6 ms·

I can't watch the video right now, but I do have a question: Why would we want to save the newspaper?

by kaens 18y ago

0x44 18y ago
A major demographic in the United States has a significant nostalgic attachment to newspapers as a vehicle for information and as a driver of the public discourse. Losing that could disenfranchise a group of people who still comprise a large portion of public opinion. More importantly, those views might not survive to be digitized if we don't soften the death spiral facing print media, so we all lose out - even if we don't consume archaic forms of information dissemination.
- CalmQuiet 18y ago
  Shall we similarly have sympathy for the "major demographic" has an attachment to MSIE-6.x... and protect them from needing to upgrade? Or is that an unfair comparison?
  - 0x44 18y ago
    I think that's an incorrect comparison, as IE6 does not directly or indirectly create content and the newspapers do.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    If you could go to a museum and view a five-hundred-year-old version of IE6, people might shed a lot more tears when the last copy was turned off. Newspapers are one of our oldest media. There's an entire infrastructure of mythology built around them that will be difficult to replace overnight. That's one reason why everyone finds it so easy to make glib generalizations like "the death of newspapers will herald a big increase in corruption". This isn't a rational statement. [1] It's a statement of religious faith, akin to the belief that atheists can't make moral judgements because they don't go to church on a regular basis. But, more charitably, and to return to your point: Yeah, we should have at least some sympathy for the people who don't know about Firefox, or can't use it for some reason. The prisoners of corporate IT are people, too. The people who can't understand their Windows box are people, too. And the folks who are losing their jobs in journalism and have no idea what to do next are in legitimate distress. --- [1] I mean, where's the controlled experiment? The last time a case of corruption happened in an era without newspapers was three hundred years ago. Unless you're a really well-read Latin student or a Renaissance historian, every case of corruption you've ever heard of happened in spite of the existence of newspapers. Of course, if you hand-pick the data you can prove any point you like. There have certainly been many heroic acts of journalism. But there have also been many shameful acts of journalism, and one hell of a lot of mediocrity. I'd wager that for every great investigative journalist there have been a hundred mindless stenographers, several dozen shameless toadies, and at least one William Randolph Hearst. And that's without even getting into Pravda or (pace Godwin) Joseph Goebbels.
    - mynameishere 18y ago
      When society is involved, controlled experiments are impossible. Take a look at the front page of a common "new media" blog: http://dailykos.com/ http://dailykos.com/ As of this moment, about 18 out of the 20 posts are using old media (almost always newspapers) as a source, with the bloggers' total contribution being opinion. Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. There's a serious void threatening there.
      - mechanical_fish 18y ago
        Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. But this is like arguing that, if Internet Explorer stopped working tomorrow, 90% of web users would be out of commission for years. Whereas, in fact, if IE stopped working tomorrow there would be a brief panic for a day or two until the world's techies, armed with handfuls of installation media for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, filled in the gap. After which things would continue much as before. (Except that many websites would be cheaper to build and would work better. But let's not get into that. ;) There would be several years of intense pain on the edges as various people and companies who have tied themselves too closely to the IE codebase scrambled to adapt to the new world. But in ten years nobody would even remember IE, just as few people today remember Lotus 1-2-3. Of course today's blogs depend on dead-tree reporters. Dead-tree reporting is available in abundance -- indeed, in many niches there is a massive surplus of it -- because it is subsidized by steady outside sources of revenue derived (in part) from monopolies on local advertising. It was hard to compete against that subsidy, while it lasted. But that subsidy is smaller now, and shrinking. [1] And we just don't know what happens next. --- [1] Though, in fact, I don't think it is gone. The death of print media may be greatly exaggerated. It's hard to tell the difference between an extinction-level event and an event that will reduce the population by a mere 85% when you're in the middle of it. And simple mismanagement has a lot to do with the newspapers' current plight.
    - knowtheory 18y ago
      To be honest, the newspapers of yore are already dead. I do have nostalgia and a sense of wonder for the industry that ran full page broadsheet political cartoons, or Little Nemo in Dreamland, but those orgs are already long gone. What's left are the dregs. They can't justify their existence, and so they're disappearing. Clay Shirky's piece on the nature of technological shift is particularly enlightening ( http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking... ).
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  While I enjoy my weekend newspaper, and feel that it far surpasses a good deal of the writing available in other mediums, to suggest a dead medium deserves some sort of protection even though it cannot survive on its own is basically counter to everything the free market stands for. If there is a market for the product, as you suggest their is, then let them pay to enjoy it. If not, so be it.
mynameishere 18y ago
Newspapers still do the bulk of the workaday journalism, which is the raw material of almost all "news" in TV and the internet. CNN will still be able to cover national topics in the future, but local stuff will go uncovered. I predict increased municipal corruption throughout.
- derefr 18y ago
  Newspapers themselves don't do journalism; newspaper journalists do. The journalists who write for newspapers will still exist, and still write what they write, if newspapers die out; their content will just be converted to, and paid for by, a different part of the media.
  - pclark 18y ago
    err... how will they be paid for?
    - mahmud 18y ago
      adsense, common sense!
    - knowtheory 18y ago
      Orgs like http://www.propublica.org/about/ http://www.propublica.org/about/ are funded privately by people or orgs who believe that there is a public interest in maintaining independent journalism. Orgs like http://www.npr.org/about/ http://www.npr.org/about/ are paid for by the public, using a distributed model. There are local stations that are paid for locally, who in turn help fund the umbrella organization of NPR. Likewise there are private individuals who have left endowments or other contributions to maintain NPRs independence. Journalism is alive and well. Corporate journalism is dying. And i can't say i'm hugely sorry. Sucks that the industry has crashed as opposed to transitioning, but i can't say that it wasn't at least in part their own fault.
    - run4yourlives 18y ago
      Like everything else: People who value the service will exchange money for that service.
pietro 18y ago
You would if you owned one. Why _we_ would want to, I have no clue.

