Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Turning the page on print
Putting the "me" in media: I'm quoted in this story about the upcoming Jay Leno prime time show.

The cortisone shot I mentioned a few days ago: After a couple days of sheer agony -- having a gigantic needle shoved into your shoulder for several minutes is going to hurt -- I have recovered about 90% of my range of motion. I can wash my hair and put away dishes using both of my arms. Believe me, that may not sound exciting, but it is to me. I am not quite sure how long the effects of the shot last, but I'm far less miserable. Here's a really good article about frozen shoulder, for those of you who want to learn more.

More sad news for newspapers: if you live in the Detroit area and want a newspaper delivered to your home every morning, forget it. A print edition of the Detroit News and Free Press will now only be available to subscribers on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. My family used to subscribe to the Free Press when I was in high school, mainly because it was a morning paper (the local Grand Rapids Press was, and still is, an afternoon paper). I used to get up early in the morning, tiptoe out to the driveway and pick up the paper to read while I ate my breakfast. I'm sure that sounds downright paleolithic to today's wired generation. The last time I read the Free Press was this past June, and I was shocked at how skimpy it was. I'm sure a lot of papers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, will be keeping an eye on how things go in Detroit. This could be the wave of the future.

Yeah, yeah, it makes financial sense, and I guess I'm part of the last generation to find sitting down with a printed broadsheet more enjoyable than reading the news online. I like the big comics page and being able to do the Jumble and crossword in pen rather than on a screen. I like the layout, even though I wish more papers would follow USA Today's lead and not have so many stories that jump to an interior page. (The worst offender is Friday's Chronicle, when you can read the first paragraph of six different movie reviews on one page, and they all jump to different inside pages.) The Chron's SFGate.com gets millions of hits every month, but they just haven't figured out a way to "monetize" all of those "eyeballs," to use some unpleasant jargon.

The most reasonable plan I've heard is to take a fraction of a cent out of every dollar we pay our Internet service providers and pass it along to the newsgatherers. I have no idea how that would work in practice, but somebody's gotta come up with something, and fast. The Detroit experiment will save money on newsprint, but I can't imagine it'll be a cash cow for them, and it will get people out of the daily paper-reading habit. This is a serious problem, because 99% of bloggers just link to somebody else's news coverage instead of doing original reporting, and the people who write and edit those stories are being laid off or taking buyouts every single day.
posted by 125records @ 9:44 PM  
1 Comments:
  • At 5:22 AM, Blogger kts said…

    I feel so cool to know such a media maven--you go quotable girl! love kts

     
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Name: Sue
Home: San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States
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