Zero Decade: Newspapers
This is part of a series about the first decade of the twenty-first century, also known as the Zero Decade or zerodec. Text from DJCline.com.
When was the last time you bought a newspaper? There has been quite a bit of sturm and drang about newspapers going out of business because of the internet. They should remember that papers were in trouble when radios first came out and then television.
Frankly there are user interface issues with papers. The display is not backlit. You can’t do a keyword search. Copying and pasting requires actual scissors. Storage and retrieval can be a fire hazard. There is the environmental irony of killing trees to write about deforestation. Covering the paper with toxic chemicals, loading it on trucks and tossing it on your lawn is not an eco-friendly or even efficient way to distribute information.
People act like every Picayune Daily News is the New York Times paper of record for a town. Maybe they are right. I can pick up a paper and tell who the major advertisers are. That will tell me I will never see a story about crooked real estate developers or car salesmen in between ads for houses or cars. There are inevitable conflicts between content and advertising. Newspaper barons used to say that if it didn’t sell it wasn’t news.
The best stories are always covered about your town from another town because there is less conflict of interest. The concern is that there were will be fewer papers available to be that second opinion in a democracy. They don’t realize that the internet allows millions of second opinions. The power of the press no longer belongs to someone who can afford a printing press. It belongs to anyone with a phone.
I’m running into lots of good journalists looking for jobs. Just because newspapers go away does not mean the news does too. If they can find a story they can find work.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved
Posted by dj in Blumbers, Commentary []