Father John Misty – Now I’m Learning to Love the War (Live on KCRW) by subpop
The New Orleans Times-Picayune will reduce its print run to three days instead of a full week as a cost-cutting measure, as will a group of newspapers in Alabama. Both of those stories made me think of this song (at about a minute in), which is a comment on just how inefficient it is to have a physical artifact for music, and print is even worse. The useful lifetime of a newspaper is about an hour, and it takes a multi-million dollar press, acres of trees, fleets of trucks and a staff of delivery people to get it to your door. Doing that inefficient thing three days a week just makes an already out-of-date product more useless. I’ll be surprised to see these papers publishing anything in the near future.
BGK
Charles Pierce passionately and effectively rebuts your argument on multiple fronts.
RalfW
I think Sunday papers will be around for a while. They can be a good (or, more often, crappy) repository of analysis stories, style sections, etc. Main reason Sunday papers will stick around for a while? Glossy ad inserts for stores. Those still make a lot of money. Sure, that too shall pass, but more slowly.
But breaking news on a daily basis? Absurd to keep pulping trees and trucking everywhere all the time.
robertdsc-PowerBook
Having once seen newspaper presses operate up close and personal, I am sad that they’re going the way of the dodo. Sure, the paper coming out was the conservative rag from Investors Business Daily, but watching the press run was a treat.
BGK
Also three, one wonders if a tumbrel is being prepared for Warren of Omaha, given what he said about free online content.
different-church-lady
But… I thought we digital age trendies were always supposed to celebrate the death of “trad-media” so that bloggers could liberate us from the corporations and deliver us into a free-info paradise?
mistermix
@BGK: Right…poor people need the T-P in paper form because the Internet is too expensive for them.
Let’s just look at the economics of that statement. A monthly subscription to the T-P costs $30/month after all the b.s. free offers are over. (The come-on rate is $19/month, so it’s at least $30/month for a daily subscription after you’ve subscribed for a while. I was paying roughly that about 5 years ago for our local paper.)
Low-end DSL is $15/month here, don’t know what it is in NOLA. Buy a cheap netbook and DSL and you have the whole Internet, not just the T-P, for roughly the same cost over a couple of years.
When Pierce starts talking about real subscription rates in the 9th Ward, then I’ll listen. My guess is that if you’re really poor, you have neither a subscription to a daily paper nor an Internet connection. But at least I can say it’s a guess, since I’m not blathering on about the imagined needs of a community I don’t really understand.
gbear
Don’t be knocking vinyl records and CD’s. There are those of us who don’t want our entire music collection to be in crappy sounding formats delivered on computer speakers, sliced and diced in ways that the artist didn’t intend.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@different-church-lady:
you still need reporters, and people with access. oh yeah and people who are paid because people who make their living at it, kinda have to,whether they feel like it or not. that is of primo importance in a shit storm.
that said bridges can be built, and a new foundation can be created.
Ash Can
While I’m happy about the prospect of no longer expending trees and energy resources for this, my concern is that this could result in a permanent underclass of underinformed citizens. If optimal — i.e., most comprehensive — news delivery is via electronic gizmos that are out of the financial reach of many people, those folks will have to rely on TV and radio news broadcasts, word of mouth, bulletin boards, and other significantly more limited and superficial sources. The solution, of course, is to make the technology cheap enough for everyone to afford it. I suppose that’s possible, but will it happen in time to coincide with the ultimately complete demise of print news?
James Gary
However inefficient and clumsy the old dead-tree ad-revenue-supported model was, it had one advantage: it enabled the existence of actual reporting/news-gathering entities.
As brilliant as the posters here at BJ are, they still only link to, and comment on, other people’s actual reporting–and the less of other people’s actual reporting there is, the poorer we will all be.
Tom
Love this album. Aside from the one-two punch of “Nancy From Now On” and the Hollywood cemetery song, this was the one that really stuck out.
Love the tee-pee song too.
ohollern
My local newspaper only publishes three times a week, and it’s worse than useless. It’s not even fit to line a bird cage with. If it wasn’t for the crossword and Suduko puzzles nobody would probably get it at all.
brashieel
It’s already been pointed out, but… A lot of people still don’t have regular access to the Internet. During disasters (like say….a flood) the number without internet access increases.
Factor in the loss of a bunch of rather competent reporters and I don’t see anything good here.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Cheer up Mister Mix, Politico has this. As old guard newsies fall by the wayside, the up and coming all digital scions of virtual 4th estaters will take up the slack telling twoof to power. Why just this morn Politico let’s us know that Obama has and is fucking up, by talking dirty about rich people and Wall Street leaders.
