I know, I know, print is dead. But it’s one thing to say it, and another to see the actual corpse. The Rocky Mountain News died today, just a couple months shy of its 150th birthday, and even those of us who are more pixel-pushers than ink-stained wretches should pause to pay our respects.
The first daily I ever worked for, the Colorado Springs Sun, died under similar circumstances, the weaker of two publications in what had become a one-newspaper town. The Gazette murdered the Sun, then burned the body and scattered the ashes. And today, no Bibleburger under a certain age knows that the Sun ever lived at all.
My thoughts are with the men and women of the Rocky as they take those first hesitant steps on an even rockier road, the one that leads to the unemployment office.
Mad Blog Media 
‘morning Patrick. A thought on both pixels and print. Is print dead and pixels mostly ignored? We seem to be a very uninformed population. I seriously doubt people are reading much, or very widely, on the web. -Bruce
Probably showing my age, but I am more likely to go into a sustained bout of reading if I have something made of paper in my grimy little hands.
Its not just the demise of print journalism that promotes less than a five minute attention span. The 24/7 news cycle is equally vapid. We are indeed becoming a nation of…um…what’s that word???
I believe that would be Ritalin addicts Khal. I’m concerned because I just ended a 7 year battle with unemployment by becoming a journalist (someone sent me a job offer at my blog). I finally found a job I can do with my brain damage, just when that business is going Tango Uniform? TANJ!
Hey, Bruce … I think we are becoming a Balkanized nation, each citizen a paranoid fascist dictatorship of one. We read/watch/listen to whatever reinforces our beliefs and dismiss anything that challenges them. And I think that implies a certain decline in intelligence. Critics derided W as lazy, disengaged and devoid of intellectual curiosity without noting that he reflected his society.
Khal, I agree that the 24/7 news cycle and the shift to online models has downsized the national attention span. I’ve started but not finished three or four books recently; some of that can be chalked up to poor writing and/or indifferent editing, but there’s no doubt that I have become conditioned to expect my news and other information in bite-size portions. I write in short form, too. My BRAIN column used to be 1,200 words. Now, after various redesigns, it’s a smidge over half that. Before long I’ll be unable to write anything longer than a 140-character Twitter post. And y’know what? Some of my tweets don’t even challenge that limit.
Opus, glad to hear you’re gonna be banging out the word count with the rest of us. Don’t fret credentials (though if you’re going to spend a lot of time chatting up the cops, you might want to see if they require any formal press ID, something the Examiner crowd should be able to supply). You might just have some official-looking business cards run off at the local Kinko’s. I haven’t had a press card since 1991, but people tell me things all the damn’ time.
I can’t watch CNN or Fox for more than five minutes without screaming in disgust over the raw number of typos on the crawler. And yet, when I mention that to a regular viewer, their only response is “huh?”
That right there tells me what the tv machine does to our attention spans.
Patrick,
I haven’t had a press card since 1991, but people tell me things all the damn’ time.
But those aren’t things you can run in a family paper!!