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Dead Trees Walking

By John Batchelor on April 5, 2009 at 4:15 PM in John Batchelor, Larry Johnson, New York Times

(Listen to Larry Johnson on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated KFI-AM radio show tonight, at 10:30 p.m. ET (show starts at 10:05). Stay tuned for a detailed promo with tonight’s hot topics. ALSO: You can listen live to Mr. Batchelor’s earlier show on NYC’s WABC-AM 770, starting at 7:05 p.m. ET. Check out the full slate of guests and topics on both stations.)

The Slow Motion Farce of the Newspapers.  


NewYorkTimes_NYT540.jpgThe thrilling headline in the WSJ.com is that the NYT is threatening to disappear its step child the Boston Globe.   The issue is union give-backs, but that is just the start of the argument.  Newspapers no longer make sense.  Newspapers are especially aimless here in the deeply wired and Iphoned up Northeast.   The NYT geniuses paid $1.1 billion for the Globe in ‘93 and have watched the money burn ever since, so that what remains may be worth $12 million.  Meanwhile the NYT is playing a version of the Chekhov story about a man in a troika running from wolves who feeds the pack everything until he is what’s left to feed them.

Why do newspapers resist doom?  Embrace it.  The notion of opening and reading my NYT, WSJ and FT in the morning is silly.   I will make them go away before they go away.  Online is the world.  There is no meaning to printed paper.  The New York Times and the Boston Globe are dead trees walking.  Did you notice that POTUS didn’t call on you at the last White House presser?   POTUS doesn’t read your greasy paper version.  Show up as videographers who blog, waving a Mino Flip and a wi-fi Macbook, and you will get attention.  We are supposed to wait until tomorrow morning to learn what you just heard me say?


What Next?

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Online reporting is vital.  I work with Dow Jones and Bloomberg and the FT and WSJ reporters routinely, and there has never in a thousand years been a wilder, more romantic time to be a journalist than now.  Everything on this planet and the next one hundred just like it we discover is in need of complete rewrite with quotes and pics.  The publishers who hold onto newsprint, and paper books, and the useless glossy magazines, are peculiar creatures.  Like watching men and women explain that there is no having to fix a horse’s engine.    I loved newspapers when I was young.  I delivered the Philadelphia Bulletin when I was 13 years old, making $7.00 a week.  Loved the smell of the just delivered bundle, loved the attention I received when I rode my bike with papers in the basket.  I was a time traveller as a newsie.  It is gone with the 20th century.  The Boston Globe in newsprint is laughable.   Everything you need is at Boston.com.  And the websites only grow stronger and faster with video, and live news links, and live blogging.  Yes, there must be editorial control; however we can sort this out.  What does not get solved  is the dead trees.   Close the building, scatter the editorial staff to the four corners, outsource everything to freelancers, send Kindles to your subscribers, blog.  

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From my blog and show site, “The John Batchelor Show.”