newspapers

[jitahs]

It's 2013 - the world is a lot bigger than what's in the local/their particular schtick.

If one is looking for an insightful slant on anything search for the topic, read it whether it be in Russian or Arabic (Google Translate does he hard part), get outside your own skin.

The vast majority of the local rag's content is written by an intern, even from AP. Exhibit A - Asiana air crash.

PS no kidding Noonan.

[omnigrid]

100% digital.

I do not subscribe to any online content. I have not had a newspaper delivery in at least 8 years. The only actual paper I read is a local alt-weekly freebie that's actually quite good (their online presence needs more development). I am 33.

[omnigrid]

Yeah, dead on.

When I was a kid all the novels & movies about a grim future had the goverment restricting and censoring the press. Well the future has arrived and the exact opposite is true. There is so much press and information available that none of it matters. That, coupled with the fact that people simply don't care anymore, and may have gotten stupider.

The goverment is secretly monitoring your phone calls? This fact becomes common knowledge and basically no one cares.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Huxley vs Orwell | High Existence

[lukasz]

Orwell was describing his present. It just so happens that we're still living in the same era.

Also, this is a great NYT article re: Snowden, NSA, and the Guardian. Won't find articles like this in the SF Chronicle anymore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/ma...wden.html?_r=0

Read this (on paper!) when I was without internet yesterday. I think I'm going to open up my history classes with it this coming semester. The next 3 months will be spent discussing how we got there.

[theflashunc]

That's just it. It's not news seconds after the event. It's still gossip. It's limited, subjective, containing a kernel of truth, perhaps more, but nothing to give a rational person enough information to act intelligently upon.

Tell that to Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones, in a dog fight to get news to their investor clients as fast as possible.

At the wire we were constantly measured by how quickly we got news out, even with a tenth of a second considered a victory.

[lukasz]

Britain Detains The Partner Of a Reporter Tied to Leaks

[Jaq]

Tell that to Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones, in a dog fight to get news to their investor clients as fast as possible.

At the wire we were constantly measured by how quickly we got news out, even with a tenth of a second considered a victory.

Fair enough - but those investor clients are highly specialized consumers of news, with the instincts honed by training that give them an ability to use this news as news and make corresponding decisions - decisions that one assumes (judging by the source of the news) to be almost exclusively financial in nature. As valid as that example is, it would seem incredibly rarefied.

Beyond that, the example doesn't contradict my muddled claim - that early news isn't "news" so much as unfiltered "gossip" - but buttresses the idea that, especially in our internet age, there is only first place; anything after that is dead last. Information-mongers can't afford to wait for the dust to settle, because consumers want gossip, want to be in the moment, want the raw feed rather than the rational examination - that's the stuff of Sunday morning talk shows.

I can't imagine the pressure of working in a modern newsroom. The only thing that would keep me from having ulcers is the stroke that'd hit me first.

[zetroc]

Orwell was describing his present. It just so happens that we're still living in the same era.



Read this (on paper!) when I was without internet yesterday. I think I'm going to open up my history classes with it this coming semester. The next 3 months will be spent discussing how we got there.

The plot thickens - David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald, has been detained at an airport in Germany and had materials confiscated. A chilling effect on journalism. Partner of reporter at center of NSA leak detained - SFGate

[sk_tle]

We went from daily to weekend about 5 years ago and dropped it completely 3 years ago. As the business model of running and selling papers has changed, the Orlando Sentinel has responded by having less real journalism. They are dead to me. I get my news online now. I'd consider paying, but so far haven't felt a need, though I do support NPR. I'm 43.

Same sort of experience here.

[davids]

Those of you who don't pay for journalism: You are going to get exactly what you pay for. You think a bunch of bloggers on social media are doing journalism? God help us...

I'm 52 and I value good journalism - the product of fact-collection, analysis, good writing, careful editing - and I pay for it. My household has digital subscriptions to both the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I read them both daily. The NYT has managed, so far (and with occasional, spectacular lapses), to maintain the high standards I value. The Globe is faltering, but after I dropped my subscription for a couple years I found I was missing a big chunk of information and analysis on what is happening in my community. I am hoping my few dollars a month will help them sustain. Whenever I get too critical of The Globe's quality, I visit another city and am horrified at the hollowed-out husks I see on the newstands there (Chicago and DC are still exceptions.)

(as an aside... The NYT digital pricing model is silly - My Sunday home delivery subscription gets me 24/7 digital access for less than a digital only subscription. We give our paper to the neighbors so it won't go to waste. Who over there is paying attention to this stuff?)

I have a lot of friends in the business - The Globe; The Times; Bloomburg; and the Sun-Times. The people I know are professionals who care deeply about what they do. They're scared and discouraged but they keep showing up, keep doing the reporting, thinking, writing, and drawing that they believe matters. I just hope we all value it enough to throw them a couple of bucks for their effort. Otherwise we'll be stuck with TV "news" and angry bloggers with agendas.

[Dallas Tex]

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Huxley vs Orwell | High Existence

Wow, that was fantastic.

Thanks for posting this.

Folks should realize. The papers didn't fail. The people that made up the readership failed.

[jitahs]

Quartz.

[Jaq]

All might not be lost. The city of Long Beach (CA) got a second newspaper today. The Long Beach Register. First time a major city's gotten a second newspaper since... forever.

[EricKeller]

we get the local paper on weekends. Sometimes they deliver all week. They always give us the paper on holidays too. I have come to infer that this is because their circulation manager was burglarizing houses (now in jail, but the policy lives on) and wanted people to have to cancel when they weren't going to be home. You can't make this sort of thing up. One of my wife's co-workers was burglarized by the circulation manager. They should have broken the Sandusky story, but it took some little paper from a small town near Harrisburg to do that. Pretty typical of their competence.

Unfortunately, the national papers seldom commit the crime of actual jornalism, preferring to pass on the company line from "sources" I learned during the Watergate scandal that you could often read conflicting stories on the same page of the same paper. I really don't see anything wrong with it, it's better to have more information than for them to worry about every last story being right.