Lots of interesting comments on my newspapers post — seems lots of you still crave your morning moment with the daily snooze, even if it’s not what it once was.
I feel your pain; the last time I read The New Mexican in Santa Fe (another former employer), I felt as though I had stumbled across an old pal who had suffered a crippling brain injury. The Gazette here in Bibleburg is similarly impaired, if today’s edition is any example.
Above the fold, just one story — the “news” that the United States has been in a recession since last December, with a terrible headline — topped by a fat teaser to the sports section for a story on Lance Armstrong’s comeback. Both items were history rather than news, having been beaten to death earlier by the Intertubes and TV. The number-one column is given over entirely to teasers, 14 of them, plus a weather bug.
Below the fold, another bit of history (President-elect Barack Obama’s national-security team, ho hum); a locally produced feature on a rodeo cowboy, teasing the 50th National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas; and a locally produced piece about plague croaking black-tailed prairie dogs in the Comanche National Grassland in southeastern Colorado. I predict that press-association awards will prove elusive.
The rest of the A section is given over to national and international news, a graphics-heavy calendar-slash-website-teaser page and two pages of neo-libertard opinion where one would suffice. And it only goes downhill from there. The Metro section is just four pages, heavy on the police beat, and includes four stories from outside the metro area. The three-page Business section has one local story. Ditto the Life section. The Sports section has more local news than Metro, Business and Life put together.
The final insult is the comics page. Same ol’, same ol’, most of the strips as fresh as the dead guys and barely ambulatory geezers who conceived them decades ago: Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, Hi & Lois, Peanuts, B.C. The few bright spots are Frazz, from my buddy and fellow VeloNews ‘toonist Jef Mallett; Zits, drawn by Jim Borgman, whom I remember as a top-notch editorial cartoonist; and Dilbert.
The local economy is perhaps best reflected in the Classified section, which is all of six pages, including two full-page ads (King Soopers and Heuberger Subaru). Anyone who plunked down 50 cents hoping to find a job in this bad boy is shit out of luck — just 17 jobs are on offer, most in construction, maintenance or sales.
Is it any wonder that the locals are tuning this thing out in droves (and that nationwide, newspaper ad revenue fell nearly $2 billion — a record 18.1 percent drop — in the third quarter)? What does this brief examination of a single issue tell you about Bibleburg, besides that the town’s lone daily is owned by out-of-towners who are more interested in cutting costs than building readership?
Back to you, Katie.
Mad Blog Media 
Reminds me… we were talking about listening to NPR the other day. I used to work on the road a bit, and I’d always seek out the local NPR station, not because of their “news” coverage but because they did the stories that no one else would do: a group of sixth graders discover a thought-to-be extinct species of snail darter, or a bio of some 90 year old samba king or the inventor of the Ouiji board or the like.
Then, when the news was over, the local kids would take over, and it was all alternative music.
I’m not sure if it’s just the election, but I can’t listen to more than two minutes of the radio now. It’s all retreads, and all so obvious. Those drive way moments no longer exist, because if you missed in when you pulled into the garage, you’ll catch it again as they repeat themselves throughout the day.
Gotta add Non Sequitur and Mother Goose and Grimm to your comic list. But after that, anyone who gets caught laughing at that page should have his voter registration card confiscated.
Nice NPR story this morning about how the Feds under Reagan-Bush policy has farmed out much of the government to get-rich-quick privateers. For example, the Blackwell Army in Iraq and private bill collectors doing the IRS’s job. Certainly can see the effects of farming out government here where I live. I think the newspapers and news industry in general have followed suit–minimize costs, i.e. staff and research, and maximize short term profit. And reading Patrick’s columns, we all know who answers the phone when you have a question about Internet service or your health plan. Speaka Inglesh, por favor…
So maybe a good, hard recession (or do we use the D-word?)would actually be good for us if it puts an end to the last quarter century of get rich quick finance scams–quick buck artists always proclaiming victory over real substance. I would like to see someone, anyone, proclaim they are building a business dedicated to quality and sustainability over the long haul, when long means beyond the next quarterly profit statement.
Khal, I can’t speak for every single slice of the privatization pie, but from my limited experience, whenever Uncle Sugar tries to save money by handing the work to the private sector, the bill actually goes up. Civilian security folks in Iraq make $125K and up, doing the job that privates and corporals used to do for three hots and a cot. Same story with the Corps of Engineers. When I was in Doctrine Development, I had one Sergeant First Class who was responsible for writing and updating 54 collective training manuals, and he was making about $45K a year. We contracted out for a defense contractor to provide two new manuals, and we paid them $150K for them.