Why? because Politico says so, that’s why. And Cory Booker said so, and he is the voice of prophecy for the entire democrat party, as did a gaggle of anonymous “consultants” reportedly close to the campaign. If you count Doug Schoen and buggeye Caddell blithering on Fox News.
And it’s unmistakable, that Obama has fucked the chicken by criticizing rich people, and the upstanding citizens on Wall Street producing real money from fake money, doing society a great service in the process. Every economic system needs vultures, otherwise who will eat the carrion of a dying middle class.
It’s unmistakable, I tells ya.
As is the clear eyed ascendancy of the Mittster.
Let the turd polishing begin. And we don’t need no stinkin’ local newspapers. Politico and co, have this and dint kill a single tree. Though the truth might have been euthanized, as dead weight, sucking the profit out of life.
Now excuse me, I have a personal space ship to build, and no time to waste.
James Gary
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Don’t worry. I’m sure Mistermix understands that Politico will start providing extensive coverage of local New Orleans news, thereby filling the vacuum left when the inefficient Times-Picayune laid off a third of its staff.
different-church-lady
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick: No, no, no, I’m repeatedly told right on these here internets that reporters are awful and blogging will set us free!
different-church-lady
@Ash Can:
Isn’t that what we already have? Even among those with means?
different-church-lady
@James Gary: Ahh… so someone else noticed that too.
elmo
Damn. I’ve got no brief for the majority of newspapers out there, and particularly not for my own local fishwrap the Kaplan Daily, but the T-P did absolutely astonishing work during Katrina. Really first-class, brave reporting.
mistermix
@Tom: The next post is for you, then.
@The Rest of You: I get it, it’s going to suck when paper newspapers fold. But they will, and all the impassioned Charlie Pierce blog posts in the world won’t stop it from happening.
James Gary
@mistermix:
No one’s disputing that. But your breezy TED/Yglesias-style handwaving about how it’s some kind of improvement, “because ‘efficiency!’ and ‘streamlining!,'” is just really obnoxious.
Todd
The content of my daily local paper blows, and isn’t worth the price I pay. It is good, however, for starting my charcoal chimney for my grill and smoker. Don’t know what I’ll do when newsprint is gone – use remaindered copies of wingnut books I expect, but I don’t know how well it burns.
ET
The Times Picayune has been around since 1837 and it got though Katrina so this is sorta sad. Unfortunately going to three days just speed up the process of the whole endeavor going away forever. Sure the online will be around. For awhile but I don’t expect it to last either. What happens then? I don’t know.
mistermix
@James Gary: It is simply a fact that printing a newspaper is an immensely wasteful thing compared to putting the same news on the Internet, and people don’t pay for waste.
I guess if I had emoted correctly and conjured up (probably imaginary) images of some of the poorest people in America subscribing to a daily newspaper because they “can’t afford” the Internet, then I would be “serious” instead of “breezy”.
Sorry I didn’t give you a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Next time I’ll try to spare your delicate fee-fees by making the right noises.
Corner Stone
Somebody used both hands to pull on the crankypants this morning!
Kent
I get my local paper delivered Wed-Sun because they have a pay firewall and it’s only about $0.50/mo. more expensive to get the Wed-Sun home delivery than it is to just get the online version. My 3rd grade daughter loves to read the comics and page through the news so I mostly get it for her.
The weekday mornings when it comes I bring it in to school to read (I teach HS). The other day some smartass kid asked me “Mr….why are you reading yesterday’s news?”
“This is today’s paper” I told him.
“But it’s yesterday’s news” he replied. “You show me one piece of news in that paper that happened today”
Of course he was right. It’s always yesterday’s news.
Kent
@mistermix:
I think a lot of poorer people buy newspapers for the coupons which are worth a lot more than the cost of the paper. One doesn’t need the internet for news anyway when one has cable. And most everyone has cable.
Older_Wiser
@mistermix: When you’re living from paycheck to paycheck, or on a monthly SS or welfare check, it’s hard to come up with enough cash for what you’re proposing. Figure 50 cents for a newspaper, even $5/wk for a subscription vs what even a used computer would cost, plus the connection to the internet.
But it’s true that some people simply rely on TV to get their news; sadly, too many don’t even keep up with it. There are satellite dishes all over poor areas of this county. People will be entertained, if not informed. Some simply don’t have the education, tools or hope to deal with their lot in their little world since everyone else there is in the same boat.
