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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.

The 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?

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.”

Steve_in_KC

This makes me sad as hell. I love newspapers, even when I vociferously disagree with their content. They are a matter of public record that can’t be altered after publication, like the web.

I love the printed word. I love the crisp feel of paper in my hands. I love doodling on them while working the puzzles. I love having that daily summary of news and features delivered to my door each day.

Internet news and commentary have their fans, but I’ll always love my local newspaper, no matter where I live, as long as it’s available.
sowsear

Here is what I took from the web:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090405/pl_nm/us_financial_usa_geithner
sowsear

Yes, I like the part that they don’t just get wiped off the record. We had a lot of that with Obama: stuff that never was recorded anywhere, thanks to the MSM.
I’mFedUp

How sad. Especially in light of the fact that the Stoner in Chief and Pelousy the Pig are trying to silence free speech, and we all know that Obama’s been scrubbing the net like crazy. We already know journalism is dead, considering the rape of America with the Obama lies and bias by buffoons like Tweety and Olberbite. Even now the media is BARELY telling the truth about the scumbag and his crooks in Congress. Now, all we will be able to rely on is net news that Obama will have scrubbed if it doesn’t suit him. Why is that romantic? I think it sucks.
sowsear

Ths is also scary:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Bill-Grants-President-Unprecedented-Cyber-Security-Powers-504520/
Baba Rum Raisin

Sounds pretty Seven Days in May - ish to me. Too bad they didn’t call it ECOMMCON.
AF catfish

I’ve done blogs, read twitter, and now I’m back to reading the dead-tree edition of the newspaper, in the end parchment is the best technology for getting news. Reading is not a natural act, you have to form a habit with intent. I have a day job. I don’t want to surf the web or be a citizen-journalist.

The number of stories I see in our whittled-down SF Chronicle far surpasses what I’d see by clicking on SFGate.com homepage.

So many I think I better blog that or make sure other people see it – like this one yesterday, UCSF just set a policy that bottles of wine over $75 could not be expensed to the university (which pass thru is subsidized by student tuition and state taxpayer dollars.)

If students, scraping to meet ever-rising tuition fees read the newspaper, they’d be up in arms. Instead they believe they get everything they need thru facebook blogs and online editions of news.

They’re proudly ignorant. Something’s gotta give and it will soon. I have a dayjob. I don’t want to surf the web or be a citizen-journalist.
NoTrollZone

I agree. The one thing about newspapers is that they are public record and you can’t just wipe them clean like you can the info on the internet. The Obama cycle showed just how easy it is to make things “go away” when they are inconvenient. I’m for anything to make Winston’s job just a little bit harder.
NoTrollZone

I do like newspapers for the fact that they are public record and can not be wiped clean like the internet. Anything that makes Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth a little bit harder has got to have something good going for it. During the Obama cycle things had an uncanny way of disappearing from the net. Of course it would be nice if we could get some of the major newspapers to fire their Winston’s as well. The AP could use a little
Aegean Stables treatment too.
Tuppence411

I agree with everything you wrote Steve. I too love the printed word, love flipping thru the pages. But it seems to me the newspapers, both large and small have been digging their own graves for a while. Few hire real journalists anymore. The ones they do have got lazy, just re-wording press releases. No real investagations, few in-depth interviews. And in the world of 24 hour news channels and the internet, instead of speeding up they have slowed down. Local or state events are reported days later. WTH! That’s no way to compete. If it wasn’t for college/high school sports and the comics, my city newspaper would already be buried.
Peggy Sue

I think there is a romantic attachment to newspaper in hand, book in hand. We have a tactile experience with the published forms we’ve grown accustomed to. One of my earliest school memories is the smell of new books at the start of the year.

But e-publishing is the way the world is going. I’ve had endless discussions with friends and family and virtual friends on another site I frequent, who claim that the Kindle will destroy the book market. Well, I own a Kindle. The Kindle and like e-vehicles will eventually be the book market, period. And they’re a pretty nifty devices, where books are affordable again and I can carry my own personal library to work, on vacation, read my daily newspapers, hunker down with a book of essays or the latest piece of great American and/or foreign fiction.

The Whispernet for ordering purposes [downloads take less than a minute or two] is incredibly convenient.

I still like to browse through books shops and news stands, but the world is a-changing. And it’s not all bad.
elise

Dedication is necessary to get up in the morning, sometimes in very cold weather when it’s still dark, wander around in the front yard looking for the newspaper even before the first cup of coffee. But the rewards were so great. Sit at the kitchen table before the world is fully awake and read what you believe is legitimate news to keep up with what’s happening in clear across the world and in city council. Even hands dirty with ink would never have stopped me from the most pleasant and satisfying part of the morning. Citizen Cane was filmed before I was born, but I love that movie. The shadows in the newsroom, reporters really doing their jobs with cigarettes hanging from their mouths and a bottle of booze in the desk drawer. Then All the Presidents Men which may have made Woodward and Bernstein look more like heroes than they really were, but there was a dedication to the story and the truth. I guess this is another antiquity now, like my childhood when we never locked our front door and the only thing my mother worried about when I went to school in the morning was making sure I had money for lunch. I know it sounds silly to the kids who spend their days on a computer, Blackberries and iphones, but I’ll miss the newspapers when they’re gone.
AF catfish

When radio debuted, newsprint took a permanent hit but did not disappear entirely.

People forget that paper IS a technology. I have an old palm pilot in a desk drawar that once had ebooks on it. It doesn’t work anymore.

Paper news and paper books will be with us forever.
Peggy Sue

I’m sure they said that about the Illuminated text industry as well. Forever is a very long time, catfish.
I’m a Linda too

Great post Mr. B.
Citizen70

I cancelled my Boston Globe subscription last spring after their biased reporting against Hillary Clinton and for Barack Obama. It pleases me that I could help in their demise.