 10y ago
  Beautifully said!! wish I wasn't working to comment more. Newspapers aren't just about news. I may choose to consume one investigative report every quarter, say, and am grateful there's a qualified source . Weather travel planning, for sale, advertisements, and government notifications I no longer need a newspaper to get. We used to buy the Sunday Times just for the Travel section to look at advertisements. We're better off now that we have the internet to find deals

FussyZeus 10y ago

That's a nice thought but the majority of what "anybody" posts is mindless nonsense with the added benefit of not even pretending they're trying to be informative. It's like how cell phones put a camera in everyone's pocket so now when we have natural disasters or a 10 car pileup we get photos, but about 3/4 are idiotic selfies.

losteverything 10y ago
I wonder if we will ever grow out of that, now that cameras are everywhere. The sense we have to capture news. I grew up wanting to be the next (accidental) Abraham Zapruder.(0) to be the source, the Deep Throat so to speak, of something so important -to be validated by the news. (0) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kq1PbgeBoQ4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kq1PbgeBoQ4

abakker 10y ago

I'm sorry, but I can't disagree more. Newspapers are far from being a distribution channel, and to think of them that way is as reductive as thinking of social networks as address books. Newspapers are organizations that are first and foremost investigative, backed up by quality control, editorial, and research organizations. If you replace this with a smartphone and shift the delivery model out from a newspaper, then the role of being a fact-checker, editor, researcher, and expert falls on the reader. This is a bad idea, not only because it creates more work for the reader, but also because it increase the extent to which personal bias of the readership can increase the incorrect interpretation of facts. Obviously, no newspaper is a perfect example of this ideal, but they are a great deal further along the curve than almost any individual. As a result, they act as a force against filter bubbles by promoting a whole set of stories and ideas that force people to participate more broadly with real world events and ideas. The mere fact that we worry so much about editorial bias in newspapers is a symptom of the importance that they play in guiding their consumers. The solution is not self-guidance and self-filtering and self research in order to wade through a sea of unqualified, unedited BS. Furthermore, by being a news seeker, you are admitting that you are still seeking to know what is out there? Is there a particular reason you do not want to consume news through a qualified source? If you want to read the panama papers by yourself then you will likely do that to exclusion of all other reading for a period of days to weeks, and you will need to spend twice that doing research to understand what it means. If you go through a newspaper, they do that work for you. Newspapers are not broken in any fundamental way. The only reason that this discussion is even happening is that news was traditionally funded by advertising, and that advertising is a shifting business, dragging news along with it. Discussions that center on the decline of newspapers without acknowledging that the shift in advertising revenue is really the problem ignores something very important: that the business of generating news is not at fault, the business of paying for it is. That is the real discussion worth having.

losteverything 10y ago
Beautifully said!! wish I wasn't working to comment more. Newspapers aren't just about news. I may choose to consume one investigative report every quarter, say, and am grateful there's a qualified source . Weather travel planning, for sale, advertisements, and government notifications I no longer need a newspaper to get. We used to buy the Sunday Times just for the Travel section to look at advertisements. We're better off now that we have the internet to find deals