Another One Bites the Dust

One more publication, The Printed Blog, closed up shop this week. This new kind of newprint publication--which compiled posts from local blogs in a printed format-- was, in my opinion, a novel idea. But due to lack of outside investment capital, The Printed Blog folded. And alas, bloggers will continue to find their audiences online, and not in newsprint.

The New York Times let The Daily Show in?

O gosh. This is sad, uncomfortable, baffling, and hilarious:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Leaving Newspapers You Can Hold Behind Part I

Many people who grew up loving newspapers can't get used to the idea that their news might not come in the form of a paper that they spread out on the breakfast table every morning.

I can understand that. My father read Mike Royko aloud to my mother at night while she fixed dinner, and my love affair with newspapers and the worlds they could open me up to started there. Over the years I came to love the wide variety of information a newspaper could provide. Somewhere along the way in my 30s I decided I wanted to understand the world of business and finance. I used the business pages of newspapers as my textbook, wading through articles I barely understood, until, little by little, I gained a basic understanding basic financial concepts.

Click here to read more!

I always thought of the newspaper as the average person's college -- a place where, if you spent the time, you could learn something about anything you really wanted to know about and at very little cost.

Best of all a good deal of the joy came from the way a newspaper could unexpected introduce me to new and fascinating information that I had no idea I wanted to know about.

Though I still read print newspapers on the weekdays, it's mainly because they come to my office that way. At home, my Sunday morning routine now begins with me settling into my easy chair with my cup of coffee and Google news on my laptop.

And, you know what? It's better. The variety of news and information is so vast. I started really understanding this during the Obama campaign, when I, like everyone else, was searching everyday (multiple times) online for some new scrap of information that would show we were winning.

That activity opened me up to numerous new information sources and the wide variety of content available online -- much more than a newspaper could ever provide and much more varied.

Yes, you can't spread the online world out on the table, but, if you have a laptop -- and that's essential -- you can enjoy it from an easy chair.

I'm not a tech geek, but my next post will tell you what I think are the basics for shifting over to an online news world. It's really not that hard.

The State of the News Media 2009

The Seattle Post Intelligencer publishes its last print issue on Tuesday. The Rocky Mountain News is no more. These are two venerable publications that I never thought I would see disappear in my lifetime.

It's a good time to read a new report from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media: An Annual Report on American Journalism.

Here's a taste:

Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.
In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7% in an election year—something unheard of—and ratings are now falling or are flat across the schedule. In network news, even the rare programs increasing their ratings are seeing revenues fall.
Now the ethnic press is also troubled and in many ways is the most vulnerable because so many operations are small.
Only cable news really flourished in 2008, thanks to an Ahab-like focus on the election, although some of the ratings gains were erased after the election.
Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating.