I have no reason to think Albuquerque will become a no-newspaper town, but the set of questions confronting civic life in Seattle as the P-I goes down and the Times teeters are nevertheless worth thinking about in our own context. In that regard, I’ve been following the discussions my old college chum Chuck Taylor and …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Affirmative Answer to a No-Newspaper World’ »
It’s been a hard week. Colleagues who did good journalism around me losing their jobs, and the business I love coming unglued. We call it “the daily miracle,” somewhat sarcastically, because you see the chaos that sometimes sets in, around 6 in the evening, the false starts and confused discussions, the arguments over what are …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Thing That Finally Made Me Cry’ »
The standard critique at the interface between the dying dinosaurs of print and the whip-smart web is that newspapers simply did not understand and embrace the web, and are doomed as a result. If newspapers would only do “X” – and among Internet cognescenti, “X” has many definitions – newspapers would be able to thrive, …
ht Nora
Jeff Jarvis, who has (for better or worse) become something of a new media guru stalking the land of the old, caused a bit of a stir in my world when he posted last Saturday on the amazing success of the LA Times news web operation: David Westphal reports an important and historic crossing of …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Overhead of Print’ »
There’s a common confusion among “Netizens” about the reason for the mainstream news media’s demise – the notion that newspapers are in decline because they have not done their job of informing the public well enough. Paul Mulshine, reporting from Newark, offers a different explanation: They assume newspapers are going out of business because we …
Ned Resnikoff with a message many of us in old media are good about hearing: The journalist can no longer afford to keep his audience at a comfortable distance, or ignore the work of others covering the same topic.
An intriguing analysis by RIccardo Puglisi and James Snyder, published this month in NBER (gated), finds statistical evidence for a correlation between newspapers’ endorsement patterns (R vs. D) and the papers’ news coverage of scandals involving Republican and Democratic politicians: [T]hose with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elec tions give significantly more …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: On Endorsements and Bias’ »
It is frequently suggested that there are important parallels between the changing business models of the news and music industries, and that there is much we can learn from one another. I am currently brainstorming ways to get someone to pay me to perform journalism in bars.
Bruce Barcott on the loss of newspapers: It matters because papers exist in the physical world, the meatspace with the rest of us, and the fact of their existence, in print on paper, sitting on every corner of downtown Seattle, reminds us that there’s a larger conversation going on around us. She’s worried that the …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Information in Meatspace’ »