I read another baby-boomer hand-wring piece about the way newspapers used to be on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website tonight. It got me up enough to register for the site, click the activation link in the email and write a comment.
This is what the lady wrote:
Sure, the Internet is a wonderful place to be. But the digital newspaper shares space with those who post because they have a position to promote, a score to settle, a diet to sell or that voice in the microwave told them to.
Newspapers are better than that. They are apart from that. No, they don’t always get it right. But they are the only daily medium of depth that has the resources and the responsibility to try.
This is what I wrote:
Gosh, so much hand-wringing. I love newspapers too, and you know what I worry about? I worry about the collective lack of imagination of those (such as Drexel [the author]) who can’t envision a future any better than the present that exists. I feel like I just read 15 inches of my grandpa, on his porch, talking about how things were when he was my age.
This attention to nostalgia is part of same mindset problems newspapers face. Sure, newspapers are in trouble. But nostalgia is not a business model, and it’s going to take local papers some attention to detail and investment online if they’re going to figure out meaningful ways to publish information, build community and make a living out there.
I don’t have any grand predictions, but I can imagine a future of local online publishing that’s more engaging, thoughtful, informative, context-laden, diverse, and meaningful to the members of its communities than the paper-based one we used to have.
I agree with you about on-line as a story-telling medium. Compared with printed text and static photos and the limits of space, the combinations that seem possible now are mind-boggling. If you are engaged with the new medium, and just as much as a journalist I would have thought an academic would be interested for didactic purposes, every day there is a new discovery, a small eureka moment of how better to convey information. Who has time to read newspapers any more with so much “news” to be involved in?
There should be no business model in the news. You can’t make money from reporting the truth because its just too boring and everyday - which is precisly why local newspapers suck and have always sucked. What you are talking about is media, propaganda and advertising. If there is a nostalgia it is for the time when people believed and had faith in objectivity and unbiased reporting - those days are long gone. We don’t have NEWS today we have an unending stream of trivialities and opinions.