I’ve had to support myself and 2 other people, from time to time (when there’s no work for my grandson), on less than a $1100/mo SS check. It’s doable w/food stamps if you’re not a frenzied consumer. My computer is 8 yrs old, a desktop, bought new when I was working, for cash (I no longer believe in “credit”), and I have a basic cable pkg (mostly for the internet, but also for PBS kids programs for my 2-1/2 yr old great-grandson–his father has custody by default–movies and local stations. I remain a leftist to the core and don’t believe a lot of the disinformation spewed by the media, local or national, much of which is devoid of facts anyway. Not having cable news w/all the punditry has lowered my blood pressure, too. People’s choices are almost always made based on their own personal economy. I figure I get more bang for the buck on the internet; sometimes getting anything secondhand is better for your health and gives you time to think, instead of just reacting.
Mnemosyne
@RalfW:
Not as much as you’d think. Now that every local department store has been swallowed up by the Macys conglomerate, newspaper ad departments are desperately trying to make up the revenue.
Here in Los Angeles, we used to have three competing department stores: Bullocks, The May Company, and Robinson’s. All three of them would take out large ads in the LA Times, have glossy inserts, etc. All three of them were taken over by Macys, so now there’s one ad per week, not three. And that’s happened with Best Buy, Target, Home Depot, etc. driving other competitors out of business.
I really think that retail conglomeration is the unsung villain in the death of newspapers. If they’d had the ad revenue to get through the transition, newspapers could have survived, but they couldn’t survive the huge advertising revenue loss.
different-church-lady
@Kent:
But Groupon makes coupons obsolete! Wait… DAMMIT…
James Gary
@mistermix:
I knew “fee-fees” were gonna be mentioned sooner or later. Feel free to take your condescending tone and shove it up your ass.
It is simply a fact that printing a newspaper is an immensely wasteful thing compared to putting the same news on the Internet, and people don’t pay for waste.
Let me say it again, in caps: IT’S NOT THE ‘SAME NEWS.’ If the newspapers were only laying off printers and delivery people, you might have a point. But editors and reporters are losing their jobs, too, because most of the cost of producing a print publication is PAYING PEOPLE TO CREATE QUALITY CONTENT. The less you pay, the less quality content you get. It really is that simple.
catclub
@James Gary: “As brilliant as the posters here at BJ are, they still only link to, and comment on, other people’s actual reporting—and the less of other people’s actual reporting there is, the poorer we will all be”
With the exception of Kay, who does frontline reporting
of the things she is interested in. Which brings actual expertise to reporting.
mistermix
@James Gary: It is not at all “that simple”. A printing plant is a huge capital investment and a fixed cost: a certain number of people are needed to run the presses, no matter how few copies they print. The layoffs that papers are using to preserve their profit margins (not stay profitable, they’re mostly still profitable) hit content creators disproportionately because there’s just not that much left to cut in the pressroom. So the quality of the content is suffering because of the need to preserve the print side of the business.
In other words, instead of accelerating the switch to digital and keeping a big enough newsroom staff to put out a quality product, newspapers are clinging to print, downsizing their newsrooms, and skimping on digital.
Instead of understanding this, you’re all up in my grill about my supposed breezy/TED-style argumentation.
mistermix
@different-church-lady: Direct mail and free weekly shoppers are supplanting the Sunday paper that fewer people read, at least here. We get far more shopper/couponer publications now than we used to get in the mail.
@Older_Wiser: I sure understand that living paycheck-to-paycheck makes planning and saving like that impossible. My skepticism is that people with limited resources would choose to subscribe to a print newspaper (which Pierce seemed to just assume). If I’m reading you right, you decided to spend on TV and Internet, instead of a newspaper, to get your information. But maybe I’m not getting what you said.
James Gary
@catclub:
With the exception of Kay, who does frontline reporting
of the things she is interested in. Which brings actual expertise to reporting.
I like Kay’s posts a lot..but imagine how much better and more informative her writing would be if BJ paid her enough cover Ohio politics full-time.
Mnemosyne
@mistermix:
You may want to read up on stuff like Sam Zell’s financial shenanigans with the Chicago Tribune before you decide that the problem is fixed costs and union workers. A whole lot of newspaper chains (and most of them are chains these days) were pulling similar tricks to put more money in shareholders’ pockets.
