Slate: Newspapers' real killer is 'lack of social currency'

I don't think he's dead on, but he definitely has part of it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2196485/

 

At our place, by the time a denomination of social currency finds its way past our desk and our bosses and into the paper, it's already been put out of circulation.

 

He's nuts. There are at least five parallel worlds:

1.) There are people who are rooted to their physical communities by their heritage and/or their children, and local daily newspaper still offers a great deal of social currency for them.

2.) There are people who are disconnected from their physical communities because they are essentially rootless, and local daily newspapers offer no social currency to them and never can.

3.) There are people who are too cool to read the local daily newspaper, but they may read local alternative-alternative weeklies (such as The Stranger in Seattle) either on newsprint or online.

4.) There are people who are complete morons and don't read anything.

5.) There are people who can't read enough. Probably these are Slate.com readers. They read every-fucking-thing. It's not that the local daily newspaper lacks social currency, it's that there's inflation across the board and all media's social currency has been devalued.

There may be some subcultures I've left out. My point is that it's a fractionalized world. Where once people had 3-5 TV choices at a time, they now have hundreds. It's not a problem unique to newspapers. I get the feeling Jack Shafer is in that world that asks, puzzled, "What does PTA stand for" and doesn't know the name of the guy who runs the gas station a block away. We live in an increasingly less locally-connected society in which many people now engage, if they engage at all, with people not based on physical proximity. It sucks for newspapers, but it sucks for a lot of other businesses as well.

 

I'm pretty sure you just identified the decline of the Roman Empire. We are the new Rome. We're going down.

 

We're gonna need a Nero.

Nominees?

 

I want to be Caligula.

 

Soccer. Or Max Mosely. Pick one.

 

Frank_R, that's one of the best posts you've made. And that's sayin' something.

Wow.

 

Would-be end of thread.

Thank God we're done with him in five months.

 

Only superficially.

Fredo will turn out to be the Gift That Keeps On Giving . . . for decades.

Unfortunately.