The media, with the collusion of Republicans (yes, that’s the right order), created a myth of “Gore the liar” based on his claims that he created the internet, worked on a farm, and was the inspiration for the character in Love Story. They didn’t let the fact that all three are true get in their way.

Actually, considering three deaths from rockets in seven years, it’s undoubtedly false. But if Israel did want to do something to curtail rocket fire, it could have stopped starving the people of Gaza.

One thing the toxic Israel haters …

A great way to start a dialog and a sure sign that you’re a rational thinker capable of unbiased analysis.

And the dailies did that with any consistency ? Hell, IF Stone did more of that than any major daily in his era and he was just one guy with a postage meter.

Whereas, say, the Bay Guardian’s or the L.A. Times “circulation” figures are, what, solid gold?

Whatever shortcomings online metrics might have, they are 1,000 percent better than any tools available for measuring offline newspaper readership.

Again. We sometimes need to be handed things that we do not want. We need a degree of paternalism. Daily’s and Weekly’s had the function because they had they had to balance the needs of a diverse readership.

This is NOT THE CASE with blogs. Blogs try to appeal to niche audiences. They can do this because the can draw readers from all over the world.

I am involved in online marketing and I understand most online metrics to be nothing short of bullshit. Even with sites like Facebook. People are spending less and less time on one site. This is not like reading the daily paper over breakfast and coming onto a story that you would not seek out like pollution in a neighboring community or some sort of unsexy news.

Blogs rely on sensationalism to draw in readers. Sure daily’s did this as well but the net does not have the code of professionalism and thus can push the boundaries. The net is real time and thus the potential for nefarious information being reported as fact is a bigger reality than ever before.

http://www.slate.com/id/2207912/

That’s why any crank can have a blog and, with a bit of creativity and a bit of luck, reach far more people than he could dream of by standing on a corner handing out xeroxed leaflets. Josh Marshall graduated from blogging at Starbucks to running an important source of news and commentary by simple perserverance and talent. Go to some amateur operation like DCWatch, which completely fucked with a mayoral election, or other “watchdog” sites in various cities and tell me that they could succeed with as much impact under a “traditional publishing” model before the internet.

No, but we are always, or at least periodically, moving. Lamenting the fact doesn’t put things “right” anymore than mindlessly celebrating technology. But folks like Josh Marshall – and Marc with his “Off the Bus” project – ARE moving in the right direction and old institutions like the LA Times, that haven’t really served their readers and communities very well over the decades if the truth be known, so much as been PR machines for elites, are going to wither if not die unless they transform themselves. Given the ownership model of something like the LA Times, that’s very unlikely.

More than anything, I see the internet giving rise to some non-corporate journalism models (non-profits, reader supported and “Lone Ranger” IF Stonish enterprises) that would have been much harder to sustain in print. Also, the interactive aspect – and the efforts of amateur watchdogs like the early Atrios – keeps the whole landscape more honest. This absolute despair at what’s happening to newspapers – most of which would have happened WITHOUT the internet – is pointless. The existence of the internet should be seen as an opportunity for more and better journalism far more than a reason for predicting the demise of journalism. The truth is that traditional models for journalism have been long on the skids – outside of New York even the largest towns weren’t supporting more than one newspaper and most of those were turning into shells of what nostalgics liked to remember.

It’s useful to remember that in the run-up to the Iraq war the best reporting was done by a news service that most “sophisticates” had never heard of – then Knight-Ridder, now McCaltchey. It’s the national news service for a conglomeration of smaller city papers owned by the parent company. The LA Times, the WaPO, the Chicago Tribune and the NYTimes didn’t do shit in their pre-Iraq reporting compared to a couple of obscure Knight-Ridder reporters. McClatchey stock is currently in the toilet, co-incidental to their debt to buy Knight -Ridder, so there’s no perfect tale here. Just a reminder that the journalistic models of the big-city papers are as prone to fail miserably AS JOURNALISM when the chips are down as any other.

My own fantasy projection – If I were going to develop a new model for news it would be something on the order of a web-based conglomerate of smaller citiy news operations that focused on a combination of entertaining and locally-oriented “good government” journalism, with lots of opportunities for reader input, combined with a national-international bureau that didn’t try to compete directly with the major news services but supplemented them with innovative, off-beat reporting. Maybe at least initially incorporate a free print visibility piece in each locale to grab max eyeballs and advertising. My bet is that a George Soros type with a big bankroll in front and a talented crew could pull some such scheme off and make it more sustainable than than that Zell mess or the post-KnightRidder McClatchey. The best model for an operation like this would be to incorporate as a public trust that attempted to be profitable over time and pay professionals, but not to make the kind of profit that publicly traded companies demand.

Don’t mourn…innovate!

The problem with conventional print is profit margin. 10% let along 20% is not enough of a margin for a public company on the NYSE. Nor are many rich folks cool with that. Nor have papers met the necessary growth projections needed to maintain a rising stock price. Thus papers simply do not seem to fit into the economic system. They fit into the older model where a local family owns the paper. The decentralized brand of capitalism is OVER. Dead and gone and will never come back.

The net fits into the global epoch that we have moved into. But do not for a minute think that it can sustain expensive investigative journalism. The public NO LONGER has a sense of the value of this product and thus is willing to take what they get for free and spend money on video games or just try and cover rent.

