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10-07-2010, 11:01 AM | #1 (permalink) | |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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the sinking of the chicago tribune and other sad tales about newspapers and politics
i decided to post the whole of a rather long ny times article here. it's about the implosion of the chicago tribune. i find it kind of interesting to speculate about what the meaning(s) might be behind it's appearance in a competitor newspaper. no matter, i suppose.
i think the "bankrupt culture" or culture of bankruptcy (take your pick) is described in a way that makes of this rather sad situation something more than an isolated factoid.... read on. we'll waiting for you at the bottom. Quote:
hello again. that was a long drop, wasn't it? so... first off this is obviously a piece about the ongoing problems that newspapers are confronting as media (rather that Newspaper confronts as a Medium...but that sounds funny). crunched by the net on the one side and the 24/7 cable streams of one-dimensional idiocy, newspapers across the board find themselves with disappearing advertisers, dropping circulations and precious little in the way of obvious alternatives. personally, if this were to affect rags like usa today or the washington times, i wouldn't care. but the tribune was once a good paper. and good newspapers have an important role to perform in the civic lives of cities in particular. it's the disappearance of the medium and its effects on civic life that make of this a political matter, it seems to me. but what are the alternatives? if you look at newspaper publisher/publishing organization websites, there's all kinds of stuff about "monetizing" the web. but nothing seems to quite work, not even the limitations on non-paying access/subscription model. there's eulogies proffered here and there for reading and how passé it is in the brave new-ish world of monitors and memes. but i dunno. this seems to me yet another area where a government industrial policy on the japanese model might be useful. less a "bailout" than a use of federal monies that would enable newspapers to buy themselves time away from bankruptcy specialists to explore alternatives....or maybe newspapers could be defined as important enough to civic life that they should be state-funded at least to some extent... what do you think? b) another dimension of this article has to do with the culture imposed on the tribune by the yahoos who now run the show there. if this portrait is accurate (i have no reason to doubt that it is...) then these people remind me a bit of the people in i-banks and insurance houses who award themselves vast bonuses as the ship they are piloting sinks at speed. do you think the behavior of these people indicative of general tendencies? what do you make of it? it's almost like there's some kind of millennarian thing happening--the world's gonna end soon anyway so let's plunder what we can get and screw everyone and everything else....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
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10-07-2010, 11:21 AM | #2 (permalink) |
warrior bodhisattva
Super Moderator
Location: East-central Canada
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There is some parallel between the issue with newspapers and the issue with books, of which I play a part as an editor for a small press in Canada.
One way to look at it is that the digital age has shifted our perceptions of certain cultural products, namely, music, news media, books, magazines, and the like. What this has meant is a shift from a physical-oriented product to a more content-oriented product. The music industry was the first to experience this shift, so it helps to look at that. For example, one of the best initial shifts in mindset is to get it out of your head that you're in the business of selling pressed plastic discs, folded newsprint, paperbound books, etc. What you're selling is content. So the music industry learned and is learning how to "monetize," as you mentioned, certain things such as the Web and the culture surrounding music. So with music you get new revenue streams such as digital downloads of mp3s and ring tones, new models surrounding performances and other media, etc. With books you get new revenue streams via e-books. Libraries, for example, are snatching up digital products like crazy, and e-book readers are finally hitting the mainstream. But there is still a lot of work to be done. In some ways we're just behind newspapers, who are struggling with the models you've mentioned: how to monetize the Web via ads or subscription models. It's messy. But I think the whole deal needs to come back to the idea of content and how to monetize it. Book publishers aren't producers of books, they're producers of book-length textual content, so newspapers companies aren't producers of newspapers, they're producers of news content. The focus needs to remain on the quality of the content. There needs to be a market and the market needs to be served. If this means diversifying or focusing, then do it. The Globe and Mail recently invested in newfangled, multimillion-dollar German printers to come up with a full-color, mixed glossy/matte product on overall higher-quality paper. It's reorganizing its content, mixing it up with info and editorial. They're emphasizing the quality of journalism and the overall experience of delivering what readers want. Of course, they also revamped their online presence too. And the Globe's circulation has actually been increasing lately. It's about knowing your market and giving it what it wants. I think there are still enough people out there who want quality journalism—actual journalism. It's too bad the Chicago Tribune didn't make the transition to the newer models.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot Last edited by Baraka_Guru; 10-07-2010 at 11:24 AM.. |
10-07-2010, 12:11 PM | #3 (permalink) | |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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the ny times piece makes it sound as if the crew that zell brought in with him had neither the interest in transforming the tribune nor the competence to do it. what they appear to have done instead was basically treat the paper as so much investment portfolio meat and in the process fuck over about 10,000 employees by giving them worthless bonds. part of this seems to me to follow from something that's enabled by (or of a piece with--it's hard to say) shift you perform (which i agree with and think interesting)
