Wow! Not the Grey Lady!

[Annie]

links at site!

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/special_packages/sunday_review/14405781.htm

Posted on Sun, Apr. 23, 2006

Paperless news is doing just fine



Newspapers are dying. This isn't an ideological statement or a heartfelt wish, just a simple observation. Horse-drawn carriages yielded to cars, and steamships and ocean liners yielded to airplanes. Consumers prefer efficiency, and the market cannot be denied.

The news business, on the other hand, has never been healthier. At one level, everything is just text, to quote blogger and newspaper columnist James Lileks. Whether written or spoken, it is all just text. A lot of that text, though not nearly as much as a decade ago, still appears in the print of a newspaper. But in the last two decades, much, much more of that text was spoken over the airwaves of talk radio and cable news.

In the last half-dozen years, a huge portion of that text was made available exclusively over the Internet, much of it via the online editions of newspapers, but far more via the more than 25 million blogs that have sprung up since 1999.

Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas. Lots of folks - especially liberals and elites - still like the old Sherpas. The mainstream media - MSM - are populated overwhelmingly by left- and hard-left-leaning writers and editors, and few people even bother to argue the point anymore. American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt.

And nonideological readers, too, began to drift away. Internet news and opinion providers are by and large free. Let's say I love Cleveland-area sports and live in Southern California. I can get the Indians and Browns news from the online editions of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal, the stuff the newspapers of Southern California never cover. Why bother even touching, say, the Los Angeles Times, when I can read the Washington Post for politics, the Wall Street Journal for business, Townhall.com and RealClearPolitics.com for opinion, and the Ohio newspapers for sports? The Times went hard-left years ago, with almost no center-right voice to balance its incessant cheerleading for Democrats. It left me; I didn't leave it.

Advertisers are figuring this out: There are much more efficient ways of connecting with audiences than ads in newspapers that, even when delivered on driveways, go largely if not completely unread.

But news-gathering is not dead. I gladly pay $100 a year for the Wall Street Journal online edition, and I would probably pay for the Washington Post as well. (And, yes, for the Cleveland sports reporting, especially America's best sports columnist, Terry Pluto, who toils at the Akron Beacon Journal.)

And political news-gathering isn't less vibrant today than 20 years ago. It is a golden age of information availability even as the old elites and gatekeepers drown their sorrows at the corner bar because nobody needs them anymore. Power Line (www.powerlineblog.com), Time magazine's blog of the year in 2004, has launched a news service as well as a citizen-journalist site. The three lawyers who run it have done this for free. Instapundit (www.instapundit.com) and the Truth Laid Bear (truthlaidbear.com) have teamed to start Porkbusters, the most effective citizen-journalist watchdog movement in a generation. Right Wing News (www.rightwingnews.com), Michelle Malkin (www.michellemalkin.com), Captain's Quarters (www.captainsquartersblog.com), and Polipundit.com, Fraters Libertas (www.fraterslibertas.com) and Roger L. Simon (www.rogerlsimon.com) - all of these bloggers are producing a huge amount of original and powerful content, subject to the editing of hundreds of thousands of readers.

And Day by Day by Chris Muir (www.daybydaycartoon.com) is just the first of many online cartoons - a syndicate of one.

Old, slow and - sorry to say so - lazy reporters are dizzy at the pace and glee with which the new media report, analyze and move on.

The republic is safe as far as news-gathering and reporting, debate and analysis can make it safe. But newspapers and their employees, well, think stagecoach drivers and clipper-ship captains. There are a few of each still around - as conversation pieces.

Memo to J-school students: It's an online world. Find an online employer.