Comments on: Late to the funeral

By: Thomas Nephew

Thomas Nephew — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:30:38 +0000

Jan, Robert — I suppose I also forget what it’s like to have a newspaper around that I’m fond or proud of. I remember sort of rolling my eyes about the “Comical” back in the 80s and 90s, but take your word for it that it’s been doing a good job lately. Don’t know much about the Atlanta paper other than it’s huge, but I’m sure you’d miss it, and I shouldn’t have shortshrifted that.

By: Thomas Nephew

Thomas Nephew — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:56:21 +0000

I don’t deny reporting is valuable, or that I link to it. (Even where I do, it’s not provided free of charge, as the advertisers on those pages will attest. It may be that as the supply of paper news is reduced, the price that can be charged for Internet ads might increase.)

I do deny that reporting is valuable *to many of the corporations ostensibly gathering the news*, as anything other than a loss leader to be cut to the bare minimum needed to preserve the fiction of “independent press.” As evidence I point to the same developments TNR decries; I just explain them differently.

I think / hope that at the national level, models like the Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, RealNewsNetwork or (maybe, someday) ThinkProgress will continue or pick up the ball on reporting. These are more frankly ideology-based publications, whose reporting nevertheless stands or falls on its accuracy. Readers/viewers can and do choose to subsidize them above and beyond the cost of subscriptions. At the usual metro level — Atlanta, SF, Chicago, LA — I think eRobin’s right, and local/hyperlocal coverage could pull in/maintain readership.

By: RobertNAtl

RobertNAtl — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:34:20 +0000

Even if the “MSM” had done a bang-up job reporting the Iraq WMD tory, the mortgage meltdown and financial crash story, the Florida 2000 story, and the Ohio 2004 story, they still would be in the same exact financial position they are today, namely going broke, fairly quickly. IMO, the “cause of death” of the MSM is not being a handmaiden to the power structure, but that they are now giving away for free a product that costs a lot of money to produce, and that is apparently not highly valued by very many people. I think the blogs will suffer from the decline of the MSM; as an example, just in the past month or so, you have linked to three Washington Post stories and a Seattle Times story. If nobody is actually reporting the news, blogs will have less on which to intelligently opine, including the quality of the newsgathering itself. I wish the everything-available-for-free culture of the Internet could be changed when it comes to news reporting, but I suspect the trend will be more in the direction of voluntary contributions and limited advertising (like the blogs do), which will not generate the revenue necessary to maintain newsgathering efforts at even their current levels. I will mourn this development, but then, I regularly read 2 or 3 newspapers a day, so I’m hardly representative.

By: janinsanfran

janinsanfran — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:24:46 +0000

Out here in NorCal, we’re about to lose the Chronicle. It’s business model no longer works.

Curiously, I’ll miss it. It has always been a fluff-fest. I remember being shocked that this sensationalist rag claimed to be a newspaper when I first encountered it in 1965. And yet it is had some moments of journalistic quality. Curiously, its early coverage of both the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars was quite good. They sent reporters and they saw things. It probably helped that the paper was sold to a public that actually was willing to read somewhat truthful accounts of war’s realities.

By: Thomas Nephew

Thomas Nephew — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:04:09 +0000

cheerleading for corporate interests is fun too.
Pays the bills and the heftier salaries. I loved the point Sean Quinn relayed the other day, about the sudden interest of the White House press corps in the finer points of tax policy: “Did you notice all the questions about taxes came from reporters making over $250,000 a year, especially the TV guys?”

Which reminds me of another point: one thing that TNR kind of grandfathered in to “serious press” status was broadcast news and TV news. That’s often deserved (in both the good and bad senses), but I’m an old enough geezer to remember that TV news used to bring out the same sort of head shaking, beard stroking seriousness that those bad bloggers do now. With far more justification, too: there are clearly all kinds of barriers to entry of the TV market, judging by the scarcity of competing TV news departments per major metro area, let alone the scarcity of competing news philosophies beyond ‘if it bleeds it leads.’ Factor in the rise of phenomena like “Entertainment Tonight”, and you have a pretty strong competing hypothesis: TV’s economies of scale came, dumbed down, and conquered. (I’ll cover my a** and concede that may be buried somewhere in Starr’s treatise, but I don’t have the time to go back and check.)

By: eRobin

eRobin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:02:27 +0000

But as the Iraq WMD story showed us; as the mortgage meltdown and financial crash showed us; as Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 showed us: big stories go unreported, big power is free to proceed all but unobserved and unchallenged. At the end of the day, I can’t do much about that, but in the meantime I won’t be lectured on what to read and where to read it by the very people who have done so very little observing and challenging.

It’s like you’re reading my mind! With some obvious exceptions, I’m sad for the reporters who are going to get crunched in the gears as this new model grinds ahead. But I’m not tolerant of explanations that blame teh bloggerz for the meltdown. And I look forward to what comes next - in my home county, the paper has decided to pay more attention to local issues in the hopes of grabbing readers and it’s working. I think that’s going to be the answer for mid-level papers. As for the big ones, I have no idea. They could try being relevant to people’s lives by writing about stuff we care about and look into reasons why other stuff happens and then staying on the story … but cheerleading for corporate interests is fun too.

Re: the pro-war WaPo
I call it that b/c it sponsored the Pentagon’s Freedom Walk. The sponsorship was pulled, but for me, the die was cast.