Brad Delong on the news of the New York Times’ financing deal, which sounds a bit like the Gray Lady went to one of those brightly painted car title loan places you see in former gas stations: Good God almighty! 14% interest with short-term inflation at zero plus a share of the upside if the …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Economies of the Times’ »
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’ »
Rick Anderson on the rich life and untimely death of the Seattle P-I: It was different after the P-I packed up its globe and moved to a new building on the waterfront in 1986. Newspapers were evolving—less fun, but more respectful work. No more would a beleaguered reporter likely need to drop acid to get …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Obituary for a Life I Never Quite Lived’ »
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, …
A bit of dystopian fiction from my young friend Kelsey, with a loving nod to our disappearing past: “But those were on paper once, you can’t be that sure” “It also isn’t one of those papers.” “What? But that means it’s…okay, you’re right, it’s old. But how old?” “Dunno”, you say, “dates missing. But it …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Zombie Fiction Edition’ »
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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.