Comments on: Fading Away

By: Enoch

Enoch — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 12:09:43 +0000

‘T is my fondest hope the New York Times continues to publish. Whether for sale or available through the occassional pail dive, there’s always a need to pass the time and, perhaps, later in the day, to wrap up kitchen refuse.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:35:25 +0000

Another MSM problem is their general ineptness when they try to do anything in the online world. For example, I’ve been trying intermittantly for half an hour to use the NY Post link for the Ralph Peters article in the story below. Every time, it hangs up waiting for an ad for Michael Bloomberg.

Either engineer your web pages to load the content in parallel with the ads, or write performance contracts with ad vendors requring them to provide downloads within a few seconds. Don’t allow every single ad supplier to make your website unusable.

Jeesh

By: Knucklehead

Knucklehead — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:20:35 +0000

Everything you could want to know about the MSM, the decline of public opinion and audience regarding the MSM, what the MSM thinks of itself and its audience, and how it intends to wage the battle as it goes down fighting, can be found in the State of the Media – 2005 report of Journalism.org. This a report about the MSM commissioned by the MSM.

The net of the report is that they bear no responsibility for the decline of “journalism”, it is due to factors beyond their control but which they are forced to adjust to, the audience that increasingly dismisses them as biased and inaccurate is too stupid to know anything about bias and inaccuracy, and the only solution to their problems is to be increasingly hostile to the Bush administration (no kidding).

By: David Foster

David Foster — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:12:03 +0000

The newspapers would be having trouble anyhow because of technological and demographic changes, but irresponsible managements have made the problem much worse by allowing political bias to permeate their news pages as well as their editorial columns.

New “electronic paper” technologies are about to hit the market: these will make it much easier to read electronic documents in bright sunlight, in a subway car, or wherever. I predict a significant additional hit to newspaper readership and revenues, unless they do very smart things very quickly. Which they won’t.

By: Don

Don — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 12:34:47 +0000

Wonder if there is a relationship between the numbers of lost readership and the death rate among the older generation of society. People are comfortable with the media they grew up with. As the dead wood media generation starts to depart the room, the base number of subscribers and purchasers is going to decline naturally. Wonder if Al Gore took that into consideration when he pushed to ‘wire the classrooms’? Horses didn’t disappear overnight from the public roads, it was a generational thing.

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 05:01:25 +0000

To prove James’ point, the NYTimes ran an article in the Magazine on August 15, 1999, “The Eminence of Excess” by Nina Munk, about architect Thierry Despont. The article discussed, inter alia, a house that Despont designed for Les Wexner, founder of the Limited, which house is about 10 mi. from where I sit at this moment in Columbus OH. This is from the article:

“For Wexner, Despont constructed a 60,112-square-foot manse (three-quarters the size of the White House) on 340 goodly acres three hours from Cleveland.”

Well, like I said the house is in suburban Columbus, but even then it is only 2.5 hrs from here to the Jake in downtown Cleveland. Alternatively, they could have said 2 hours from Cincinnati. Maybe they couldn’t spell Cincinnati.

By: Robin Goodfellow

Robin Goodfellow — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 02:47:05 +0000

Another factor is that so much news, especially news beyond the local horizon, has been amalgamated and conglomerated. The bulk of any average newspaper or TV news cast is composed of stories from wire services or written “based on” wire service stories. Thus, the news in the paper and the news on the TV is actually, for the most part, the SAME news. So there’s very little reason to wait longer and spend more money to read it.