Comments on: Musings on the Death of the Newspaper Business

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By: Ivan Pope

Ivan Pope — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 09:26:00 +0000

Thing about Dave Winer is he doesn’t actually let you comment on his blog – so here’s mine:
Firstly, when we call the death of newspapers we seem to be confusing a bunch of things. Is it that the model of journalism as a profession is dying? Is it that the model of a newspaper as a carrier of information is dying or is it that the technical method of distribution that involves printing on paper is dying?
Firstly, journalists. Well, this is the dream of bloggers, and they may well have a point. But do we really have a problem with educating people to write well and objectively, to be professional? I would find this a strange attitude. Joseph Beuys said ‘everyone an artist’, but he didn’t mean that there should be no professional artists – and they didn’t die out because he pointed out a truth.
Secondly, there’s the issue of what a newspaper is. A newspaper is much much more than a collection of news journalists. It is a living organism with a history and an ideology and an ability to publish a lot of complex information to a schedule and to keep fresh and to serve its readers and to (hopefully) turn a profit. Now, again, we may feel that the time for such complex organisms is passing, driven into extinction by the complexity of online information. Then again, we may have more need for them in a complex online age.
Lastly, there is the issue of printing information with ink on paper on a regular schedule. This has been forecast to die for many decades now, and in fact has been slowly dying since the heyday of newspapers a long while ago. But it probably has a lot more time to live than would seem apparent to those of us who live almost entirely online.
We need to understand the parts of the mix to be able to analyse what may happen next.
And when Dave Winer says that in future everyone may be a journalist, that’s a nice conceit. A lot of people will be and in fact are. But even more people just can’t write to save their lives. Or, as was said in another context, ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing’.

By: alex

alex — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 06:23:00 +0000

Thomas, you make some very interesting points, but I have to disagree with Dave Winer's quote that in the future, "every educated person will be a journalist."

Journalists objectively track down facts, speak to sources, gather that information and write about it as clearly and succinctly as possible. This sort of writing requires extensive training and dedication, and cannot be done by everyone. I also have edited a school newspaper, and have had to read through absolute dreck to find the good stories needed to put together a competent paper.

As far as I can see, bloggers do not do this. Bloggers mainly write about what has already been reported on, merely adding their own opinion and other random information. I think that bloggers play an important role in this new media world, and I read many blogs myself. However, bloggers are truly consumers while the newspaper journalists are the producers in this food chain.

I do agree with you that more newspapers need to embrace bloggers, and some already have. The New York Times does a pretty good job with their blogs (David Pogue and others). If more papers do this, they will become better papers.

It will be a sad world if the newspaper business dies as many have predicted. We need dedicated professionally trained people to go out there and write about what is happening -- without this we may have heard about disturbing events such as the domestic spying program . They may not get it right all of the time, but we still need them.

I also hope that we never stop reading an actual paper -- the "accidental" stories I come upon while paging through the paper are almost always better than the stories I originally intended to read.

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 16:59:00 +0000

I’m with you all the way on this one. Especially with getting print on your fingers, but then again, I’m a fussy, clean freak So, newspapers for me, no ta. But magazines, slightly different….

Have just subscribed to JPG so looking forward to that. I do enjoy some magazine, mostly for the photography and I collect some of them. Evo (cars) is great and Wallpaper is very well put together. Also Living and Powder.