Again, the promises of the net are nothing more than hype like everything else on the net. Most sites are trading a 2, 3, 4, 5 times their value. The net is driven purely by speculation and the idea that the revolution is coming. The metrics of online impressions are totally suspect as well. The net is a big, giant, terrible bubble. People pay to have access to the net and maybe to buy something on Amazon that they cannot easily find in a store, but they will not pay for news.

The problem with conventional journalism is that it isn’t “commercialized” enough — thus the massive layoffs at newspapers and magazines from LAW to LAT to public radio. A little more commercialization would have saved those jobs. A lot more would generate the cash to fund investigative work.

Instead, the dominant model is to subsidize journalism via advertising and/or corporate largesse, perpetuating the myth that reporting, writing and editing are easy enough tasks not really worth paying for.

The Internet’s greater commercialization, i.e. the ability for pretty much anyone to create a blog and ask readers to pay up directly to read it, is exactly what is empowering the most talented journalists.

Along with cutting out the middleman, leaving more for the journalist herself, the new model also redefines success by taking the guesswork out of who’s reading what. Newspapers have lived and died by their ability to draw readers, now journalists will.

Once we can accurately measure what people are actually reading, realtime, we can get rid of the stuff people are ignoring, further empowering the more talented, effective journalists.

This is how technophiles respond to my kind of argument. We are ALWAYS moving in the right direction. EVERYTHING ALWAYS will be ok if we just trust that the net will fix things. Why are these changes immune from criticism?

It really shows how unthinking humanity can be in regards to technology. We have a duty to try and understand technology, the good and bad. We cannot just blindly allow these transformations to occur without due criticism.

The issue (leaving aside your ridiculous smearing of journalists with a broad brush) is what the models of new journalism might be. “The internet” can’t produce news without journalists – and most of them are going to have to be professional and paid. I think that the concerns about the decline of local newspapers (which won’t disappear so much as be transformed IMHO) are valid. What I take issue with is the assumption that new models supporting diverse journalistic projects that are financially viable won’t develop on the internet and that, after a painful transition (creative destruction ?) we aren’t going to be better off. Journalists aren’t the enemy – frankly the corporate publishing model hasn’t served journalists well and is the primary reason for most of the problems attributed to “journalists.”

The internet is weakening the corporate publishing model (and it’s really a fluke in the context of late capitalism that the intenet is, for all intents and purposes, “free” – thanks, of course, to “big government” and those liberal universities.) And it’s providing space for folks to counter it. But the best information on the internet is coming from folks who are professional journalists, like Josh Marshall’s TPM and bloggers who are paid, like Ezra Klein. The blunderbuss rightwing critique of “journalists” is mostly hogwash.

No, but we are always, or at least periodically, moving. Lamenting the fact doesn’t put things “right” anymore than mindlessly celebrating technology. But folks like Josh Marshall – and Marc with his “Off the Bus” project – ARE moving in the right direction and old institutions like the LA Times, that haven’t really served their readers and communities very well over the decades if the truth be known, so much as been PR machines for elites, are going to wither if not die unless they transform themselves. Given the ownership model of something like the LA Times, that’s very unlikely.

More than anything, I see the internet giving rise to some non-corporate journalism models (non-profits, reader supported and “Lone Ranger” IF Stonish enterprises) that would have been much harder to sustain in print. Also, the interactive aspect – and the efforts of amateur watchdogs like the early Atrios – keeps the whole landscape more honest. This absolute despair at what’s happening to newspapers – most of which would have happened WITHOUT the internet – is pointless. The existence of the internet should be seen as an opportunity for more and better journalism far more than a reason for predicting the demise of journalism. The truth is that traditional models for journalism have been long on the skids – outside of New York even the largest towns weren’t supporting more than one newspaper and most of those were turning into shells of what nostalgics liked to remember.

It’s useful to remember that in the run-up to the Iraq war the best reporting was done by a news service that most “sophisticates” had never heard of – then Knight-Ridder, now McCaltchey. It’s the national news service for a conglomeration of smaller city papers owned by the parent company. The LA Times, the WaPO, the Chicago Tribune and the NYTimes didn’t do shit in their pre-Iraq reporting compared to a couple of obscure Knight-Ridder reporters. McClatchey stock is currently in the toilet, co-incidental to their debt to buy Knight -Ridder, so there’s no perfect tale here. Just a reminder that the journalistic models of the big-city papers are as prone to fail miserably AS JOURNALISM when the chips are down as any other.

My own fantasy projection – If I were going to develop a new model for news it would be something on the order of a web-based conglomerate of smaller citiy news operations that focused on a combination of entertaining and locally-oriented “good government” journalism, with lots of opportunities for reader input, combined with a national-international bureau that didn’t try to compete directly with the major news services but supplemented them with innovative, off-beat reporting. Maybe at least initially incorporate a free print visibility piece in each locale to grab max eyeballs and advertising. My bet is that a George Soros type with a big bankroll in front and a talented crew could pull some such scheme off and make it more sustainable than than that Zell mess or the post-KnightRidder McClatchey. The best model for an operation like this would be to incorporate as a public trust that attempted to be profitable over time and pay professionals, but not to make the kind of profit that publicly traded companies demand.

Don’t mourn…innovate!