ETA: Most of the problems that newspapers have are self-inflicted, but not in the way you seem to think.
Older_Wiser
@mistermix: I subscribed to a daily paper for many years and was a regular contributor to their “letters to the editor.” My 52 yr old son got his working life started by delivering papers at an early age. I can read the same newspaper online now, free, as well as other papers, even international ones. The internet has become more important because of the worlds it opens up. A local newspaper can’t do that.
different-church-lady
@mistermix:
Whereas websites just appear by magic, and self-fertilize on a weekly basis.
But… but… printing plants are huge capital investments!
Dude, I don’t dislike you, but there are so damn many holes in your arguments on such a regular basis that I just can’t resist driving my little golf cart of snark through them if only for the kicks.
different-church-lady
@Older_Wiser:
DING! Someone finally hits the target.
mistermix
@Mnemosyne: I didn’t open that can of worms, but since you did, you’re right about the past. The newspapers did a whole bunch of stupid stuff (another good example is the NYTimes new palatial HQ) to get themselves in their current financial pickle.
But now that they’re here, the layoffs now and going forward are hitting the content side of the house because the print side of the house can’t be cut much further.
James Gary
This is total fantasy on your part. Printing and delivery costs for dead-tree media are trivial in comparison to the cost of paying people to write the content that goes in it, and digital display-ad revenues are a tiny fraction (I don’t know the exact numbers, but I’ve heard 10-20%) of those for print. “Accelerating the switch to digital” is simply incompatible with “keeping a big enough newsroom staff to put out a quality product.”
mistermix
@different-church-lady:
They’re much cheaper than print. You can run the tech side of a web-only operation with a couple of developers/sysadmins and host it for a thousand bucks a month. On a staff and equipment basis, that’s a couple orders of magnitude less than a metro print plant.
Those couponers and weeklies are printed at contract print shops with long lead times and sent via direct mail. Metro newspapers own their own printing plants in their own buildings and have to be able to print an edition every day on extremely short lead times, and those editions are distributed via a fleet of trucks and people employed by the newspaper. They’re very different animals, with different costs.
Yeah, you’re a genius, as clearly demonstrated here.
mistermix
@James Gary:
Another expert heard from. Let’s look at some reality:
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle#ixzz1vtZ2v7lM
That was 2008, granted, but it’s a good comparison because it was before the major newsroom layoffs and print reduction.
James Gary
@mistermix:
Huh. I had no idea it was that high (although the writer’s pulled-out-of-nowhere-plus-anonymous-source estimate of the fraction of wages and benefits going to newsroom employees vs. other employees seems slightly suspect.)
My other point, however, about print vs. digital ad rates remains. To remain profitable in digital-only editions, newspapers would/will need to become not slightly, but drastically smaller.
Birthmarker
I speak as a lifelong lover of newspapers. I grew up reading one daily, and continued that habit on to what can most charitably be called late middle age.
The Huntsville (AL) Times is my local paper and it has gotten horrible. Someone decided to have more graphics to compete with the online world. Unfortunately, people buy the newspaper to have something to READ. I don’t need half the front page to be covered in a picture of something that most of the time isn’t even important. The paper has become something that I flip through for a few brief minutes.
It breaks my heart, frankly, because newspapers provide a temporal view of things really not available anywhere else. For instance, it is fascinating to go back and look at issues of the Birmingham News from the Civil Rights era. Papers really are repositories of current events, but always suffered from being relatively inaccessible. (No real indexing.) Now we are getting access to this treasure trove online, while at the same time the format is dying out.
I consider it a pretty sad day. I’ve always felt the newspaper was the best place to get the most unbiased view of things. Now we’ll end up with a few national papers such as the Murdoch-owned WSJ. And they won’t be accountable to local readers.
mistermix
@James Gary:
Yes, they will. I’m skeptical that any mid-size metro newspaper can re-invent itself fast enough. Their print legacy is going to kill them because they are structured physically, financially and mentally to put out a print product and digital is an afterthought. The barrier to entry for digital is also extremely low compared to print, so at some point they’re going to get competition that can survive on those low ad rates.
Older_Wiser
Is anyone aware that its advertising dollars, not subscriptions and newspaper sales, that have kept print media in business for so long? With internet retail sales rising, expect to see more brick and mortar stores disappearing, too. Everything is changing very rapidly, even employment in some quarters; why provide equipment and facilities when your employees can work from home, from their own space, using their own equipment? This kind of change via the internet has already become rather wrenching, especially for people who have become accustomed to a particular way of living for many years.
