Quoted
“I confess that I don’t spend as much time as I used to reading the newspaper — any newspaper. I’m making a promise to myself, and now to you, to reverse this trend. The future of journalism, not just newspapers, depends upon such loyalty. And now I pose this challenge to you: It is your duty as a journalist and a citizen to read the newspaper — emphasis on paper, not pixels.”
– Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, plays the guilt card in an effort to keep circulation numbers up
Roy Peter Clark has it backwards. The newspapers are so bad now that the fewer people who read them the easier it will be to regain credibility when the Political Correctness disease abates. At this time the newspapers simply don’t have much news in the sense of stories or opinions that educate or surprise. When was the last positive article on George Bush, the Iraq war, Israel young males or fathers? When was the last negative article on Hilary Clinton, Arab Terrorists,young women, mothers or the media? At this time I can predict the headlines and the main point of any story given the author or the publication. Why do the newspapers exist? If I wanted bull chips I would go to a feedlot and if I wanted my intelligence insulted I would call my ex wife.
Does anyone here remember when the paper, the presses, the type and the ink for what we refer here to as ‘newspapers’ or ‘journals’, the foundation, in theory, of ‘journalism’ - Does anyone recall when all of these comodities were required by law to be purchased through the ‘crown’ ?
Now stop and ponder that for a moment before you go on, And I do implore you to go on with this conversation, As if your future, and mine, depended on it.
Huh?
My family subscribes to the Mercury News. When they start putting news on Page 1A instead of Barry Bonds or the endless stream of Hollywood slobs, I’ll probably start reading it again. I know I’ll do the search for the comics when they put the ones I used to read back in. I might even read the business pages again if only they’d remember to ink the presses they use for the stock reports. What ever happened to news from our neighbors to the north? There’s too much about next year’s presidential campaign and not enough about what they’re doing to merit the job. Sorry, Mercury News, you can’t cut back and outsource any more. You need to start delivering a REAL newspaper with REAL news.
“plays the guilt card”? More like the “idiot” card.
It’s time consuming enough trying to find relevant material online, trying to find it in print is a colossal waste of time, not to mention money, trees, energy…
The solution to “saving journalism” is to provide accurate, interesting, useful material that is easy to find and use. No one is interested wasting their most precious commodity (time) wading thru tons of BS and advertising in order to find the occasional story of marginal value.
I am continually amazed at the low quality of journalism (online & print). This isn’t rocket science, can’t someone hire management with a clue in technology, journalism, marketing, and sales (in that order)?
Someday newspapers will all be totally digital. It is just a question of when, not if! The cost of paper, ink, printing, distribution and even recycling after use make this absolutely inevitable. We may not all like every change that time and technology bring, but they are coming nevertheless. When our old VCR broke down last month I discovered that it was impossible to replace it with a new one, VCRs as such are no longer manufactured. Vinyl records, new movie releases on VHS, 8-track tapes, and one day soon newspapers and magazines on paper, nothing lasts forever.
If there is some news out there, I can get the relevant 4-20 articles online, from England, Australia, Mexico, Croatia..in 2 or 3 minutes. If I want to buy something this weekend, or at 2:00 am, I can go to buy.com and see it at 273 stores, and have fedex bring me the cheapest one. If I want to find a job, I just check over my e-mail. Newspapers, delivered to your door, are already extinct; they just don’t know it.
Don’t forget that the people who do most of the actual reporting are still in the newspapers/ news anchor business. In other words the people who go to Sudan to investigations on the genocide going on there are NOT the same people who run online only news sites.
There might be some who do, but by far most of it gets done by much larger groups/organizations that have the money to hire investigating journalist who are willing to risk their lives for the news. If it was not for the journalist from T.V. and newspapers and organizations like the A.P. where most of these online news sites get their information from?
One more thing most doesn’t realize. What newspapers like the New York Times reports on usually gets picked on by T.V. News and Online News.
We are reading newspapers…just not the tree versions…online articles are the way to go komrades…u can link off highlighted words…on the NY Times articles everyword has a def that pops up when u click on the word…and the def is how it is used in that particular sentence…no the treeversion paper is as dead as the milkman, the iceman, and the old fashion department store…sorry but I started reading online in 97 and never looked back…examples: I get the NY Times in my inbox @ 4:00 am…in the old days here where I live not till aboot 8:00 am etc…also online papers give u so much more info up-to-real-time…not what went to press somewheres around midnight or sometimes much earlier…
When newspapers make their first priority to actually report real news in an objective manner, they’ll make a comeback. Until then, they’ll keep declining as they drive away their readership by their increasing group-think and echo chamber mentality.
For whatever reason, the print media today seem very concerned with a certain political agenda, to the point where if a newspaper says that the Sun rose in the east you feel compelled to check other sources to make sure.
The news business got out of the news business in the 1990s. When was the last time you saw a network television “Christmas card”, that old fashioned montage of news reporters affiliated with the network around the world? Well, the networks don’t have affiliates around the world anymore. In fact, they, and the newspapers, barely cover anything outside the US anymore.
The print news business is no better. Most newspapers were terrible for anything other than local news. The handful of good ones, the NYTimes, WashPost, LATimes, have been cutting back on national and international reporting since the 1980s. The political coverage seems to have been subcontracted to People magazine. It’s all personal profiles and “How do you think your new movie, I mean campaign, is going to turn out?” Throw in our still fresh memories of the coverage leading to Bush’s War in Iraq, and we are all wondering why we need newspapers and news shows when the White House has a web site.
The good newspapers used to actually run articles on politician’s positions, what they intended to do and how they intended to do it. The reporters would actually do some research and compare versions of planned legislation. They’d look things up to see how the new plans compared with the old ones, and how these things worked historically. I haven’t seen that kind of coverage in ages. Even Spy Magazine, with its weird tabular articles, did a better job of presenting the news. Of course they can’t do this kind of thing nowadays; they fired everybody in the newsroom.
The newspapers have been their own worst enemy.