Hurt: Shrink paper staff quality
If you are packrat like me you once and awhile pick up an old paper lying around the house. I am talking old - like the '70s or '80s. If you do that - you may see some of this horrible fear about newspaper demise slightly shredded.
Papers in those days were not jampacked with tons of great stuff. Articles were short. The demand of the press ruled. There was a type of news inflation over the last 20 years and things are just coming down to earth - because there is not the advertising to back the product. So I take the Project for Excellence in Journalism's study called "The Changing Newsoom" with salt. Any day still I can throw out half the news in the paper and half the words in the stories I keep. [eg, There is a story in today's Glove about a mailman that wants to wear kilts. Stop the presses.]
It's said that an institutional memory is being lost. That reporters dont know their beats - well let them trial and error and learn them. That is no different than in any field of endeavor. And the Internet is less to blame than is sometimes supposed. Television was the former threat to news, and it does seem as time goes by people become less literate, and more televisual.
Yes it is awful to me that newspapers appear to be dying. Without a great story like Watergate, the idea of a Fifth Estate seems to be dissipate. The idea that only two or three papers have Bagdad bureaus is frightening. Some old power WASPs probably chorttle. Someone can still come along and shake up a town with headlines, but not doing things as they are done now.
http://www.journalism.org/node/11961
Papers in those days were not jampacked with tons of great stuff. Articles were short. The demand of the press ruled. There was a type of news inflation over the last 20 years and things are just coming down to earth - because there is not the advertising to back the product. So I take the Project for Excellence in Journalism's study called "The Changing Newsoom" with salt. Any day still I can throw out half the news in the paper and half the words in the stories I keep. [eg, There is a story in today's Glove about a mailman that wants to wear kilts. Stop the presses.]
It's said that an institutional memory is being lost. That reporters dont know their beats - well let them trial and error and learn them. That is no different than in any field of endeavor. And the Internet is less to blame than is sometimes supposed. Television was the former threat to news, and it does seem as time goes by people become less literate, and more televisual.
Yes it is awful to me that newspapers appear to be dying. Without a great story like Watergate, the idea of a Fifth Estate seems to be dissipate. The idea that only two or three papers have Bagdad bureaus is frightening. Some old power WASPs probably chorttle. Someone can still come along and shake up a town with headlines, but not doing things as they are done now.
http://www.journalism.org/node/11961
Comments