I fully expect the internet to replace a lot of the physical we have become accustomed to over the “industrial age” and prior to that. But can the “information age” by itself really sustain any society? Do we really want to be at the whim of employers and corporations who have access to us 24/7? We’ve already seen it happening on Wall St with computer-generated trades, done in split second timing.
Also, expect to see more adverts on the internet–even FB is relying on you as a source for this just to sell you stuff. Where do you think all that “value” in FB comes from, anyway? This commercial invasion of people’s privacy will become as egregious as anything you can think of coming from govt once the corporatocracy takes over your life because they don’t have to stick to any rules and they don’t have to protect your rights once they have bought out the politicians.
Mnemosyne (iTouch)
@mistermix:
What do you mean, “now” the newsroom staff is getting laid off? They’ve been on the front lines of the layoffs for years, if not a decade. The only difference is that the owners seem to have finally realized that you can’t run a newspaper with a single reporter.
Their “solution” is probably going to be going HuffPo and not paying anyone, but that’s not a particularly useful solution, either.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
Not quite. The newspaper was about both ads and stories and portability. People in a household might take individual sections along with them (e.g., the raving form section when they went to the racetrack), or the section with ads for the Memorial Day sales. Moms and Dads might hold onto the morning paper for the kids to read as part of their homework assignments. A sports section might get passed around, still the case in my office, where the sports section becomes communal break room or bathroom reading.
you don’t have portability, and tablets haven’t quite licked this problem. And smartphones are not as cheap and battery life still sucks.
And you miss a key problem here. As newspapers die, their Internet versions die as well.
As a related aside, one of the things I greatly miss as newspapers die is the local coverage of political races and ballot recommendations, especially of judges and other key local and state elections. There are very few blogs that are as comprehensive, reliable and easy to find with respect to this.
The Internet is little more than a huge reservoir of gossip and propaganda without good content, organized content which can be effectively organized and delivered.
And this doesn’t even get into the suicidal choices of some news providers to disappear behind pay walls.
Lastly, some of the best, and correcting, news coverage i read about Hurricaine Katrina came from the New Orleans papers, thanks to the Internet. But because I knew about the names and reputations of the local papers, and had sometims bought copies from my local news vendor, I knew where to search on the Net. I don’t know how online news sites can best make themselves known.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
Newspapers have always depended on advertising revenue for the largest share of their profits. Classified ad revenue has largely evaporated because of Craigslist and similar sites. Display ads have dropped dramatically for all kinds of reasons noted by other posters here.
There ain’t enough money left and it is harder than you think to deliver a quality product. The LA Times web site has always sucked and for a lot of twisted reasons, including the giant egos of executives who understood nothing but the print world, they actually sabotaged the development of their online products.
But the key problem is that even though there is a variety of ways to get to the Internets, no one has come up with a good, sustainable model of serving readers, advertisers and content.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
it is more complicated than that. Even free alternative weeklies are dying, and they have always depended on cheaper ads. Many of them are also laying off their best veteran journalists and reviewers and depending on new, cheaper staff of variable quality.
The sustaining costs of a news organization are higher than you realize, and this includes the cost of legal staff needed to defend a newspaper against attacks from those who would try to intimidate or shut down a paper because of its investigative efforts.
lou
What’s really galling about the NOLA demise is it’s totally frickin’ unnecessary. The paper still makes a profit. It has 75 percent market penetration. It’s a classic example of how newspaper companies are run by idiots. They keep practicing the vicious cycle thing — cut staffers and run wire copy, which makes people wonder why they bother paying for the paper. Then the circulation goes down, and then more staffers are cut, rinse, repeat.
As an aside, as I understand, the folks in the Lower Ninth Ward do read NOLA. All the little barbershops have subscriptions and their clients would read it there.
Brachiator
Good piece by Jed Horne, a former editor of the New Orleans paper, on what this all means
http://thelensnola.org/2012/05/24/opinon-on-tp-changes/
John
Tell it a historian. The Internet is great when it comes to immediacy and short-term costs, but maintaining that data so it remains available over the long-term is hugely expensive and requires active management, whereas the storage of physical media is fairly cheap and largely passive. I can’t imagine the bean-counters at the Times-Picayune are any more interested in paying for active digital content management than they are for active analog content creation, so I won’t be at all surprised if before long, all that digital content that doesn’t make it into their thrice-weekly paper edition is lost forever.