Just finished walking the dogs, and with the sun setting so early now, I could see in all of my neighbors’ windows. Half the folks here have temp blinds or worse on their windows, despite having lived here for a year, and yet they all have big screen TVs. Hate to say it, but we get the economy that we deserve. Parents are too cheap to buy their kids a $60 scientific calculator, but will buy them a $300 iPhone. It’s all about choices, and we keep making the wrong ones.
Patrick, mi amigo,
Life and journalism in the higher climes sounds no different than here in the flatlands. As we’ve discussed, I escaped from the local comic almost three years ago and I’ve never looked back. Must have been the first time in my sorry life I actually had good timing. I always said my former employers ran the fourth-largest paper in the state of Pennsylvania and were trying their hardest to make it the fifth. They exceeded expectations, aided and abetted by the Zelleots in Chicago. We still get the damned thing delivered, mostly because the wife wants to know which former classmates are looking at the wrong side of the daisies and which ones are guests of the county bed-and-breakfast. Sometimes its a race.
But the paper itself, a once proud broadsheet that broke real news and produced some of the best feature writing to never win a major award, has slipped like an old wino in an icestorm. We get one or two local stories these days, just to fill space between the canned copy they rip off the feature wires or plug in as alleged “news you can use.” I can’t.
I conversed electronically with a former rim-rat colleague who now mans — woman’s? — a desk in Oregon where they apparently still try to commit journalism on a regular basis, and even she is growing pessimistic about the future of the industry.
Back east here we watched the greatest steel company in the world commit industrial suicide by its failure to keep up with Joneses and other foreign neighbors while the unions militantly fought to maintain every last vestige of the old perks that kept their leadership in golf balls and premium brew. It seems the newspaper biz learned some key lessons watching that happen.
I’m not optimistic about the future of the newsprint industry, but on the bright side, we may save an acre or two of rainforest out of the deal. But the bottom line is, people always want news. It can be the town crier stumbling through the village streets after last call, the beat reporter calling in the extra on deadline, the talking head blabbering through the hair mist or the ‘net dweebs suffering from diarheaa of the hands and constipation of the mind. We will want news.
What worries me is the type of news we want these days. The old gossip girls were fun, but they were always relegated to the “Women’s” pages. Now they’re front page. We don’t care ’bout no stinkin’ war. Give us Bennifer, instead, or the antics of some preteens who get more action than a Hollywood hooker. Meanwhile, our elected alleged leaders have X-ed out the Bill of Rights in the name of security, our jobs are going south — and east — faster than McDonald’s sells french fries, and those of us still toiling in the mines are looking over our shoulders for the awaiting ax.
Hey, any village out there looking for a town crier? Will work for wine.
Seems we have more villages looking for idiots than for winos or town criers.
Speaking of which, I’ll raise a glass to SteveO’s comment. I don’t think the Feds even know what their money is being used towards half the time.
If I could bother to take the time , maybe tomorrow at work, I’d figure out how to get my comics via RSS feed. Then I could dump the Tribune subscription. The NY Times already sends me a daily digest that is readable on the iPhone (which has a nice scientific calculator, just hold it on its side).
Roll out of bed, boil tea water and scan the funnies, weather (with moving doppler maps oh boy) and key stories of the day while calculating out the interest on the money saved by not getting a paper paper. Unfortunately my aged eyes just can’t deal with the screen until cup number two.
The best local news around here comes from my alderperson’s discussion group list. a 100 – 150 neighbors providing the latest info right down to the lot next door with commentary from various city managers and civic minded involved folks. The local stuff I get on line now, meaning a several block area. The national stuff I get online from journalistic entities and blogs. The regional stuff still seems to fall into a traditional newspaper collection and delivery system, but that will not last long.
Still I haven’t seen an online entity that fills the role of actually setting the tone of national discourse for the public. Just by dint of longevity that role seems to still sit with the 3 or 4 big papers left in this country. But that too will change.
Is it just me, but isn’t the complaining about things “the way they used to be” while surfing the net for cheap, legible ‘news’ counter-productive?
If you want the hardscrabble news, get out there and pluck down the $$ for what is being offered, ya cheap bastards. Those $300 iPhones, and $60 calculators aren’t going to do you any good, if you aren’t using your grey matter every once in awhile. Maybe one reason that the net is so free and easy, is because we, as Americans, have made it that way. The people who can make you happy for your inexpensive, cheapskate lives are the people who are working their tails off making something.
