Joel Pett on the fall of the newspapers

[alfredo]

[ogneopasno]

1. It's a simplistic view, and not exactly accurate, I think.

[alfredo]

2. It's hard to go into depth in a cartoon, but it did show the "thinking" of

the owners of the papers. It's hard to make money when you give your product away for free.

[ogneopasno]

6. Yes, but no one was paying for Web access for information for anything

when newspaper started putting their stuff online. Bigger problems were high gas prices, a reliance on national advertising when local advertising dropped (and then a bigger hit when national advertising dropped), a spike in the cost of newsprint, and a declining readership as the aging demographic of newspaper readers begins to die out.

[alfredo]

9. Less to recycle too.

[ogneopasno]

10. That could actually help the logging/paper industry, which has been hit because paper recycling has

gotten so popular.

[alfredo]

13. that's good news/bad news thing.

[ogneopasno]

14. It would be a good thing where I live.

[alfredo]

15. We're destroying our support system by mowing down our trees.

[ogneopasno]

16. Where I'm at, we don't "mow down" trees, because of the recognition of the value

for recreation, real estate, and carbon sinks. In fact, because paper is so bad, a lot of public land is being sold off to developers to cover the money usually earned from logging.

[alfredo]

19. Public land should not be privatized.

[ogneopasno]

20. I agree.

[ThomWV]

17. Its an Accurate view, and not exactly simplistic, I think

You can not begin giving away what you used to sell and expect higher income. They used to sell two things, advertising space and used newsprint. Now they only sell advertising space and they are trying to do it at the same time that advertising space is becoming less expensive elsewhere.

[Deja Q]

3. And newspaper peddlers tell me of all the coupons...

Well, to come out ahead by even a small margin, I have to use all those coupons.

Last time I checked, I have no use for tampons at 20% off. Not even if it's Xmas season and I want to cobble up some novelty tree decorations.

[LiberalEsto]

4. I was a newspaper reporter much of my life

and 5 of the 6 papers that employed me over a 25-year career have gone out of business. The sixth paper just forced 40% of its employees to accept buyouts under threat that the paper would be sold otherwise. I'm pretty sure it won't be around in another decade.

I'm 56, not in the greatest of health, and am basically obsolete, career-wise. I do a little marketing writing and a little freelancing, but my husband is the breadwinner. I wish there was more work for me at the small PR firm where I've worked part time for 7 years. But times are tough.

I blame television, for the most part. It has lured too many people away from the habit of reading. The average person no longer spends much time reading books or newspapers. Our local Borders is closing down for lack of business even though we're about 15 miles outside Washington DC. Hardcover books cost too much, at $25 or $30 a pop, at a time when people are struggling to pay their bills.

In addition, people just don't have much free time any more. Working people who spend a lot of time commuting and dropping off and picking up kids from daycare just don't have time or energy to plow through a newspaper. It's easier for them to catch a quick broadcast on the car radio, or turn on the evening news during dinner. On weekends they have to catch up with their kids, run errands, buy groceries, etc. My dad used to come home from work, eat the dinner Mom cooked, and settle down in his easy chair with the evening paper.

Newspapers were already heading for obsolescence long before the Internet was in widespread use. We used to talk about it in my journalism classes, way back in the early 1970s. It's a shame, because I enjoy reading newspapers as well as surfing the Internet (I rarely watch tv), and if they vanish, I'll miss them.

But times change. Cars have replaced horse-drawn buggies, and jet planes have replaced transatlantic ships. The manual Smith-Corona typewriters on which I pounded out my first news stories have long been replaced, first by electric typewriters, then by computers.

[alfredo]

5. change is

Painful
difficult
unsympathetic
essential
sometimes

[ogneopasno]

7. Good luck to you. I just resigned as city editor from my daily. I'd had enough, and it's circling

the drain. I'm freelancing too, but I'm sad to see newspapers die. Good content doesn't write itself!

[LiberalEsto]

11. Thanks. And good luck to you too.

I quit my last newspaper job in 1997. The idiot publisher brought in a managing editor - a right-wing zealot - who purged everyone on our small staff who showed anything of a liberal bent. He hassled one guy for having longish hair. He watched my computer screen from his glass cubicle and harassed me whenever I had something on my screen that he didn't think belonged there. He forced me to rewrite my stories from a pro-repuke perspective. He drove the paper, formerly a bastion of liberalism, into the ground and killed it. In one year, 13 people were fired or left, including me. The paper died. Having succeeded in destroying the paper, he then moved on to a fat job in the Heritage Foundation.

In my journalistic heyday, newspaper reporters were generally liberal, it's true. The Republican kids majored in business and economics and went on to lucrative careers, while we English and journalism majors struggled to pay the rent as reporters.

But as the Republicans began organizing their big takeover in the 1990s, they sent some of their kids to work temporarily as journalists before moving on to making big bucks. This happened all over the media. Liberals were purged, or downsized, or forced to toe the corporate line or be fired. Any kind of independence was frowned on. It happened to a number of people I knew. That's how they destroyed the liberal media and replaced it with a fearful corporate-ass-kissing media.

[Greyhound]

8. Like the music, film, and soon television industries, they are failing to recognize and

utilize the next change in human communication. Instead of jumping on and redeveloping their mission to conform to the reality, they concentrate on trying to stop the flood.

I told my students back in 1994 that the internet was far bigger than any of us could comprehend, a new paradigm in communication has always spurred wide-spread, sweeping changes in society.

[alfredo]

12. we still need a real medium as a fall back. The internet is so dependent

on a huge infrastructure.

[ThomWV]

18. Honest Question

Would you mind telling me - and I am not being at all fecicious about this, I really want to know - what changes in human communications are taking place and more particularly how is that change in human communications related to the industries you mention? I ask because as far as I know humans sill receive imput the same ways we have for thousands of years. I just don't see how we have changed at all.