The Houston Press. Not the weekly Houston has now (which is probably doing OK... many local weeklies are), but the afternoon daily. Growing up, we took the Post in the morning and the Press in the afternoon and did so until the Press was bought by the Chronicle. The Press was the more moderate/liberal afternoon rag, with the Chronicle the conservative/right one. My folks were FDR/Truman/Kennedy Democrats. For many years, the Chronicle was owned by a foundation, answered to no one, seemed to have bottomless resources, and was very conservative. Not really the same model we have today. Before your time, Fatty.
A newspaper that weekly gives column space in the *entertainment* section, no less, to people like leonard pitts and linda wallace (thankfully gone now), and dedicates whole chunks of space to 'going green'... And anyone wonders why no one wants to read such rags any more? I subscribe to it through work, for the sports page, some of the comics, and the Fry's ads. If they could deliver just those things to me, I could save them a lot of money and paper. And what are the homeless guys going to sell at the intersections now, once this last newspaper goes bye-bye?
as with the auto and music industries the economy and the times are forcing a reordering of priorities. the silver lining going forward is that we have an oportunity to make our infrastructures leaner and meaner. it's kinda like when gas prices went through the roof and some of us thought that was a good thing. we have grown fat and lazy and it's time to pay up. we'll get through this and come out better for it.
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/03/chronicle_cuts.php Chronicle Cuts To Be Stretched Over Two Days By Richard Connelly in Spaced City Tuesday, Mar. 24 2009 @ 8:52AM Good news on the pending Houston Chronicle cuts -- the latest word is that the layoffs will be in the range of 12-13 percent of the newsroom. That's bad, but not as bad as the 30 percent figures that some understandably frantic people were tossing around. The bad news is the cuts will be carried out over two days instead of one -- today and tomorrow. What sadistic genius put this plan together? Already people -- many of them on long-planned Spring Break vacations -- have been on edge wondering if they have a job or not. They're coming into the newsroom today waiting to be tapped on the shoulder. Then they survive today, only to go through the whole thing again tomorrow? Pretty cruel. Oh, and in case anyone has the lack of reading ability of the idiot who commented on our last Chron item, we're not "celebrating" anything over here. These are tough, tough times in print journalism, and our thoughts go with any good people losing their jobs through no fault of their own.
When information is ubiquitous is loses it's value. Music, news, wholesale prices, car dealer tricks ...when everybody has all the information there is little advantage from which to garner a profit. Frankly I read the news on Fark and Igoogle. Everything is usually there 24 hours or more before it reaches print. My wife and I were talking just this morning about how skinny the Chronicle has gotten. I always wondered how Dale Robertson could make a living writing about tennis.
Rhad, you don't have any complaints because you don't have to meet the payroll for the people working at your daily paper. Heck, I read numerous sources from all over the world. Not nearly as many as some people read, like Mango, for instance, but a lot. I'm really enjoying the ability to do that. But what happens when all those sources go out of business? Who do you think finds the stories that are on those online sources? Who does the investigations? Who pays the many and many reporters on the beat, covering all the different areas of interest that you and I devour online for free? Those daily rags, that's who. ("rags" used affectionately) As The Cat and pgabriel pointed out (and your friendly Blade Runner), where will the folks sitting at their terminals putting out these online sources get their stories? The investigative reporting? The Woodward and Bernstein's of today and the future? The newspapers and magazines blew it from the beginning, not realizing the danger and believing the hype about ad revenue from the online sites. They worked against each other, defeating a model that could have produced a profit. I would be happy to pay $10 a month, for example, to access all these news sources. Maybe they could charge you fractions of a cent for every hit on a source. The big web browsers could probably handle it. With hundreds of thousands of hits for the more popular sites, the fractions of a cent would add up. You wouldn't want a fee for each site, but a flat rate, with the fee being divided up according to who you used. Heck, something like that. The current model just isn't going to work. When the large resources of the print newspapers and magazines disappear, so will much of the content the people running those sites on the web cut and paste, and interpret, to produce those groovy sites you and I enjoy. It's a bummer, dude. It has to be figured out, somehow.
I think chron.com is a good web site for daily news, however it won't be missed because of all the other competition out there. With television, radio, and the cable 24 hour news cycle there are just so many damn sources of news the only reasons to really miss the pring media are nostalgic. having that cup of coffee in the morning while reading the newspaper. the media I'm afraid that might go away are the weekly news magazines. heck, there is a wonderful article in the D&D right now from Rolling Stone of all sources that goes very indepth on the AIG bailout and its very educational for people who still don't understand why these problems are so severe. You don't get that out of the daily rags. You get that from the Time and Newsweek Magazines with their investigative journalism. That's what we should all hope remains in the aftermath.
Damn deckard. I never said it was perfect. I am in total agreement that some payment scheme is necessary to make this work. But I'm not ashamed to admit I love the idea of getting news from 50 bazillion different outlets either.
I feel like I'm beating my head against a wall. When you guys talk about getting your news from Google, where do you think Google gets its news from?!? Google doesn't have a staff of reporters around the globe gathering information. They're simply linking the AP and other journalism organizations and putting it together for you under a new umbrella. If the Houston Chronicle dies, the news you get (well, Houston-related) on Google will go down too! If newspapers (who largely fund the AP through subscriptions, what a concept) go down, the Associated Press will go down too! The internet isn't giving you new information sources, for the most part -- it's just packaging it in a different way. If the actual news organizations go down, so will the internet news sites you guys love... but no one realizes it, yet. Yes, news is old when it hits print. But it's not old when chron.com breaks the story the day before and we all talk about it here, and that's going to die right along with the print (or before it, even) considering print is the cash cow. One of the things I love about this site is that Clutch demands you cite the actual source (not the portal, the source, the journalism outlet which actually did the reporting) when you post an article. I think that's a great practice, and it teaches you to appreciate who did the actual work, as opposed to simply citing a portal. Unfortunately, that message hasn't sunk in with the masses, and I doubt it will until it's too late.
the first published pic of the hudson plane landing was a tweet. news of the recent earthquake in india, also a tweet.
That's fine for national news, but I still think they do the best overall job covering Houston news in terms of getting it on their website first.
Ok well, don't get too upset then. Over the last few years, very little in the actual print version of the Chronicle was anything other than reprinted AP stories anyway. Local coverage is the only thing that will suffer, and the smaller, less-costly outfits like the Press are ready to swoop in and let the national news take care of itself. On top of that, as anyone who is a half-decent reader of news will tell you, any national news that hit the paper pages, they had already read the same news a couple of days earlier on the internet. Such a thing simply has no *value* any more. I do agree that overall this is a disturbing trend, because a lack of the 'sunshine' provided by a vigorous journalism culture allows for nearly unhindered corruption and deceit. However, history over the last 4 decades or so has shown that that culture already existed anyway, as the 'media' began to consider itself the 4th estate, and objectivity has been long gone. Maybe never to return. And that's a tragedy, because it means, ultimately, 'the truth' will almost never be known, But the 'news biz' did it to themselves, they have no one else to blame. When they sold their souls, exchanging objectivity for ideology, the end was inevitable. People simply are not willing to *pay* for dissembling posing as objectivity.
Had the Chronicle not gloated when the Post was shut down I would care. What goes around comes around.
I totally disagree. You're cutting down on resources given to journalists to undergo month to year long investigations to dig into the heart of a story. That can't replace twitter feeds or insider blogs/news gatherers like Huffington Post or Drudge. I mean, maybe you don't read 8-10 page articles from the NYTimes about the Defense department paying military advisors to sell the Iraq invasion, but someone in the "blogosphere" did and wrote a nice paragraph summary for his readers to consume. The control, quality, and fidelity of information is at stake here. It doesn't help that consumer tastes have shifted with their internet usage. People read what they want to read. When you sit down with a paper in your hand, you're also guided along a path of events you might never have bothered to search for. It's one eye flicker away. It doesn't take a click to commit. Then again, I'm speaking about a reader who doesn't just go directly for the sports section and trash everything else. Some things don't change. With that consumer attitude and the shrinking of different news outlets for trusted content (and its assumed quality and standards), our society is in danger of becoming unbalanced in awareness even more than it already is. Newspaper organizations are like public libraries. Even though they're in danger of perceived obsolescence, they serve a public interest that can't be replaced in the digital medium.
