Another one bites the dust, as the dailies fall one by one.
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I turned 50 in 2007, so I'm practicing curmudgeon-like behavior by stressing, "whatever it is, I'm agin' it!" Call me anarcho-syndicalist or progressive, except I think most anarchists and progressives are as annoying as neocons. I like to point folks to way-outside-the-mainstream literature and music, while grumbling about everything else.
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About Me
- Loring Wirbel
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- Born and raised in Grand Ledge, Mich., lived throughout the southwest, been in the evango-military center of Colorado Springs for 16 years.
10 comments:
We'll look back at this one day with our pocket sized computers and Kindles and say . . . what will we say?
If it was only printed daily newspapers that were endangered, we'd say "No more dead trees! Hooray!" That's not what's broken. The newsgathering function being underwritten through advertising is broken. Online news sources are going down in flames. And if there's not a vetted source that confirms what is going on, you can have 20 bloggers denouncing Ethiopia's policy in Somalia, but no one being paid to be on the ground telling you what is going on in Somalia.
And like Brian Fuller keeps reiterating in his Greeley's Ghost blog, that doesn't get replaced by blogs and gossip sites. There needs to be some new economic model to justify a news and information function, but I'm afraid all the old sources will be dead before anyone figures out what that new thing is. We had to destroy the village in order to save it.
I think the HuffPost is the future of newspaper journalism. Ariana's expanded way beyond the left wing political blog she started to include sports, entertainment, business, lifestyle and other sections; they're even rolling out city-specific editions. She also sells a lot of online ads, which--considering that almost all of the content is either aggregated or contributed for free--pays the bills for her small staff. While it's a private company, according to Forbes the HuffPost is making good money and even thinking of going public.
While it wouldn't be easy to replicate this business model--there's a finite supply of people worth reading who are willing to write for free--this certainly seems like a viable business model. But expanding it offshore will take some doing. And getting qualified people to report on Darfur is a real reach.
I think the HuffPost is the future of newspaper journalism. Ariana's expanded way beyond the left wing political blog she started to include sports, entertainment, business, lifestyle and other sections; they're even rolling out city-specific editions. She also sells a lot of online ads, which--considering that almost all of the content is either aggregated or contributed for free--pays the bills for her small staff. While it's a private company, according to Forbes the HuffPost is making good money and even thinking of going public.
While it wouldn't be easy to replicate this business model--there's a finite supply of people worth reading who are willing to write for free--this certainly seems like a viable business model.
Still, it remains to be seen if the HuffPost can scale to the point where it can cover overseas events. If they start paying for coverage, then there are a lot of good freelancers out there who might sign on. Some of the best Vietnam war correspondents started out as freelancers.
Huff is part of those new breed of hybrid news-blogs, and sometimes their quality is good enough to become a news source on their own. Still feel there's something "crunchier" missing.
I see the HuffPost is now loaded with ads for Examiner.com (http://www.examiner.com), which is another online newspaper, this one with dozens of city-specific editions, all well supported by local ads. These guys are well worth a look. Stock it up with laid off journalists from the Rocky, the Chicago Trib and other MSM papers, and you've got a first-class successor to dead trees.
I see the HuffPost is now loaded with ads for Examiner.com (http://www.examiner.com), which is another online newspaper, this one with dozens of city-specific editions. These guys are well worth a look. Stock it up with laid off journalists from the Rocky, the Chicago Trib and other MSM papers, and you've got a first-class successor to dead trees.
I agree about the missing crunchiness. And there is a bit too much pop culture "Beyonce's bared nipple at the Oscars" stuff for me, although I do enjoy some Palin gossip now and then.
Last night I read an excellent interview in The Sun (current issue, not online yet) with Nicholas Carr on this very subject. He said something similar to you in your comment response to me.
He also discussed, and I agree, how we use our brains differently when we're online from when we read print. As in the book iBrain where one group of non-Internet users went online, and another group of Internet users went online, and they monitored brain waves. The non-users at the start used the thinking part of their brain that is used in reading books. The users used the part of their brain for decisions. He said we would eventually become big flat pancakes with tons of information but losing the deeper thought processes required for focusing on reading, say, a novel.
I was mistaken, the Sun interview with Carr is online.
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