I thought this might interest you... and everyone else here:

http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4530#more

Conference on State of Newspaper Industry Draws Huge Crowd

by Ian Elwood‚ May. 18‚ 2007

On May 14th, Stanford University and McClatchy Company co-sponsored a free community forum at Cubberly Auditorium to discuss the fate of the newspaper industry. Speakers included Bill Keller,Executive Editor of the New York Times, Gary Pruitt, Chief Executive Officer of McClatchy, Marissa Mayer, Vice President of search productsand user experience at Google, and Harry Chandler, a former executive at the Los Angeles Times. It was the 41st of such events sponsored by McClatchy.

Titled, "Pressing Times: Can Newspapers Survive in the New World of Journalism?," the event drew a capacity crowd and left the impression that these executives had very little hope for the newspaper industry of the future.

"The inevitable conclusion is that newspapers are dying," offered Pruitt. Joel Brinkley, a journalism professor at Stanford, gave a summary that the four panelists had a hard time denying — the survival of the newspaper industry is threatened, and the Internet is the cause of it.

Other assertions floated by Brinkley were that only newspaper reporters can do ethical journalism and that radio, television and online reporting routinely "lift" newspaper content. Newspapers and journalism were often conflated by panelists as one and the same without separating the craft from the medium. But Pruitt said "it's the business model that is under stress," and that was what is harming journalism, not simply heavy competition from other media.

"We're gonna have to adapt and evolve, as Darwin pointed out," he said. The loss of classified advertising revenue to sites like Craigslist.com was the first clue that their business model was doomed..."We are computer scientists, not journalists," she said. Google's aim is to partner with "content providers," a term that made the three other panelists wince, and build a "monetization" model (wince again) with newspapers. Bill Keller of the New York Times leaned towards Mayer hopefully as she described an experiment by Google in which blogs were surreptitiously inserted into the listings of Google News, and readers could immediately tell the difference between "professional journalism" and blog commentary.

"If you are going to do great journalism you need great journalists. Not business men," Keller told the audience. Speculating about the future of newspapers he compared his colleges to members of Alcoholics Anonymous in that they had to, "fake it 'till they make it." The crowd burst into laughter.

In a more somber tone he went on to criticize new media in saying that there was not a set of journalistic ethics and reporting standards that people could be held to. He gave a nod to the coverage that bloggers provided, saying that he is addicted to blogs himself, but said that what they couldn't do was the original reporting that newspapers can afford to fund; reporting with depth, context, skepticism and intelligence.

Chandler, the former LA Times executive, again stressed a similar viewpoint that good journalism cannot happen outside newspapers. "It's the newspaper business model that is out of whack, and I don't even know what that is." He said that Internet revenues were not growing fast enough, and that classified revenues are gone. "Monetization of readers is down," he resigned. The only suggestions he offered for keeping newspapers alive were cost-cutting methods such as multiple networks using the same reporting team for routine assignments, and using readers as free labor by farming out menial reporting tasks.

He even suggested following the Pasadena Star's example of using a webcam to stream city council meetings to a reporter in India, who could be paid at a much lower rate. The room went silent when—tentatively and at the end of his speech—Chandler suggested that the traditional wall between business decisions and editorial decisions could be impeding the survival of newspapers by creating a system of incentives to persuade editors into doing stories that would be more profitable...Many ideas that panelists offered for economic survival of newspapers would create such fundamental change, that the result could no longer be called a newspaper.

It is clear that at least three out of the four panelists believed that newspapers as we know them will not exist for much longer, but their hope is that what comes will still be a venue for quality journalism, despite the loss of the printed word.

Interestingly, you are a very aggressive attacker. That would put you in the pyscho-sexual pyscho matrix where?

It all depends on the object of all that aggression, doesn't it? And it's quite obvious who I channel all my aggression towards: Republicans, fascists, wingnuts, theocrats, fundamentalists. Some people who claim to be heterosexual are just a little too fixated on homosexuality as an evil. From a purely evolutionary psychological perspective it makes no sense at any rate. Gay men and women do not compete for heterosexual breeding partners. It makes no sense until you realize that fear of homosexuals is a product of latent and repressed homosexual urges in people like you. So I guess we know where to put you in the psycho-sexual matrix, don't we. Right up there with Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell, Father Dobson and Fred Phelps.

You can find this study in all the Psych Journals: http://tinyurl.com/yovhyz

N=A A=N B=O A=N L=Y Z=M B=O B=O F=S R=E

Is he the Zodiac Killer?