Take away the costs of newsprint, presses and distribution (distribution costs are huge. Very little of the cover price makes its way back to the bottom line) and it might (might, please) be possible to maintain a 500 strong crew on the back of the internet advertising alone. But that would require that they manage to keep the current print style ad rates, not the $1 per 000 internet ones.

They are intelligent people, but they are trying to earn enough money to stay alive, have a home and raise a child. They don’t even have time for TV. The corporate world should think about this when they put out advertising. Sadly, they don’t have time for blogging, either.

My husband and I still buy the local papers for local news and columnists. (I stopped watching TV a long time ago.)

My hometown paper, The Flint Journal,(Michigan) has a lot of different views expressed by columnists, cartoons, letters to the editor and unsigned small letters from readers. I appreciate this very much.

There is real fear at the slow motion implosion of the newspaper world and will be more fear as the network television world also begins to implode. There is jealousy and fear of bloggers as they are perceived as piggy-backing upon the work of REAL reporters and throwing mud at working journos like Judy Miller (well, maybe not Judy Miller anymore but let’s not admit that the bloggers may have got that right). There’s fear and disgust that readers can reach out and criticize working reporters and columnists (Daniel Okrent who named a supposedly abusive reader in print as the public editor at the NYTimes was a fellow at the Shorenstein this Spring).

These folks are living within their bubble, although it’s getting a little tight, and look out beyond that comfort zone only with a massive push. They don’t understand the technology, the culture, or the new rules and are shocked that these new kids on the block are not conforming to their ideas of courtesy and commity.

Doyle McManus of the LA Times spoke at the Shorenstein recently and said that the current business model of newspapers has maybe another 20 years of life left in it. I was astonished. By my estimation, newspapers as currently constituted have five or ten years at most. Ellen Hume, ex-Wall Street Journal now teaching at UMass Boston, is one who is looking around for the next wave but she is one of the few. These days, I buy only a Sunday paper and that’s mostly for the coupons and the comics.

BTW, Craig of Craig’s List is starting a news service. Yahoo has hired at least one accredited reporter. Jimmy Wales of wikipedia is developing an online model for wikinews in a variety of languages. Others around and about are developing other models of collaborative journalism. Joshua Micah Marshall is actually making money doing online news with the Talking Points Memo sites (tpmcafe and tpmmuckraker). Whether anybody at the Shorenstein is paying attention is highly debatable even though folks down the street at the Berkman Center of Harvard Law School are doing citizen journalism on a world-wide basis.

Hell, when I mention Riverbend or John Robb’s Global Guerrillas at the Shorenstein, there are people who reach for their pens because they haven’t heard those names before. But they sure have comfortable cocktail parties.

For my money, the most interesting development is dailykos and the flourishing activist community there. I doubt anyone at the Shorenstein is paying attention or can understand just what Kos has done. Look at the way the mainline journos misconstrued the Dean’s internet campaign. They ain’t larned nothing since.

Oh, just go ahead and say it: they’re just not very bright, as a rule.
.

If this kind of bait is not working, then they’ll have to find some other bait; hide free scratch lottery tickets inside or something.

Posted by abb1 • May 3rd, 2006 at 11:34 am

Well, they could try the truth, and standing up for what is just and right as well as the wellbeing of their country.
I never read the papers anymore or watch TV News except for Oberman, because it is all cheerleading, soft-pedaling of the issues and flat out blatant lies.
In my eyes and others as well, they have become complicit in the crimes off the Bush administration.
They could not have pulled this fiasco of a presidency, or war off with out the presses assistance, so they are as guilty as bush IMHO, and think they should also be tried if we ever get down to some serious prosecution of these dangerous clowns.
I think Bush threatening them with imprisonment for telling the truth and divulging the crimes of this administration does not wake them up then nothing will.

If this kind of bait is not working, then they’ll have to find some other bait; hide free scratch lottery tickets inside or something.

While there probably aren’t any simple answers and bloggers certainly aren’t solely to blame for this predicament, I think its probably wrong to say that bloggers are only responsible, if they are at all, for the loss of the power and prestige of newspapers and newspaper writing. Blogs, as one the latest in electronic alternatives, have necessarily taken way the eye balls and ink-covered hands that made newspapers profitable and thus also bare (some of the) responsibility for the real problems facing the newspaper industry.

But these streams have now become separable. News has been viably separately distributed for a while now; in fact most people get their news from television rather than newspapers; Fox and CNN are profitable entities. ESPN has taken over sports. The net, largely, the rest. Different parts of the net, different streams: craigslist, ebay and monster.com advertisements, political bloggers political opinion, mommy-bloggers (if you’ll forgive the expression) women’s page opinion, “features.”

So demand for the bundle is shrinking. Perhaps only partly due to blogs. And newspaper employees are aware that shrinking demand means newsroom layoffs. So naturally they’re upset.

But herein lies the problem: Who wants to cover a city council meeting when you don’t get paid anything for doing it?

Now, Marshall and Co. are doing some real reporting, although too much of the TMP Cafe material is just more punditry (from Ivy League law school grads and whatnot—it’s the New Republic model transferred to the Internet). We’re awash in punditry, drowning in it. But who’s going to pay you to cover the less sexy stuff? Where will you get non-DC material for a blog if a newspaper doesn’t cover it?