That's one of the silliest excuses I've ever read. People have accused the media of being "too liberal" or "too conservative" or "biased" for long before the past 5-10 years. This isn't a new phenomenon. Everyone thinks the big, bad media is out to get them. Welcome to 1950. Newspaper readership isn't dying. In fact, more people are reading newspaper stories now than ever. The idea that the internet means people have alternative, less-biased (or more-biased, depending on your perspective) news sources they can turn to is hogwash, and the numbers show it. You may be mad, but you're still reading. Everyone is. You're just reading it for free now, and on a platform where advertising doesn't pay anywhere close to as much. It's the technology that's the problem. If the problem were content/bias, then newspapers would've declined for far, far longer than the last decade and readership would be down. I agree that newspapers package all AP copy for the most part, but that further goes to show the reliance the AP has on newspapers. If newspapers die, who's going to fund the AP coverage? It's all interconnected, and it's not as simple as a lot of you make it out to be. As for the Press "swooping in," that's just laughable, and I say that as someone who covers the Rockets for the Press. If the Chronicle decided to not have a Rockets beat reporter (which of course won't happen, I'm just saying hypothetically), you'd see a huge dropoff between their stuff and my stuff. And that's not to degrade myself -- I have a Master's degree in journalism from the top j-school in the world. I'm good. But without having adequate funding to justify spending 40+ hours a week cultivating sources in the organization, I can't do the job the Chron can. I can't. And the Press doesn't have the money to pay reporters to adequately cover all organizations around town -- it just doesn't. Local news is going to take a huge hit if/when newspapers die. Now, I'm not selfish. If people genuinely don't care about local news, that's the right of the free market and I can accept that. But what sucks is that the opinions, as well as the numbers, show people do care about local news -- they just don't understand where they're getting it from. It's a bitter pill to swallow knowing that people do appreciate your product but are content to let it die because they can't grasp that you're the source of it.
I think it's a cycle of life food chain thing. I mean, yes, papers are losing their value and ability to compete due to vast info being available online. Yes, it's sad that these people are going to be laid off, like many right now. But, I don't think that because newspapers are phasing out that these people won't find a home. I'm guessing, but doesn't it seem like if all these papers go away, that online advertising in a place like Chron.com or other actual news sites will have revenue increases with no local paper to compete? Doesn't it seem like more and more 'paper' journalists will flock to the net, magazines, or elsewhere, and that execs will find a way to make more money from these other sources of news? The Demand for news isn't decreasing, it's the supply that's increasing. Yes, this brings a devaluation, but quality should win out, and come at a premium that can provide people with jobs, yes? Only problem is, determining quality of news has become harder and harder.... so much to sift through. I blame OJ. Ever since that car chase, news is freakin' everywhere, shoving non-newsworthy crap down our throat. If there's a problem for news delivering entities, it's in the amount of competition. Competition for our attention has become fierce on all fronts. The new age of mind control isn't about keeping information from people to make them dumb, it's about bombarding them with crap for so long they lose interest and sensitivity to what is newsworthy and important. But I may be digressing. I know what the Cat is saying, but I think it's more a changing of the guard/source than the end of news and qualified professional news people. I suspect paper news journalists etc. will find jobs somewhere among the sea of news delivery entities that now exist, right?
I think they should shut down chron.com if they want to make money The chronicle is the only source of indepth houston news. But why would i subscribe if i can just read it on chron.com?
As someone with dozens of laid off friends in the industry, I doubt it. What people don't realize is that of the sea of news delivery entities, most of them are one- or two-man portal operations, like Drudge. There really aren't that many news entities that stress actual reporting. They're simply pulling together everyone else's reporting, and if news sites go down, their quality will go down significantly as well. There aren't many online news organizations that hire actual reporters for actual salaries, because they don't pay. With that said, you made an interesting point that online advertising should theoretically go up if there weren't a local advertiser to compete with. I hope that's right. The one positive here is that the Internet is still relatively new and, to an extent, companies are still seeing what works and what doesn't. Perhaps over time they'll find a model that works -- we'll see.
Newspaper is a dying medium as it should. It is ridiculously wasteful. Sorry, I wasn't done and accidentally posted. I hate that these people are losing their jobs but it is the way of the world now. I'm in IT. My market CONSTANTLY changes. I have to evolve who I am and what I do to keep up or I get left behind. It isn't like these people working for the newspapers didn't see this coming and if they didn't, they should have.
A one line sentence isn't doesn't cut it. I can tweet rockets game. Rockets win. Rocket lose over and over. But what actually happened in the game?? No tweeter does that in depth.
