gone

[ironymaiden]

one can go on about newsprint being obsolete, but it doesn't change the fact that something ended today.









edited to add: King County Deaths

Comments

[craftyasparagus.livejournal.com]

I couldn't have said it better. :(

[lala67.livejournal.com]

a bummer. I've been hearing about this for the past couple days all the way on this side of the continent and it's still sad.

[varina8.livejournal.com]

The snapshot says it all.

Even made the news up here

[andrew-the-oga.livejournal.com]

Even made the news here in Edmonton. Sad when these things happen.

[buhrger]

i totally grok what shirky says about newspaper business models, but this still feels sad.

did you guys subscribe?

[ironymaiden]

we did when we first moved here. but we found handling the pile of waste paper a little too much in that little apartment - and we weren't reading about half of it and never would :/ which reminds me of how i described an RSS reader for work - create a sort of newspaper with only the articles you like to read.
the saddest thing for me is that the Times should have gone first. while the Times is owned by a local family, it's also more conservative and less scrappy. i always liked the P-I's reporting better and i thought that having Hearst behind it would keep it afloat. not so much.

[buhrger]

we found handling the pile of waste paper a little too much
that's the main reason i consider cancelling my subscription. (it's not even the newspapers themselves, as we pass those on to dad to read. it's the frelling mountains of ad flyers.)

how i described an RSS reader for work - create a sort of newspaper with only the articles you like to read
exactly. two decades ago, SF promised us custom newspapers including the news you wanted to read. now they're here, they just don't use paper.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

The line in there about "we don't need newspapers, but we need journalism" is a good one.

The thing is, newspapers have never been in the business of selling news. They sold advertising, and used news as a tease to get readers to subscribe to the advertising.

I saw Frank Blethen on television the other night, and he said that when Craigslist expanded into Seattle, the Seattle Times lost most of its classifieds. Now that the economic slump has clobbered real estate and car advertising, it's lost a lot of its other advertising too. Although he didn't admit it on television, he knows that his paper is doomed if he doesn't figure out a way to fix it. What he probably doesn't even admit to himself is that he's not going to find a way to fix it.

As I see it, the most likely saviors of journalism are editorially-interested institutions and individuals. Suppose the Republican party decides it would benefit from investigative reporting to keep Democrats honest: one way it could do that is to convince some deep-pocketed Republican to create a non-profit right-wing newspaper. One might say that Fox News already does that job. But it doesn't – it's a for-profit organization, and when making money for Rupert Murdoch comes into conflict with its journalism (slanted though it is), money wins. To be viable in the long term, they need some billionaire (maybe Murdoch, when he kicks the bucket) to leave a pile of money to a foundation that's meant to promote a conservative agenda, like right wing think tanks, except that it's an agenda-based journalism organization, rather than an agenda-based academic organization.

I use the example of a newspaper with a right-wing agenda, but the same would apply to one with a left-wing agenda. It might even apply to a newspaper with a balanced agenda, but coming up with donors for such a foundation might be more difficult than one with a slanted agenda.

[buhrger]

one way it could do that is to convince some deep-pocketed Republican to create a non-profit right-wing newspaper
to which i think shirky's question would be: why does it have to be a newspaper?

[e-bourne.livejournal.com]

A death is always sad.

Whatever things will be like in a few years, they will be different in ways we can't see yet.

Awesome link from Shirky.

[buhrger]

shirky's da man