New Yorker takes a look at the industry

when they can do it from work computers, it makes it easier.

web traffic is highest between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. and dips significantly on the weekends

 

Another sign, I dropped my New Yorker subscription and now read the articles I want online.
So suck it long-form magazine journalism.

 

Interesting piece - the "Huffington Post" model is interesting. Have actual, pristine, reported news pages. Let the loonies slug it out in the back room together. Everybody wins.

One thing I never understand is why new media pioneers have so much contempt for the traditional media. They not only want a place at the table. It seems they won't rest until they bring the whole thing crashing down.

It's frustrating. It really is. People are more apt to believe "Loose Change" than they are the New York Times. I'm not sure people even look at, say, the NYT before they decide it's a MSM rag not to be trusted. I mean, 99 percent of the stories in the paper are enlightening, informative, well-informed and not even concerning subject matter that would open itself to bias even if the reporter wanted to inject it.

Evey time I read one of these stories, BTW, about how the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo are going to take over the world, I still wonder how many independent bloggers are going to rush to cover the Podunk City Council meeting on Tuesday night, where they plan to duke it out until 10:30 p.m. over whether to add another stop sign to the Locust-Cricket streets intersection.

The HP and TPMs of the world have this idea that everybody in the MSM is covering national politics, because that's their obsession. Same thing with all their posters. The media's very, very important function in local communities is scarcely touched upon - not sexy enough, I guess.

 

I suspect that this notion is more a result of wishful thinking and hope because, as this article points out, collective "community," and not independence -- of either reporting, or reader thinking -- is becoming the new model.

Not saying that what, how or why this is happening is right. But it is happening, whether it's in anyone's best interests, or not.

The two most telling and frightening parts of this whole article were this statistical note:

"Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising."

And this paragraph, referencing the parasitical nature of the relationship between other internet sites/blogs, and the newspapers they often rely on, to find, generate and argue their points:

"And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington’s jabs at the Times, and Edsall’s critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know."

Sobering and scary stuff.