Today hurt ... a lot.

What you say may be fine in theory, but that's not how it works in real life. The proliferation of color printing in the 1980s did not have to result in art for art's sake, appearance over substance, but that is what happened at almost every newspaper. The formatting of sports sections to create order did not have to result in bad news decisions that gave too much space to trivial things while cutting important news (to fit a format), but it did. The decision to build sports covers around one huge central headline did not have to lead to a preponderance of cute, shallow headlines, but it did. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every supposed improvement, something else gets worse and that something is usually substance and accuracy. There doesn't seem to be any way around that, in real life.

 

The proliferation of color printing and elevation of the role of design in newspaper production might have led to art for art's sake in the beginning, as have the profliferation of photoshop and other digital imaging software, but if you participate in newspaper designers' discussions, you would see that for quite a while now they have increasingly focused on using design to help the story-telling, not just to decorate (and in fact the good designers hate "decorating"). That's the way with most new things -- you get a rash of missteps at first as people play with the new invention, and then people settle down and actually find good ways to use it to improve the product. That's where I see online journalism heading eventually. So no, I don't agree that every supposed improvement would necessarily lead to something else getting worse. So what got worse about journalism when people started printing pamphlets rather than handwriting them? What got worse when each generation of printing presses got better?

 

Well, just off the top of my head, each advancement in printing technology resulted in fewer people on the presses and thus fewer people to call up to the newsroom and say, "Hey, am I reading this wrong or is your headline on D-23 incorrect?"

I'm not saying we shouldn't ever make the tradeoff. But there is always a tradeoff to be made.

 

This is a great thread with the worst title ever...

 

In some ways, this thread is 2 Girls, 1 Cup