Category: Journalism

The biggest challenge facing America’s struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.

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It is a momentous, overlooked shift in the world: Foreign correspondents no longer cover one place for the exclusive benefit of readers somewhere else. In the Internet age, we cover each place for the benefit of all places, and the reported-on are among the most avid consumers of what we report.

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I have always wanted to photograph a full moon behind our giant neon globe.

The likely closure of this newspaper, last night’s full moon, the clear sky and a serious need for some solitude on the water prompted me to finally make that happen.

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What more could you have done? You could have competed more effectively. Owens complains about “substitute home pages,” where the Boston.com was trying to take away GateHouse’s readers. There’s a pretty straightforward response to that: if that’s all it takes to take away your community, you’ve failed your community. If the entire value of your site was in providing the headlines and ledes, and someone else copying those headlines and leads causes you to lose the community, you haven’t been providing enough value to that community, and you deserve to lose it. Newspapers have neglected their biggest asset, their own communities, for way too long, and this is another example of that. If GateHouse provided a better service where the value went beyond the headline and the lede, there wouldn’t be concerns about how such “copying” would take away from GateHouse.

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somehow Newspaper Death Watch escaped my view. The site, created by long-time technology journalist Paul Gillin, chronicles the usually bad news about newspapers, and has been doing so since 2007

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“They want the amount of print you would find on a cereal box, which is what you get online,” said Mike Pearson, 49, a features writer and editor for The Rocky for 21 years.

“They want headlines only and graphs that summarize everything without going into a lot of analysis. And they feel entitled to even the most complex and sophisticated news coverage for free.”

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Via dvafoto.

We learned about the Rocky Mountain News’s closure first from a Twitter post. It was the kind of hot news that people immediately shared in their own one-sentence snippets. In Denver, Rocky reporters used Twitter to report their own company’s death announcement in real time. And why not? It’s the fastest way to report eye-witness information, and it provides a satisfying outlet for jittery nerves.

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With newspapers in cities across the country on the brink, an old idea is being resurrected in the hope of saving them: They should charge for access to their journalism on the Internet. This is a great idea, but about 10 years late.

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“This restructuring is focused solely on our debt, not our operations,” chief executive officer Brian P. Tierney said in a statement. “Our operations are sound and profitable.”

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Contrary to some of the ill-informed articles you might have read lately, almost every newspaper company still needs to print newspapers if it wants to stay in business.

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On the day Barack Obama was elected, a strange new feature appeared on the website of the New York Times. Called the Word Train, it asked a simple question: What one word describes your current state of mind? Readers could enter an adjective or select from a menu of options. They could specify whether they supported McCain or Obama. Below, the results appeared in six rows of adjectives, scrolling left to right, coded red or blue, descending in size of font. The larger the word, the more people felt that way.

All day long, the answers flowed by, a river of emotion—anonymous, uncheckable, hypnotic. You could click from Obama to McCain and watch the letters shift gradually from blue to red, the mood changing from giddy, energized, proud, and overwhelmed to horrified, ambivalent, disgusted, and numb.

It was a kind of poll. It was a kind of art piece. It was a kind of journalism, but what kind?

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If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere. As news resources are stretched and shared, it can often appear anywhere as well: a Los Angeles Times piece will show up in TheWashington Post, or vice versa.

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