Reading your comics on the net is not going to pay the cartoonists’ wages. Lst I checked most newspapers give their news away for free on the net. Maybe if we all, myself included, saw that the money we save is causing that printer to lose his/her job, the solution wouldn’t be so hard to figure out.
R-word, D-word, F-word, it doesn’t matter if you are not willing to put forth the effort, people. I feel sorry for the people who work in the journalism industry (and I know a few) who sit and read this drivle. If you don’t like it, go read a book, watch a movie, anything but go out and spend the four bits for a hardcopy of the daily fishwrap. Even pick it up for free! But ‘reading’ the news on the net, is probably not going to save the American journalist in the near future.
Essentially, ask yourself the following question: would you work for free?
So why treat a journalist (or any other worker) like they should. They provide you a service and that service has a cost. If you can honestly sit there and say that they should lose their livelyhood so you can read the news for free, than we as a country are in for some deep doo.
Peace, out, my Mad Dog friends. Selah….RIP HST.
James,
Good point. Web news may not be the next refuge for journalist. Change is always better when it happens to the other guy. But my directly spending money on a paper isn’t the means to save traditional newspapers either.
The price of a newspaper hasn’t covered the costs of production for centuries. The pulp versions and web versions share a business model that is driven by advertising revenue. “Click through” revenue for web editions is tiny, but so is the cost of getting an edition out compared to the paper version. The newspapers did miss the boat on exploiting their best revenue stream – classifieds – and sites like Craig’s list are really hurting them.
Cartoonist, well many of the ones I like, have figured out how to return some revenue off their website. Show of hands who here has an O’Grady jersey? OK not a good example. the geek/math.science comic XKCD (http://www.xkcd.com/about/) Randall Munroe’s comic site is self supporting just from merchandise sales. Granted as a ex-NASA physicist his standard of living expectations my not match ours, he doesn’t discuss food or wine at all. Others use banner ads and other indirect means of making money.
I do not mind and will pay for access, if the quality is there. Salon.com, like many news/commentary/general interest sites has two tiers of service. I pay an annual fee for full access with no ads. Their product is worth it to me and I visit the site multiple times a day. The Salon model amy be teh future of newspaper like entities on the web. The trick is to make it work on a regional rather than national level. Certainly my subscription doesn’t cover the full cost of production. I’m likely subsidized by the ad viewing readers on the lower tier. Or at least their existence allows Salon to charge a higher ad rate.
Here’s a very old model that accomplishes the same thing- displacing the full cost of a good or service off the end user. I run a public library. No one who walks through our doors, calls the reference desk, of ichats us for information or to borrow a book or movie pays a cent (except overdue fines). So as far as the people using the library are concerned, yeah I work for free.
Now being tax supported we must strive to be a neutral space politically and so on so this model wouldn’t work at all for Patrick, but it is another way of displacing the full cost.
And you are right I am a cheapskate. How else I am going to afford the stuff I like?
Peace
Got three of those Old Guys jerseys. In fact, any chance on a new run of them? My original is wearing out and the new, red and white version just doesn’t have the same double meaning as “that other yellow jersey”.
James,
The New York Times tried to get folks to pay for online subscriptions (you could get 80% of the online edition for free, but needed to pay for premium content) but found they were losing ad revenue just from the pages where a non-paying viewer clicked an inaccessible article and got the “premium only” message. Online papers have the same ad revenue potential as hard copy versions… just need to figure out who the survivors are going to be.
Khal,
Have to admit that I too have all three MDM jerseys. I picked up the latest only a few months ago, when a certain cartoonist mentioned that they may be in very short supply. Gracias Patrick! I love each jersey as they are u-neek.
And Ben S, that’s how I support the cartoonists. Throw down for the goods people!! That’s all this bruddah is saying.
Peace. Out.
I got one of the Old Guy jerseys & one MD Media. Gotta support the weasels. The Capital Times(Madison WI) stopped all print a few moths back and is now an ugly online blogfest. Its sister pub the State Journal is AP wirefeed interspersed with local dog, pony & corporate sponsored “events”. They even stopped printing a weekly TV guide to boost the dailys.
I’d like to see another MDM jersey with the online logo on it. Can it be available in Midwest Fat Guy size? That way i can keep eating brats, cheese curds, and washing it down with Spotted Cow. (http://www.newglarusbrewing.com)