"Our aim, to swat liars and leeches, hypocrites & humbugs, demagogs & dastards"
-- The Yellow Jacket
Moravian Falls, N.C., 1919
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Good news
Searching high and low, the Outpost editor manages to find some good news about newspapers.
1 comment:
Anonymous
said...
Nice to see that the student paper is doing well, but I fear that the staffers will find their diplomas (like my bachelor of science degree in broadcast communications from Northern Arizona University in 1986) will be of little use other than as a replacement for Charmin, the way things are going (especially if they have no minor -- the major mistake I made). A moment of silence for The Rocky Mountain News, euthanized just 55 days short of its sesquicentennial.
I have made a long comment about the demise of the Mountain West's last tabloid over at the Gazoo's On The Margins blog, should anybody want to read that. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely we'll see very many cities with two or more daily papers after the bloodletting is over and the herd has been culled. (My guesses are New York, Washington and Salt Lake City -- the latter two because one of the two papers is run by a religious organization: The Washington Times by Rev. Moon's Unification Church and the Deseret News in Salt Lake by the Mormons). Chicago may join that group if the Sun-Times can somehow survive (although the Tribune is on shaky ground as well), while San Francisco -- where Hearst and Pulitzer started the first modern newspaper wars in the late 19th Century -- may well find itself with no daily paper at all, as both the Examiner and the Chronicle are bleeding red ink by the barrel.
This is a sad state of affairs, because while you can make a good case that the Web (which shares some of the blame for the decline in newspaper readership) can take the place of papers, there are many folks who either can't or won't use a computer for their news (my father being in the latter group).
1 comment:
Nice to see that the student paper is doing well, but I fear that the staffers will find their diplomas (like my bachelor of science degree in broadcast communications from Northern Arizona University in 1986) will be of little use other than as a replacement for Charmin, the way things are going (especially if they have no minor -- the major mistake I made). A moment of silence for The Rocky Mountain News, euthanized just 55 days short of its sesquicentennial.
I have made a long comment about the demise of the Mountain West's last tabloid over at the Gazoo's On The Margins blog, should anybody want to read that. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely we'll see very many cities with two or more daily papers after the bloodletting is over and the herd has been culled. (My guesses are New York, Washington and Salt Lake City -- the latter two because one of the two papers is run by a religious organization: The Washington Times by Rev. Moon's Unification Church and the Deseret News in Salt Lake by the Mormons). Chicago may join that group if the Sun-Times can somehow survive (although the Tribune is on shaky ground as well), while San Francisco -- where Hearst and Pulitzer started the first modern newspaper wars in the late 19th Century -- may well find itself with no daily paper at all, as both the Examiner and the Chronicle are bleeding red ink by the barrel.
This is a sad state of affairs, because while you can make a good case that the Web (which shares some of the blame for the decline in newspaper readership) can take the place of papers, there are many folks who either can't or won't use a computer for their news (my father being in the latter group).
Oh well. We shall see, I suppose.
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