10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed

Without commenting on the veracity of the list itself, let me ask this -- is what the newspaper business is doing now working?

The business desperately needs to open up to new ideas before it completely circles the drain. And open to new ideas does not mean, try to co-opt somebody else's new ideas to prop up print.

 

The question, Oliver, is whether the Swiss magazine is sacrificing quality and/or credibility in favor of page views and advertising dollars. If that's a sacrifice they're willing to make, then good for them, but I don't think it's one a lot of well-established American papers are going to make, at least not so transparently.

 

How do we know that the cures we've been trying for oh, 40 years, haven't been what's brought about this mess? And that more "cures" won't just make it worse?

I think we ought to start to consider that maybe we had it right to begin with when we covered hard news, before we decided that people were turned off by crime coverage and bored by local politics and instead want our newspapers to mirror their uninspiring existences. Shit, man, when was the last time you had a craving to read about people just like you doing the same boring crap you already do every goddamn day? Not me -- I want to read about people who have more interesting lives than I do, whether they are criminals or heroes; I do not want to read about people whose lives are even more banal than mine, fat cretins fixated on their TV sets, generic teenage twits who let their peers do their thinking for them. Fuck 'em. They're not going to read us no matter how stupid we make it. This wiki bullshit is just more of the same attempt to appeal to our readers' vanity that has never worked and never will. I don't care what you think, I care what you know.

 

Round of applause from my neck of the woods.

 

but..but..but...that way of thinking won't win awards.

 

The publisher of my first newspaper told me that people are basically stupid and that they will take whatever you give them. He was an asshole, and a few years after I left he was divorced and had bad wreck that left him hobbled for life. I occasionally wonder if he still believes this.

 

What are you talking about? Interaction helps them improving their quality. They get feedback and learn to understand their readers. Readers get heard and contribute to the magazine. After all, there are incredibly smart people reading this magazine; the idea that the journalists are the smartest people on any given topic is just plain silly. What I basically hear here is people being scared. Like this guy:

This is nothing but hollow rhetoric. Wikipedia works very well, and keeps on working. It competes in many ways with the encyclopedia Britannica, but it is just read a million times more often.

 

We are interested in accuracy, it's what we do. Good newspapers do not permit Wikipedia to be used as a resource. You can posture all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that any moron can write anything he wants on Wikipedia whether it's true or not. Lazy, ignorant people abound, and the fact that millions of them use Wikipedia does not mean we're going to give it any credibility.

You are trying to pimp your business, thus you are not a credible source on this.

 

Wasn't one of the main contributors to Wikipedia supposedly a professor and then it was found out he was just some guy in his younger 20s, who didn't have any of the lofty degrees he claimed to have?

 

Look, I post under my own name. I am as open as I can. In here there is no use pimping my business in here, and there is no need pimping my business either. The comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica is an interesting controversial topic:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/

Wiping wikipedia off the table just because it doesn't qualify as a journalistic ressource doesn't mean that it doesn't work, like the other authoritarian fellow said before.And it has nothing to do with what I was trying to say. I said: News should be a conversation, and I am not the first to say so:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7830218

 

The only advantage wikipedia has is that it's free. It doesn't approach reliability because anyone can edit it. I can start a page named after you and make up all kinds of nonsense.

 

Wiki = truthiness. It doesn't have to be true, it just needs to feel true.
Stephen Colbert has already exposed the sham that is wikipedia, as was noted previously when this thread came up before.
And all the people who pump up the interweb, wiki, blogs and the rest are all people who have a vested interest in them being successful.
Plus, newspaper readership is up, way up. Newspaper circulation is down, but largely due to the demise of the PM paper. Plus most newspapers have phased out expensive, vanity circulation.
Have papers been slow to the internet party? Yes.
But the answer isn't a wiki and it isn't to say that a pack of people, who think they are smarter, know more than the beat writer whose job it is to keep up.