I can't watch the video right now, but I do have a question: Why would we want to save the newspaper?

by kaens 18y ago

I can't watch the video right now, but I do have a question: Why would we want to save the newspaper?

0x44 18y ago

A major demographic in the United States has a significant nostalgic attachment to newspapers as a vehicle for information and as a driver of the public discourse. Losing that could disenfranchise a group of people who still comprise a large portion of public opinion. More importantly, those views might not survive to be digitized if we don't soften the death spiral facing print media, so we all lose out - even if we don't consume archaic forms of information dissemination.

CalmQuiet 18y ago
Shall we similarly have sympathy for the "major demographic" has an attachment to MSIE-6.x... and protect them from needing to upgrade? Or is that an unfair comparison?
- 0x44 18y ago
  I think that's an incorrect comparison, as IE6 does not directly or indirectly create content and the newspapers do.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  If you could go to a museum and view a five-hundred-year-old version of IE6, people might shed a lot more tears when the last copy was turned off. Newspapers are one of our oldest media. There's an entire infrastructure of mythology built around them that will be difficult to replace overnight. That's one reason why everyone finds it so easy to make glib generalizations like "the death of newspapers will herald a big increase in corruption". This isn't a rational statement. [1] It's a statement of religious faith, akin to the belief that atheists can't make moral judgements because they don't go to church on a regular basis. But, more charitably, and to return to your point: Yeah, we should have at least some sympathy for the people who don't know about Firefox, or can't use it for some reason. The prisoners of corporate IT are people, too. The people who can't understand their Windows box are people, too. And the folks who are losing their jobs in journalism and have no idea what to do next are in legitimate distress. --- [1] I mean, where's the controlled experiment? The last time a case of corruption happened in an era without newspapers was three hundred years ago. Unless you're a really well-read Latin student or a Renaissance historian, every case of corruption you've ever heard of happened in spite of the existence of newspapers. Of course, if you hand-pick the data you can prove any point you like. There have certainly been many heroic acts of journalism. But there have also been many shameful acts of journalism, and one hell of a lot of mediocrity. I'd wager that for every great investigative journalist there have been a hundred mindless stenographers, several dozen shameless toadies, and at least one William Randolph Hearst. And that's without even getting into Pravda or (pace Godwin) Joseph Goebbels.
  - mynameishere 18y ago
    When society is involved, controlled experiments are impossible. Take a look at the front page of a common "new media" blog: http://dailykos.com/ http://dailykos.com/ As of this moment, about 18 out of the 20 posts are using old media (almost always newspapers) as a source, with the bloggers' total contribution being opinion. Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. There's a serious void threatening there.