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the correlate is in the the notion of "content"---which entails a sense of interchangeability--from which it could plausibly follow that it made sense to bring in a bunch of people who worked for clear channel in the production of "radio content" and set them into motion producing "informational content" in a newspaper context. but the article says, basically a) that these people are idiots. (proof--absence of decorum. inability to recognize social norms. demonstration: sexual harrassment suits at clear channel. allegations of harrassment and impropriety in general at the tribune. the rewriting of the employee manual in order to accomidate their flinstone notion that harrassment is part of some "non-linearity" that's "central to the creative process") and b) were seemingly not interested in transitioning the tribune into anything. they were, however, interested in paying themselves giant bonuses. so what it looks like is that zell is a bankruptcy guy, really. one of those venture-capitalist vampires. the kiss of death for a foundering firm, like a buzzard that circles overhead at the end. which means that the particular problem with the tribune is both everything you say, baraka, and particular to the tribune---but in a particular way, one that looks a whole lot like other aspects of contemporary end-game fading empire capitalism. more later perhaps. working. interested in more input tho.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 10-07-2010 at 12:19 PM.. |
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10-11-2010, 11:01 AM | #4 (permalink) | ||
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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these from today's guardian:
Quote:
and this: Quote:
nothing like this has yet happened in the united states. perhaps we've already passed a "berlusconi moment".... working...more on this later. what do you think?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
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10-11-2010, 08:19 PM | #5 (permalink) |
Junkie
Location: Fort Worth, TX
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The cat's out of the bag. No one I know my age reads newspapers that aren't already available for free, and no one will pay subscriptions to re-read press releases with 0 research done by the "author" at the newspaper.
The only way is to break down the massive infrastructures and decentralize. A news agency which provides free, in-depth coverage online can easily gain the market share where it's currently divided 1,000 different ways. Decentralized semi-professionals working from a home computer, spread around the various cities of the US all feeding news to a small office of a half-dozen editors is the only way I see it working. It must be fast-acting, efficient, and low cost. Unfortunately the days where Newspaper was the most respected news source disappeared back when the news was a 5min segment on the 5-Cent movies. Now they get it effectively on demand and for free, why spend the $1.25 to shift through 9 pages of coupons and irrelevant adds?
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"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas |
10-12-2010, 03:49 AM | #6 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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there's two or three different things there, seaver...
1. the expectation that's been created via the net that information is free. personally i am all for that in principle. in fact too, really. this is the problem that most newspapers and newspaper publishing organizations place at the center of their seemingly endless discussions about how to "monetize" the web. 2. problems within the existing newspaper model. i like newspapers. i should say that i like more what newspapers were before employing researchers and writers became an externality, so before wire services became ubiquitous in the ways they are now, so before so much information was the same information--factoid format, no context or research, no critical perspective. infotainment. press releases reprinted as news because it's cheaper. but this is a delegitimation from within, as a function of the marketization of newspapers. it seems to me that the web is only an aspect of this. 3. i understand the logic of moving into a blog model, but it seems to me the consequences of that are not good at all. total parochialization. loss of common reference-points, so a fragmentation of baseline culture. more bothersome, an amateurization of journalism. what are the consequences of the erasure of journalists as professionals? to what extent is the blog model itself enabled fundamentally by the existence of these professional sources of information? another way: who vets blog information? there's an obvious lack of transparency in the form that is not in any way compensated for my it's immediacy (push a button and it's up). if in the present newspaper model there's already a problem of wire-service infotainment and press releases bouncing around in a hall of mirrors....it seems to me that this kind of decentralization would only make that worse. thinking about this, though. when you think about a more amateur-based blog-oriented journalism, what do you think of that enables you to see positive possibilities? i know of some very good blogs, but they're more academic or more art/design oriented. what about more journalistic ones? are there emerging forms that are past blogs, that may supplant newspapers but which aren't mutant tv forms? or is this a problem for print media as the primary medium for information relay. or is it a problem for paper media as the vehicles for print? (the web is print)...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
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chicago, newspapers, politics, sad, sinking, tales, tribune |
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