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| Hearsay: |
Russell Smith is a newspaper junkie and will defend them to the death. Well, Russell, despite agreeing in principle with a significant portion of what you’re saying, it was nice knowing you. I’ll plant a tree that won’t get cut down on your grave.
I love newspapers. I love the dry wit of newspaper people. I love the size and portability and recyclability of a paper product. The ritual of the morning paper creates the most focused, and perhaps pleasant moments of the day.
The security of the kitchen table, the morning light, a bit of baroque guitar, a hot coffee give me, for some reason, a sudden and deep concentration that I am unable to recreate for the rest of the day. Perhaps it’s because of that moment’s proximity to sleep. Perhaps it’s because a sheet of newsprint is so static, so stable, so unflashy: It does not distract me with links to brighter, sexier images, or to the gossipy and stressful world of e-mail, as reading on my computer does.
But it works in a coffee shop at lunch, too, or at a bar at the end of the day. I can sit by a window, look at the street, pick up that smudgy sheet and focus intensely on something like tax laws, and then look back at the street; it’s an invariably intense moment of connection to what’s going on around me.
There is something about that conjunction of pleasures, of the coffee, the view, the city, the sense of being among people that is conducive, for me, to thinking and understanding.
And now everyone is telling me, everyone believes, that this pleasure is coming to an end. We have all read the statistics and know the long list of American papers that have disappeared or are about to disappear.
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March 26th, 2009 at 9:37 am
I wonder if it would mean anything to the newspaper publishers of the world that I would pay five times what I pay now for my newspaper subscriptions if they would print a nice slim edition without the ads, the inserts, and the pap (WHY does the Saturday Toronto Star have TWO Wheels sections???).
Half the trees and all the slow, kitchen-table, coffee-warmed news!
March 26th, 2009 at 10:28 am
There is a fundamental dishonesty about what a newspaper does. Readers are given the impression that they are the customers, and that the product they’re buying is information. In fact, the advertisers are the customers, and the product being bought is reader attention. The information is simply a means to attract readers. It’s “bait”.
It has been estimated by the Silicon Valley Insider that it would be cheaper for the New York Times to give every subscriber a free Kindle than it is to print the paper. While there is likely to be nostalgia-fuelled resistance, there is a great deal of merit to the notion of having newspapers (the “paper” in “newspaper” will become a linguistic artifact, in the same way that we “dial” telephone numbers) available primarily via electronic means. I have an electronic subscription to the New York Review of Books, and it’s wonderful to have access to every article they’ve published, since older articles can give context to newer ones, and links between articles can lead to other areas of interest. Sometimes I enjoy the happy feeling of finding something that I didn’t even know I was looking for.
By using the electronic model, publisher can save on printing costs and derive more of their revenue from paying customers, and concentrate on gathering and reporting information, rather than chasing ad dollars. Like Charlotte, I believe that people who want good sources of information are willing to pay for it–publishers could even come out ahead.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Here’s what VP Joe Biden has to say about the demise of the newspaper. (You have to be patient and go right to the end.)
March 26th, 2009 at 11:15 am
sorry, i’m new. Click the link in my name.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
A lot of the newspapers that are stumbling and falling were overvalued and bought at prices far above what they were worth. There are plenty of success stories in the industry as well managed companies cope with changes.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Too true, J. Though I think there’s more to the morning newspaper than the information. Russell is pining for the ritual as well. I love sitting in the sun with my coffee and my newspaper while my daughter crawls around on the floor. I love being able to browse rather than search, to cut things out and stick them to the fridge, and to be able to read wherever I happen to be rather than be tethered to my computer. I also appreciate being able to be seen by my children reading in the family space rather than sitting in front of a screen, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
None of these experiences are exclusive to paper – no doubt an e-reader or PDA of some kind will be able to recreate it – but at this point, today, the electronic offering doesn’t hack it.
March 26th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I agree with you, Charlotte. I love sharing pieces of the paper with my family. I love working on the weekend crosswords all week. (online crosswords dont let you fill in just anything. they actually want the right answer) My mom loves giving me recipes she cuts out. I love newspapers.
March 26th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
I think you’d have to pay about ten times what you pay now for a paper to balance out the advertising revenue and all that other pap. I read somewhere a while back that it costs most daily newspapers in the U.S. around $10 to print each copy — which they sell for $1 or so. Print newspapers are incredibly expensive to produce, and they’re prettily heavily subsidized by advertising. Remove that advertising and you don’t really have a viable business model. As we’re seeing now.
Who knows — maybe online-only newspapers will work because they’re so much cheaper to run.
March 26th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
“I read somewhere a while back that it costs most daily newspapers in the U.S. around $10 to print each copy — which they sell for $1 or so.”
This is the first time I’ve seen this statistic, and I must say I find it fascinating. It also seems to me it has implications for publishing, since the majority of newspapers are already in the midst of not simply shutting down their press runs but moving to an e-paper, paper-paper hybrid. There doesn’t have to be an either/or (unless particular presses find they prefer one option only).