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. But this is like arguing that, if Internet Explorer stopped working tomorrow, 90% of web users would be out of commission for years. Whereas, in fact, if IE stopped working tomorrow there would be a brief panic for a day or two until the world's techies, armed with handfuls of installation media for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, filled in the gap. After which things would continue much as before. (Except that many websites would be cheaper to build and would work better. But let's not get into that. ;) There would be several years of intense pain on the edges as various people and companies who have tied themselves too closely to the IE codebase scrambled to adapt to the new world. But in ten years nobody would even remember IE, just as few people today remember Lotus 1-2-3. Of course today's blogs depend on dead-tree reporters. Dead-tree reporting is available in abundance -- indeed, in many niches there is a massive surplus of it -- because it is subsidized by steady outside sources of revenue derived (in part) from monopolies on local advertising. It was hard to compete against that subsidy, while it lasted. But that subsidy is smaller now, and shrinking. [1] And we just don't know what happens next. --- [1] Though, in fact, I don't think it is gone. The death of print media may be greatly exaggerated. It's hard to tell the difference between an extinction-level event and an event that will reduce the population by a mere 85% when you're in the middle of it. And simple mismanagement has a lot to do with the newspapers' current plight.
  - knowtheory 18y ago
    To be honest, the newspapers of yore are already dead. I do have nostalgia and a sense of wonder for the industry that ran full page broadsheet political cartoons, or Little Nemo in Dreamland, but those orgs are already long gone. What's left are the dregs. They can't justify their existence, and so they're disappearing. Clay Shirky's piece on the nature of technological shift is particularly enlightening ( http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking... ).
run4yourlives 18y ago
While I enjoy my weekend newspaper, and feel that it far surpasses a good deal of the writing available in other mediums, to suggest a dead medium deserves some sort of protection even though it cannot survive on its own is basically counter to everything the free market stands for. If there is a market for the product, as you suggest their is, then let them pay to enjoy it. If not, so be it.

mynameishere 18y ago

Newspapers still do the bulk of the workaday journalism, which is the raw material of almost all "news" in TV and the internet. CNN will still be able to cover national topics in the future, but local stuff will go uncovered. I predict increased municipal corruption throughout.

derefr 18y ago
Newspapers themselves don't do journalism; newspaper journalists do. The journalists who write for newspapers will still exist, and still write what they write, if newspapers die out; their content will just be converted to, and paid for by, a different part of the media.
- pclark 18y ago
  err... how will they be paid for?
  - mahmud 18y ago
    adsense, common sense!
  - knowtheory 18y ago
    Orgs like http://www.propublica.org/about/ http://www.propublica.org/about/ are funded privately by people or orgs who believe that there is a public interest in maintaining independent journalism. Orgs like http://www.npr.org/about/ http://www.npr.org/about/ are paid for by the public, using a distributed model. There are local stations that are paid for locally, who in turn help fund the umbrella organization of NPR. Likewise there are private individuals who have left endowments or other contributions to maintain NPRs independence. Journalism is alive and well. Corporate journalism is dying. And i can't say i'm hugely sorry. Sucks that the industry has crashed as opposed to transitioning, but i can't say that it wasn't at least in part their own fault.
  - run4yourlives 18y ago
    Like everything else: People who value the service will exchange money for that service.

pietro 18y ago

You would if you owned one. Why _we_ would want to, I have no clue.