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Simmons and Klosterman on death of newspapers ...

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Rhody31, Mar 16, 2009.

  1. He's been saying precisely that for going on 10 years now.
    He doesn't give a good rat's ass about struggling young writers.
    He's settling scores.
    Period.
     
  2. Small Town Guy

    Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

    Haven't listened to the podcast. But Klosterman is at least is a former newspaper guy. He was in Fargo for about four years and same in Akron. Not that his ideas have any merit about the decline of papers but he thankfully isn't bitter about someone not hiring him 15 years ago. From other things I've read, he's always been pretty grateful for the fact both The Forum and Beacon Journal gave him a lot of freedom to write about what he wanted, how he wanted, which obviously helped lead to his post-paper career. And he certainly got readers to interact with the paper, at least in Fargo. I spent a lot of time reading the letters to the editor in the archives that came after his negative review of a Yanni concert.
     
  3. Yeah, our gigantic, bloated salaries turned us all into such lazy workers. That's why the business is where it is. Right.
     
  4. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    I admit I would like to read a Klosterman review of a Yanni concert. Also those letters to the editor.
     
  5. Cousin Jeffrey

    Cousin Jeffrey Active Member

    One of his chapters in "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs," for those who haven't read it, is about the daily newspaper experience for non-media types, and it's a pretty good primer. He writes about how people see bias in coverage where there is none, how sportswriters start to hate sports (which i find mostly wrong. a lot just hate covering specific sports, or specific teams, or their whole schedule).
     
  6. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Agreed.
     
  7. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    If you want a far more intelligent and intriguing reading on the newspaper business, I would recommend this:

    http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
     
  8. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Maybe a few years at a newspaper would have taught Simmons to make his 25 inches of solid points without the need for 75 inches of vomitous crap.
     
  9. SoCalScribe

    SoCalScribe Member

    A professor who lets up because of tenure isn't much of a professor. And that's precisely why high school and colleges alike are so wary of what tenure means...because you don't always know until it's too late to do something about it.
     
  10. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    The two of them ought to do the auto industry next, or maybe high finance, or heart surgery.

    You want to do a show on dying newspapers, of course you wouldn't want the guest to be someone who's run a newspaper, or a Wall Street analyst who specializes in media business, someone like that. Nah. That'd be boring. (OK, I understand that. But these are still two people not very qualified to talk about the newspaper business.)
     
  11. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    Another piece, similar to Shirky's (the author is founder of outside.in, a local news aggregator):

    http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/03/the-following-is-a-speech-i-gave-yesterday-at-the-south-by-southwest-interactive-festival-in-austiniif-you-happened-to-being.html

    Here is the most salient part for this board:

    Let me say one final thing. I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell. But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two. That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work. But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
     
  12. Unlike those beacons of restraint and responsibility, those big corporations and banks you all seem to love so much. You know, the ones that don't seem to mind the safety net of one government bailout after another? No, it's the workers' faults. Good call. The workers pulling down those hefty $40K salaries. Greedy bastards.

    You Republicans are absolutely unbelievable.
     
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