Somebody, plz, tell me what the f she means.....

No kidding. You mean like blogs, podcasts, videos, radio, TV, email alerts, mobile web sites, interactive prep pages and stuff that most papers are already doing?

What I would like an original, specific idea.

 

Inside of the box has been getting a bad rap in recent years. It's a place where logic and civility prevail, it's the nerve center of rational thinking, and it has no sharp edges with which to contend. Probably just needs a good ad campaign. Which agency handled the "Virginia is for lovers" account?

 

There are plenty of reasons you could point to for newspapers' Incredible Shrinking Circulation. As for our failure to attract younger readers, well, I think you've got to look farther down the chain to understand that. Anybody had a kid in high school lately? They're teaching the same damn reading lists they were 30 or more years ago. Why would anyone think that the way to turn an adolescent boy on to reading is to shove Jane Austen up his ass? These kids must go screaming into the hall when the bell rings. I seriously wonder how many young "readers" -- in the traditional sense -- there really are out there. Young skimmers, maybe, young surfers, but young "readers"? And yet newspapers do somersaults trying to reach this demographic, a demographic that might not even exist -- not, at least, in the numbers they imagine.
But to return to my original point, it's as if nothing has been written in the last half century that's worthy of high school contemplation. This is where the readers are truly being lost, not when they pick up a newspaper and decide it doesn't "speak" to them. Papers should start doing stories about that -- about disgracefully antiquated high school reading lists, schools' refusal to expose students to reading for pleasure, etc. That's where the problem begins -- there and in homes where the TV is always on.

 

Schools aren't to blame for children who are uninterested in reading. That responsibility falls on parents. If you park your kids in front of a TV or DVD player when they're young, they'll become zombies and fulfill the prophecy. If you teach them to read at an early age and stir their curiosity, they will be involved and interactive. About one in every 16,000 will still become serial killers, however, so go figure.

 

Martin & Woltz (sp?)

 

Sure, all newspapers could look and read like People magazine. Then all your readers fit into the 16-25 demographic and we become a nation where you look like a genius for using any word with more than syllable.

 

Schools are absolutely part of the problem. English departments are sucking the fucking life out of these kids with their overconcern with test scores and complete obliviousness to contemporary literature. I'm not some education hater. My old man was the chairman of a high school English department, my brother was a teacher, my wife is a teacher and my two in-laws were teachers. They'll tell you the same damn thing. Get your head out of your ass.

 

I am much too polite to carve her up in public on this thread. If you would like to know more about her agenda and tactics, PM me.

 

Monroe: Nobody liked Jane Austen 30 years ago, either. But it's not such a bad thing to teach kids that not everything is "all about you." And it's not so bad to learn that some of the perplexing problems of life have always been thus.

 

If it was just one Jane Austen novel, anybody could suck it up and slog through it. But it's this unending torrent of "classics" -- the literary "canon" -- that kills any flickering interest in these kids. Someone made the crack once that "nothing stays the same -- except for the avant garde theater." He forgot about high school reading lists. As my old man once explained to me: "These books aren't chosen because they're good or even relevant, they're chosen because they offer blatant -- and often clumsy -- examples of various literary devices that English teachers are trying to teach . . . foreshadowing, flashback, what have you." Hell of a way to encourage reading.
My older boy went through an entire year in middle school where he didn't read a single book from cover to cover -- just selected chapters, selected sections of various works. So when schools aren't boring kids to tears with the books they foist upon them, they're pandering to their ADD.

 

Ace: How long did it take newspapers to start doing those things like blogs, podcasts, etc.? And did they happen before or after readers had already started looking for their news elsewhere?

As I said, I don't agree with much of what Maegan Carberry says. I did look her up to find out more about what she is all about; figured that might be a better use of my time than just focusing on the million-dollar words she uses as a reason to dismiss her ideas. And from her writings, she is a young, loud, "Dammit, WHY cant things just be this way?!?! Darn those oldies!!!" writer.

I just feel that we can't say "we're screwed!!!!!" at one point, and then say "screw THAT!!!!!" when someone brings up ideas, and we use the big words they used as a reason to ignore them completely. Ideas should be dismissed because they're bad ideas, not because we hate that she used "organically" in her conclusion.

 

Hmm ... really?

"Take Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It sold 110,000 copies last year, according to Nielsen BookScan, which excludes academic sales from its calculations—which means these numbers aren't inflated by students who have no choice but to buy Austen. Compare it to figures for, say, The Runaway Jury by John Grisham, which was the No. 1 best seller in 1996: Last year, Grisham's novel sold 73,337 copies—almost 40,000 fewer than Pride and Prejudice."

Here's the link to the rest of the story. It's from 2003, but the point is still made.
http://www.slate.com/id/2081052/