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What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

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Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#11

Post by Zikes »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #3
wcummings wrote: post #2

I'm a young guy, and I get multiple newspapers, and a few news magazines delivered. I don't like new media like reddit and "social news aggregators", because you're replacing professional editors w/ unpaid volunteers and "votes".

Instead of crowd-sourcing what gets published/visible, trust some anonymous individuals at a newspaper? Who has only one agenda instead of a mixture of many voices and ideals? That's got its downside too. The bubble is created there by what tiny number of voices are included in the subscription list.

Reddit is crowd-sourced for things like cat gifs and porn. For news, it's heavily curated by people with agendas and biases. It's as "fair and balanced" as Fox News.

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#12

Post by jacquesm »

pif wrote: post #6

A colossal mistake... from which point of view? Never had we available such a huge source of fresh news. Maybe that's not the best for newspaper industry, but as far at it lasts (and no serious signs of disruptions have shown up), let's enjoy it! It looks a bit like software development: Microsoft educated users to ship crap (people think that having to reboot is fine!) and we ended up having to maintain crap.

It's fresh news, but it is shallow. Quality reporting requires dedication and resources, something some news organizations had under one roof. It's hard to see how that very necessary element in our society will be kept around in the longer term. The 5th estate has a very important function and without it our societies will no doubt be poorer.

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#13

Post by JoeAltmaier »

lisa_q wrote: post #7
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of crowd-sourcing what gets published/visible, trust some anonymous individuals at a newspaper? Who has only one agenda instead of a mixture of many voices and ideals? That's got its downside too. The bubble is created there by what tiny number of voices are included in the subscription list.

"some anonymous individuals at a newspaper" ...you mean professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise?

No I mean editors who determine what makes it on to the printed page.

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#14

Post by orbitur »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #3
wcummings wrote: post #2

I'm a young guy, and I get multiple newspapers, and a few news magazines delivered. I don't like new media like reddit and "social news aggregators", because you're replacing professional editors w/ unpaid volunteers and "votes".

Instead of crowd-sourcing what gets published/visible, trust some anonymous individuals at a newspaper? Who has only one agenda instead of a mixture of many voices and ideals? That's got its downside too. The bubble is created there by what tiny number of voices are included in the subscription list.

I think a look at reddit shows that you can trust crowdsourced news much less than say, the NYT or WaPo.

Twitter's a bit different, there are good reporters on the ground who tweet a lot, but Twitter is terrible at actual aggregation.

Honestly, a dedicated newsroom is better.

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#15

Post by tdb7893 »

jacquesm wrote: post #12
pif wrote: post #6

A colossal mistake... from which point of view? Never had we available such a huge source of fresh news. Maybe that's not the best for newspaper industry, but as far at it lasts (and no serious signs of disruptions have shown up), let's enjoy it! It looks a bit like software development: Microsoft educated users to ship crap (people think that having to reboot is fine!) and we ended up having to maintain crap.

It's fresh news, but it is shallow . Quality reporting requires dedication and resources, something some news organizations had under one roof. It's hard to see how that very necessary element in our society will be kept around in the longer term. The 5th estate has a very important function and without it our societies will no doubt be poorer.

You might be interested to know that Buzzfeed seems to be doing investigative reporting now

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#16

Post by goatlover »

nkozyra wrote: post #10

The conclusion that a drop in readership is proof that moving to the web was a mistake is extraordinarily shallow. "Readers continue to leave print newspapers, but they’re not migrating to the online editions." Because they have more options. Print products were often monopolies, especially in the early to mid 90s, a hey day for newspapers. There was often a single publication per DMA. What happened then is newspaper…

Sacrificing the ideals of journalism sounds like a bad deal for democracy. But then again, if people would rather be entertained by whatever is in their filter bubble for five minutes, than be challenged, I guess that's the kind of news world we get.

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#17

Post by dasil003 »

> if a newspaper company wanted to make a real splash on the Web, it would be better off inventing an original website—the next Business Insider or BuzzFeed—and not remodel its newspaper copy.

I have to disagree with Chyi here—"create the next BuzzFeed" is not a strategy; it's extremely hard, competitive and they don't have the skills to even attempt it.

That said, I think there's a strong argument for having never put anything online, or at least behind a strong paywall with no trials. That way they could have maintained an air of premium information instead of going head to head with a gazillion clickbait factory paying peanuts to underemployed college grads.

Of course the problem is this is all hypothetical, and if someone had made this bet they'd be getting hung out to dry based on the declining revenues even if they wouldn't have been as bad as they ended up being in our current reality. In other words, it was just too risky a bet to not try to "win the web" even though it is a race to the bottom newspapers are ill-equipped to compete in.

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#18

Post by goatlover »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #13
lisa_q wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"some anonymous individuals at a newspaper" ...you mean professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise?

No I mean editors who determine what makes it on to the printed page.

Editors aren't also professionals who work with the journalists? What you're advocating for is a lot of amateur voices with limited resources in comparison and a plethora of personal agendas. It's more democratic than having a few professional curators. But is that better?

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#19

Post by niccaluim »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #13
lisa_q wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"some anonymous individuals at a newspaper" ...you mean professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise?

No I mean editors who determine what makes it on to the printed page.

Right. So, professional journalists with experience, and who are anything but anonymous.

Re: What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

#20

Post by VLM »

lisa_q wrote: post #7
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of crowd-sourcing what gets published/visible, trust some anonymous individuals at a newspaper? Who has only one agenda instead of a mixture of many voices and ideals? That's got its downside too. The bubble is created there by what tiny number of voices are included in the subscription list.

"some anonymous individuals at a newspaper" ...you mean professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise?

"professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise"

The world is full of domain experts who all know the journalists get everything wrong about their specialty, but out of misguided charity think its just an odd mistake and journalists in general know everything about every OTHER specialty and can't wait to read those stories.

I'd love to read tech journalism from someone who has run a compiler on source code they themselves wrote. Its out there, but not at mainstream prestigious sites where all that matters is class rank at Columbia.

The problem with newspapers is we have more than about 3. Back when they printed and delivered paper scaling meant we have 1000 substandard local papers all of which equally suck. Someday we'll have like 3 and they'll actually be worth reading. But a lot of jobs have to go away first.

That's going to have interesting effect on journalism schools. Can you even run one, if there's only three small employers? May go back to the days when most journalists have a degree in something else.

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