Letters to the Editor
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Reading vs osmosis
Spend hour on blogs, but not reading does not get one informed.
Well, I know I always turn my computer on and haul up Glenn's posts just so I can go and cook dinner. They're good company for when I'm gardening too. :-s
I love books and all sorts of printed matter, but I'll be damned if I'll give my money to spread any version, dead tree or otherwise, of pap like Kristol's.
Of course, at 48, my whipper is still snapping enough that I know I'm not quite dead yet. And, though it's only my opinion, I consider myself pretty well informed.
Bamage - the only way Kristol can find his ass, in the dark or otherwise, is with his lips darlin', not his hands. ;-}
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arguing about newspapers...
This past weekend was the second year of the Philadelphia Book Festival at the Free Library, and once again, the Philadelphia Inquirer had a booth set up to try and attract new customers. They were giving away large umbrellas for those willing to consider Sunday home delivery. And once again, I declined, but unlike last year (before Moyers' special on the selling of the Iraq War), I had even more evidence to support not subscribing to that particular paper.
It was shortly after last year's festival that I learned from Moyers about the Knight-Ridder stories that were skeptical about the need to invade Iraq. I was particularly surprised because at that time the Inquirer was a K-R paper. I asked the guy yesterday whether he thought those editorial mistakes had played any part in McClatchy's deciding to sell them. He really didn't want to talk about previous owners' decisions. So, I mentioned their more recent decision to hire Rick Santorum as a commentator. Why?
More importantly, I mentioned that they have done pretty much everything they could do to alienate their primary base: Readers. They severely abbreviated and then omitted the book review section. Then, that odious Parade magazine began appearing along with the Inquirer's own Sunday magazine and I knew that was a bad omen. Of course, they eventually eliminated their in-house magazine, which provided a spotlight for some good feature writers.
And when I mentioned getting news online, the rep said that no paper could make it completely online. I didn't disagree, but told him that I subscribe to Salon (which is only available online), as well as to The Nation, Harper's, etc., all of which provide value, and are available in print and online.
FYI... the paper is now owned by some consortium headed up by a conservative PR exec. And that pretty much sums it up. Which is not to say that there aren't still some decent writers/reporters there, but what good is that if editorial decisions are so consistently lousy? They have this crazy idea that they can turn things around by cutting costs, and laying off staff. What about improving the content? Wouldn't that attract some customers and make some old ones return?
Unfortunately, all of the reporters who were there during its Pulitzer Prize-winning heyday in the 70s and 80s are long gone.
That's the real trend that has hurt newspapers: so many of them have dumbed themselves down during a time when the public has become more sophisticated in its media consumption. Even the NYTimes. It hurts.
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"Whatever happened to Kristol's calls to prosecute the Times for treason?"
They bought him off.
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I take solice in the fact that...
Kristol is WRONG about EVERYTHING. No one has a record full of inaccurate predictions and wrongness than he. Given this record we can assume, via his claims, that:
1) "working-class" voters will vote overwhelmingly for Obama over McCain
2) The California Supreme Court ruling (leaving aside the "made social policy from the bench" falsehood that Glenn already debunked) will help Obama
3) The laughable Bush/McCain appeasement attack will strengthen Obama's argument as being stronger on National Security
Ok, I'm headed over to InTrade to put more money on Obama. Thanks Billy!!!
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solice == solace (n/t)
oops
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Point spread...
I haven't read all of the comments, so it may have been noted, but Think Progress also shows that Huckabee beat McCain in Arkansas by 41 points, and Romney did the same in Colorado with the same 41 point spread.
Kristol is an idjit.
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apologies Glenn
The NYT is an expensive kleenex tissue. Xenophanes.
`
Homer and Hesiod ascribed to gods all that brings infamy and shame to men :
adultery, theft, and tricking one another.
But mortal men think gods are born like them, have clothing, and bodies like their own.
P.S. What they call Iris is in bloom. What call they Iris (The goddess of the rainbow)?
Iris is a cloud by nature, purple and red and yellow to behold. Or, Nature can hide.
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@Bernbart- No wonder you are so misinfromed
I disagree with you that say print is dead. If some of you young whipper snappers just read a newspaper once in a while you might be more infromed. The New York times is one of the great print news left. I read it every day before I do anything else. When I hear ,"I don't have time to read the newspaper " I groan.
I've actually never seen Glenn say that "print was dead". If he has, he's spent a hell of alot of time beating a dead horse. The fact is the people in print media, almost to a man and woman, say it is dying. But you won't read about that in the dead tree media.
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.
[...]
"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.
Marissa Mayer from Google said that there was room for everyone in Google news, because they are not in the business of doing journalism.
"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.
[...]
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.
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4530
Alterman's article in the New Yorker is much kinder and very informative.
Out of Print
The death and life of the American newspaper.
by Eric Alterman
March, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman