Can design save the newspaper?(ted.com)
ted.com
Can design save the newspaper?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html
11 comments
If you watched the video then you'd know that the designer did a great job of integrating the content into the design of the newspaper. It isn't a copy-paste job. There was design and layout and graphics that you just can't do on the web, and he demonstrated that people like it.
So if you change the question to, would you invest in a designer who had a track record of boosting circulation by 20-100% in two years time?
So if you change the question to, would you invest in a designer who had a track record of boosting circulation by 20-100% in two years time?
Did he call it a magazine?
Not if, even with the boost, you're still not breaking even.
Can interpretive dance save NASA?
That was unfairly modded down IMO.
TED is great in its way, but it caters to, some would say flatters, an elite crowd of people - the type who buy expensive artwork for their houses - some of the stuff proposed there might sound great to the chardonnay-class participants but has little relevance in the real world.
Can design save the newspaper? Of course not, and merely raising the question with a straight face impressively demonstrates the out-of-touch, ivory tower, art-gallery-opening-attending disconnect of the speaker.
Such a question is, in my opinion, at least as prima facie ridiculous as posing that interpretive dance might save NASA, so the parent's comment is an entirely valid reductio ad absurdum.
TED is great in its way, but it caters to, some would say flatters, an elite crowd of people - the type who buy expensive artwork for their houses - some of the stuff proposed there might sound great to the chardonnay-class participants but has little relevance in the real world.
Can design save the newspaper? Of course not, and merely raising the question with a straight face impressively demonstrates the out-of-touch, ivory tower, art-gallery-opening-attending disconnect of the speaker.
Such a question is, in my opinion, at least as prima facie ridiculous as posing that interpretive dance might save NASA, so the parent's comment is an entirely valid reductio ad absurdum.
In what way is the speaker out-of-touch? He has personally overseen circulation improvements of ~ 30 - 100% in the newspapers he has redesigned.
"Design" in this sense goes far beyond "graphic embellishment" and is actually about changing the entire product/company involved -- and thus very relevant to the future of newspapers.
A few quotes from his speech:
"It was my personal, intimate challenge to talk to the readers."
"the changes we made were not about changing the look, it was about changing the product completely"
"my bosses wondered, why is he asking all these business questions, why is he not showing us pages? This is the new role of the designer, to be in this process from the beginning to end."
"Design" in this sense goes far beyond "graphic embellishment" and is actually about changing the entire product/company involved -- and thus very relevant to the future of newspapers.
A few quotes from his speech:
"It was my personal, intimate challenge to talk to the readers."
"the changes we made were not about changing the look, it was about changing the product completely"
"my bosses wondered, why is he asking all these business questions, why is he not showing us pages? This is the new role of the designer, to be in this process from the beginning to end."
From the presentation: "Did design do this? No. Not alone."
Mr. Utko recognizes that design cannot create a 20 to 100 percent increase in circulation. He isn't claiming that it can. He claims that if you "put your work to the highest possible level," you can pull off changes as successful as his.
I agree with your statement about TED, but this does not exemplify the "disconnect" of TED. It's ignorant to claim that his ideas are not relevant in the real world, since they very obviously increased circulation.
The most important slide from the presentation showed a Taijitu (yin and yang) diagram and made the following comparison: function is to form as content is to design.
Mr. Utko recognizes that design cannot create a 20 to 100 percent increase in circulation. He isn't claiming that it can. He claims that if you "put your work to the highest possible level," you can pull off changes as successful as his.
I agree with your statement about TED, but this does not exemplify the "disconnect" of TED. It's ignorant to claim that his ideas are not relevant in the real world, since they very obviously increased circulation.
The most important slide from the presentation showed a Taijitu (yin and yang) diagram and made the following comparison: function is to form as content is to design.
The speaker doesn't suggest that design will save the newspaper, he actually says that the series of challenges newspaper printers face would destroy any company. The presentation is about how to do good design, not newspapers.
No. British broadsheet The Guardian had a high-profile redesign in 2005 which shifted the newspaper away from the traditional broadsheet into a full-colour Berliner, and soon after the paper won multiple design awards and their circulation has increased while the rest of the industry has contracted. However, the devil is in the details: the newspaper has continued to make large operating losses (£26.4m this year compared to £15.9m last) and continues to be propped up by other businesses in the group.
I think the real problem in a lot of cases is that newspapers are trying to be something that they simply can't. They are trying to give you up to the minute news, but logistically you aren't going to receive it until the next day. They simply can't compete with the web for breaking news. Where I think they can win though is with relevant and in-depth reporting on stories which you won't see on the internet (and not just printing half of the AP feed either).
Yep. I think they need to come a little late to the table with WAY more substance and to follow scandals a month later with serious indictments. Let the net build the buzz before the big reporting and then spread the news and discussion after the big reporting. A good complement.
Decided to follow up on my blog with a vignette: http://justindz.tumblr.com/post/91601837/this-is-sam-he-work...
Decided to follow up on my blog with a vignette: http://justindz.tumblr.com/post/91601837/this-is-sam-he-work...
Fancy checking out a PDF conversion of the newspaper that was featured in this video..? I found a copy at http://rapidshare.com/files/142517365/pb.04.09.08.pdf - I'd mirror it, but even though I'm sure they'd love for people to check out their newspaper, it's just too risky legally.
I can't watch the video right now, but I do have a question:
Why would we want to save the newspaper?
Why would we want to save the newspaper?
Newspapers still do the bulk of the workaday journalism, which is the raw material of almost all "news" in TV and the internet. CNN will still be able to cover national topics in the future, but local stuff will go uncovered. I predict increased municipal corruption throughout.
Newspapers themselves don't do journalism; newspaper journalists do. The journalists who write for newspapers will still exist, and still write what they write, if newspapers die out; their content will just be converted to, and paid for by, a different part of the media.
err... how will they be paid for?
Orgs like http://www.propublica.org/about/ are funded privately by people or orgs who believe that there is a public interest in maintaining independent journalism.
Orgs like http://www.npr.org/about/ are paid for by the public, using a distributed model. There are local stations that are paid for locally, who in turn help fund the umbrella organization of NPR. Likewise there are private individuals who have left endowments or other contributions to maintain NPRs independence.
Journalism is alive and well. Corporate journalism is dying. And i can't say i'm hugely sorry. Sucks that the industry has crashed as opposed to transitioning, but i can't say that it wasn't at least in part their own fault.
Orgs like http://www.npr.org/about/ are paid for by the public, using a distributed model. There are local stations that are paid for locally, who in turn help fund the umbrella organization of NPR. Likewise there are private individuals who have left endowments or other contributions to maintain NPRs independence.
Journalism is alive and well. Corporate journalism is dying. And i can't say i'm hugely sorry. Sucks that the industry has crashed as opposed to transitioning, but i can't say that it wasn't at least in part their own fault.
Capitalism. This is the magic of capitalism. There's demand for journalism on one side and supply on the other, and if there's a profitable way to bring them together, it will be found. Newspapers can stand in the way of that by constraining what people think of.
You don't know how it will be done. I don't know how it will be done. But nevertheless, similar miracles happen every day; there are millions of examples of this sort of thing occurring, it is not the exception. One of the most intriguing things about markets is that they can be smarter than any given participant. (This is part of why they can become hard to regulate; they are as good at outsmarting regulation as evolved programs can be, in much the same way.) Bounding what the market is capable of by your comprehension or your credulity is not the path to understanding.
In truth, it is not that there is no possible way to bring them together, the problem is that there are a staggering number of ways to bring the supply and demand together and nobody knows what is best. It seems unlikely that newspapers are the answer, though.
You don't know how it will be done. I don't know how it will be done. But nevertheless, similar miracles happen every day; there are millions of examples of this sort of thing occurring, it is not the exception. One of the most intriguing things about markets is that they can be smarter than any given participant. (This is part of why they can become hard to regulate; they are as good at outsmarting regulation as evolved programs can be, in much the same way.) Bounding what the market is capable of by your comprehension or your credulity is not the path to understanding.
In truth, it is not that there is no possible way to bring them together, the problem is that there are a staggering number of ways to bring the supply and demand together and nobody knows what is best. It seems unlikely that newspapers are the answer, though.
The "magic" of unregulated capitalism brought us Fox "News" and the economic collapse we are currently experiencing.
Unregulated capitalism is an extremist form of economic system. There are no answers to be found in extremism.
The answers to our problems will found somewhere in the middle of the range between unregulated capitalism on one extreme end of the spectrum and socialist economics at the other extreme end of the spectrum.
Government oversight of markets. Elimination of monopolies. A voice for the employees. etc. In this case, there will probably be some donated money and some government money going to a public journalism system similar to public broadcasting.
Unregulated capitalism is an extremist form of economic system. There are no answers to be found in extremism.
The answers to our problems will found somewhere in the middle of the range between unregulated capitalism on one extreme end of the spectrum and socialist economics at the other extreme end of the spectrum.
Government oversight of markets. Elimination of monopolies. A voice for the employees. etc. In this case, there will probably be some donated money and some government money going to a public journalism system similar to public broadcasting.
You miss my point entirely. You can only conceive of the old system going, so you want to get the government to fund it. But there's another way: Let the market figure something out.
Governments can't do new things. They usually can't conceive of them, and if they can, they can't get them past committee.
The old system isn't working. Pouring more government money into it has no realistic prospect of working. For one thing, how can the "fourth estate" function as a watchdog if they're getting too much of their money from the people they're supposed to be watching? Your only hope of something that actually works is a truly new system, and the government can't come up with that.
But the market can, even if you can't think of what that may be and if I can't think of what it may be. It's not blind faith, every niche works that way. The government did not create the auto industry. The government did not create the electronics industry; it did not create the RAM industry or the CPU industry or the video card industry. It did not create the insurance industry, it did not create the furniture industry. It did not create just-in-time delivery or Amazon.com. These all came from supply on one side figuring out how to reach demand on the other, with all sort of creative chaos in the middle (and ongoing) that could never have been legislated into existence. (It can, on the other hand, be legislated out of existence.)
Why should the government prop up the current system instead of letting something new happen?
Nothing in my post had anything to do with "unregulated capitalism". It's simply how the economy works, and without this critical understanding, not only can you not go forward, you can not understand how we got where we are.
Governments can't do new things. They usually can't conceive of them, and if they can, they can't get them past committee.
The old system isn't working. Pouring more government money into it has no realistic prospect of working. For one thing, how can the "fourth estate" function as a watchdog if they're getting too much of their money from the people they're supposed to be watching? Your only hope of something that actually works is a truly new system, and the government can't come up with that.
But the market can, even if you can't think of what that may be and if I can't think of what it may be. It's not blind faith, every niche works that way. The government did not create the auto industry. The government did not create the electronics industry; it did not create the RAM industry or the CPU industry or the video card industry. It did not create the insurance industry, it did not create the furniture industry. It did not create just-in-time delivery or Amazon.com. These all came from supply on one side figuring out how to reach demand on the other, with all sort of creative chaos in the middle (and ongoing) that could never have been legislated into existence. (It can, on the other hand, be legislated out of existence.)
Why should the government prop up the current system instead of letting something new happen?
Nothing in my post had anything to do with "unregulated capitalism". It's simply how the economy works, and without this critical understanding, not only can you not go forward, you can not understand how we got where we are.
"letting the market figure it out" is unregulated capitalism. Unregulated capitalism is exactly the extremist economic policy nonsense that created the mess we are in. When Bush eliminated most of the regulation on the financial services industry, what that "let the market figure out" is that it is very, very easy to steal money when there is little regulation.
Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
I don't know why libertarians can't figure out people steal money that is left around unguarded, but they just don't comprehend that fact.
Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
I don't know why libertarians can't figure out people steal money that is left around unguarded, but they just don't comprehend that fact.
> When Bush eliminated most of the regulation on the financial services industry
Since Bush did no such thing....
> Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
Libertarians recognize that govts don't protect money all that well and that big thefts always involve a govt.
Since Bush did no such thing....
> Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
Libertarians recognize that govts don't protect money all that well and that big thefts always involve a govt.
""letting the market figure it out" is unregulated capitalism."
No, Adam503 chooses to misinterpret "letting the market figure it out" as unregulated capitalism so that (s)he can go off on a more-or-less entirely unrelated rant.
What letting the market figure it out really means here is that instead of a glorious upper authority picking the "winner" by handing out government funds to a proven-loser business model to prop it up ("winner" hardly seems like the right word), that we unleash the creativity of thousands or millions of people in the confident belief that where there is unmet demand, someone will find a way to supply it.
Did you think my example list was just randomly tossed in there or something? It's the core of the point; government action can only look to the past. Your actions will simply guarantee the extinction of journalism, because the system you want to prop up is dying before competition even fully matures, which is the ultimate proof of economic death.
What regulations you may or may not want to lay down on such actions is an entirely separate point, and if you can't see that, you're simply being willfully blind to the point I'm making because you've been so conditioned in your response to the word "capitalism" that you can't see past it anymore. The fact that Amazon.com created a new meeting point for supply and demand is neither here nor there in the question of whether they are regulated (hint: yes).
Again... this sort of thing has happened millions of times. It's not a wacky theory, it's how we got from the dark ages to the economy of today. (The wacky theory is that this creation is impossible and only happens when central authorities help it along; this flatly contradicts the historical facts.) This time is only different because now the town crier is facing disruption, and he's being loud about it. Other than that, it's hardly different than any other industry which has been transformed over the past 50 years, which is most of them.
No, Adam503 chooses to misinterpret "letting the market figure it out" as unregulated capitalism so that (s)he can go off on a more-or-less entirely unrelated rant.
What letting the market figure it out really means here is that instead of a glorious upper authority picking the "winner" by handing out government funds to a proven-loser business model to prop it up ("winner" hardly seems like the right word), that we unleash the creativity of thousands or millions of people in the confident belief that where there is unmet demand, someone will find a way to supply it.
Did you think my example list was just randomly tossed in there or something? It's the core of the point; government action can only look to the past. Your actions will simply guarantee the extinction of journalism, because the system you want to prop up is dying before competition even fully matures, which is the ultimate proof of economic death.
What regulations you may or may not want to lay down on such actions is an entirely separate point, and if you can't see that, you're simply being willfully blind to the point I'm making because you've been so conditioned in your response to the word "capitalism" that you can't see past it anymore. The fact that Amazon.com created a new meeting point for supply and demand is neither here nor there in the question of whether they are regulated (hint: yes).
Again... this sort of thing has happened millions of times. It's not a wacky theory, it's how we got from the dark ages to the economy of today. (The wacky theory is that this creation is impossible and only happens when central authorities help it along; this flatly contradicts the historical facts.) This time is only different because now the town crier is facing disruption, and he's being loud about it. Other than that, it's hardly different than any other industry which has been transformed over the past 50 years, which is most of them.
> The "magic" of unregulated capitalism brought us Fox "News"
and the New York Times....
> and the economic collapse we are currently experiencing.
Nope, but that's other threads.
> Elimination of monopolies.
With one exception, the US govt hasn't broken a monopoly while it was still a monopoly. And, in that case (Standard Oil), the break up took out the low-cost-to-the-consumer supplier, resulting in increased prices....
and the New York Times....
> and the economic collapse we are currently experiencing.
Nope, but that's other threads.
> Elimination of monopolies.
With one exception, the US govt hasn't broken a monopoly while it was still a monopoly. And, in that case (Standard Oil), the break up took out the low-cost-to-the-consumer supplier, resulting in increased prices....
The combination of Fox "News" the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. left 85% of Americans believing Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 at the time the Congress was voting on whether to invade Iraq.
That was, of course, proven to be complete and utter nonsense with evidence people like Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, etc. had at the time of that vote. That information was not provided to the American people by any of the major outlets of corporate-owned media.
How do you think that happened?
That was, of course, proven to be complete and utter nonsense with evidence people like Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, etc. had at the time of that vote. That information was not provided to the American people by any of the major outlets of corporate-owned media.
How do you think that happened?
I think that it had nothing to do with who pays journalists.
You're cherry-picking your "small market" sources. The vast majority are cranks.
You're cherry-picking your "small market" sources. The vast majority are cranks.
Like everything else: People who value the service will exchange money for that service.
So, discovery of municipal corruption will be paid for entirely by people who lack the conviction that they shouldn't have to pay extra just to have a clean government? Are you sure there are no flaws in this plan?
I'm sorry I don't follow. If you are a writer known for uncovering government waste, and I like to hear those stories, I'll pay you for it, or someone else will indirectly.
What matter is it the medium you choose?
What matter is it the medium you choose?
It's just not that simple. If you like Ford automobiles, but GM comes up with a new technology that allows them to sell GM cars profitably at 150 dollars, Ford is out-of-business. It doesn't matter if a million people prefer them. Unless you want to pay a 10000 percent markup for a preference, well... But perhaps GM will hire another design department to imitate the old Fords? Sorry--design's cost hasn't gone down. The extra $25/unit wasn't a big deal on a $15,000 car, but is on a $150 car.
This is what has happened to news. The internet has made the price of distribution dirt cheap, but content-production is the same price as ever. And so content will be spread thin. You'll read CNN.com's national news for free, rather than read about the local Rotary club at $1.50 an issue. Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
This is what has happened to news. The internet has made the price of distribution dirt cheap, but content-production is the same price as ever. And so content will be spread thin. You'll read CNN.com's national news for free, rather than read about the local Rotary club at $1.50 an issue. Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
>but GM comes up with a new technology that allows them to sell GM cars profitably at 150 dollars, Ford is out-of-business.
And? Obviously then, people don't prefer more expensive Fords. That's how the free market works after all.
Point is, if people don't want to pay for news on paper, so be it.
>Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
Now, if this is true, then there will be plenty of people willing to show this by paying for local news, online or otherwise.
And? Obviously then, people don't prefer more expensive Fords. That's how the free market works after all.
Point is, if people don't want to pay for news on paper, so be it.
>Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
Now, if this is true, then there will be plenty of people willing to show this by paying for local news, online or otherwise.
Good thing people are building new local news solutions!
Check the list of startups over at http://jstartup.com/categories/7673-startups
Here in Chicago, The Windy Citizen, my local news startup has just hired its first ad rep. We're basically a local Digg, loosing connecting together all the little local sites in the city through links and buttons. People are going to keep starting little local news sites. We're here to help them get that first 500 readers they need to get off and running.
Check the list of startups over at http://jstartup.com/categories/7673-startups
Here in Chicago, The Windy Citizen, my local news startup has just hired its first ad rep. We're basically a local Digg, loosing connecting together all the little local sites in the city through links and buttons. People are going to keep starting little local news sites. We're here to help them get that first 500 readers they need to get off and running.
Companies like the AP and Reuters will pay for it, because they can then sell the content to publications (both online and dead trees).
People will still pay for content, and hence someone will still get paid to produce content, but the simple fact is that traditional newspapers can't compete as a distribution medium with other, newer, mediums.
People will still pay for content, and hence someone will still get paid to produce content, but the simple fact is that traditional newspapers can't compete as a distribution medium with other, newer, mediums.
This is an excellent question, and if we want excellent answers, it is the question we need to be asking - NOT "how will we save the newspaper."
public broadcasting model. An example...
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/
adsense, common sense!
Sure whatever. Newspapers deliver ads, coupons, sales and various other "inserts"(all that crap stuffed into Sunday edition), classifieds, legal notices, wedding/death announcements, etc.
Businesses and people pay(less often than they use to but they still pay) for that delivery. Not enough people pay for journalism, we're too shortsighted and selfish. But we are willing to pay for vanity and to make money. This is why papers aren't going away anytime soon.
Businesses and people pay(less often than they use to but they still pay) for that delivery. Not enough people pay for journalism, we're too shortsighted and selfish. But we are willing to pay for vanity and to make money. This is why papers aren't going away anytime soon.
A major demographic in the United States has a significant nostalgic attachment to newspapers as a vehicle for information and as a driver of the public discourse. Losing that could disenfranchise a group of people who still comprise a large portion of public opinion. More importantly, those views might not survive to be digitized if we don't soften the death spiral facing print media, so we all lose out - even if we don't consume archaic forms of information dissemination.
Shall we similarly have sympathy for the "major demographic" has an attachment to MSIE-6.x... and protect them from needing to upgrade? Or is that an unfair comparison?
If you could go to a museum and view a five-hundred-year-old version of IE6, people might shed a lot more tears when the last copy was turned off.
Newspapers are one of our oldest media. There's an entire infrastructure of mythology built around them that will be difficult to replace overnight. That's one reason why everyone finds it so easy to make glib generalizations like "the death of newspapers will herald a big increase in corruption". This isn't a rational statement. [1] It's a statement of religious faith, akin to the belief that atheists can't make moral judgements because they don't go to church on a regular basis.
But, more charitably, and to return to your point: Yeah, we should have at least some sympathy for the people who don't know about Firefox, or can't use it for some reason. The prisoners of corporate IT are people, too. The people who can't understand their Windows box are people, too. And the folks who are losing their jobs in journalism and have no idea what to do next are in legitimate distress.
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[1] I mean, where's the controlled experiment? The last time a case of corruption happened in an era without newspapers was three hundred years ago. Unless you're a really well-read Latin student or a Renaissance historian, every case of corruption you've ever heard of happened in spite of the existence of newspapers.
Of course, if you hand-pick the data you can prove any point you like. There have certainly been many heroic acts of journalism. But there have also been many shameful acts of journalism, and one hell of a lot of mediocrity. I'd wager that for every great investigative journalist there have been a hundred mindless stenographers, several dozen shameless toadies, and at least one William Randolph Hearst. And that's without even getting into Pravda or (pace Godwin) Joseph Goebbels.
Newspapers are one of our oldest media. There's an entire infrastructure of mythology built around them that will be difficult to replace overnight. That's one reason why everyone finds it so easy to make glib generalizations like "the death of newspapers will herald a big increase in corruption". This isn't a rational statement. [1] It's a statement of religious faith, akin to the belief that atheists can't make moral judgements because they don't go to church on a regular basis.
But, more charitably, and to return to your point: Yeah, we should have at least some sympathy for the people who don't know about Firefox, or can't use it for some reason. The prisoners of corporate IT are people, too. The people who can't understand their Windows box are people, too. And the folks who are losing their jobs in journalism and have no idea what to do next are in legitimate distress.
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[1] I mean, where's the controlled experiment? The last time a case of corruption happened in an era without newspapers was three hundred years ago. Unless you're a really well-read Latin student or a Renaissance historian, every case of corruption you've ever heard of happened in spite of the existence of newspapers.
Of course, if you hand-pick the data you can prove any point you like. There have certainly been many heroic acts of journalism. But there have also been many shameful acts of journalism, and one hell of a lot of mediocrity. I'd wager that for every great investigative journalist there have been a hundred mindless stenographers, several dozen shameless toadies, and at least one William Randolph Hearst. And that's without even getting into Pravda or (pace Godwin) Joseph Goebbels.
To be honest, the newspapers of yore are already dead. I do have nostalgia and a sense of wonder for the industry that ran full page broadsheet political cartoons, or Little Nemo in Dreamland, but those orgs are already long gone.
What's left are the dregs. They can't justify their existence, and so they're disappearing. Clay Shirky's piece on the nature of technological shift is particularly enlightening ( http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking... ).
What's left are the dregs. They can't justify their existence, and so they're disappearing. Clay Shirky's piece on the nature of technological shift is particularly enlightening ( http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking... ).
When society is involved, controlled experiments are impossible.
Take a look at the front page of a common "new media" blog: http://dailykos.com/
As of this moment, about 18 out of the 20 posts are using old media (almost always newspapers) as a source, with the bloggers' total contribution being opinion. Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. There's a serious void threatening there.
Take a look at the front page of a common "new media" blog: http://dailykos.com/
As of this moment, about 18 out of the 20 posts are using old media (almost always newspapers) as a source, with the bloggers' total contribution being opinion. Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. There's a serious void threatening there.
Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters.
But this is like arguing that, if Internet Explorer stopped working tomorrow, 90% of web users would be out of commission for years. Whereas, in fact, if IE stopped working tomorrow there would be a brief panic for a day or two until the world's techies, armed with handfuls of installation media for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, filled in the gap. After which things would continue much as before. (Except that many websites would be cheaper to build and would work better. But let's not get into that. ;)
There would be several years of intense pain on the edges as various people and companies who have tied themselves too closely to the IE codebase scrambled to adapt to the new world. But in ten years nobody would even remember IE, just as few people today remember Lotus 1-2-3.
Of course today's blogs depend on dead-tree reporters. Dead-tree reporting is available in abundance -- indeed, in many niches there is a massive surplus of it -- because it is subsidized by steady outside sources of revenue derived (in part) from monopolies on local advertising. It was hard to compete against that subsidy, while it lasted. But that subsidy is smaller now, and shrinking. [1] And we just don't know what happens next.
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[1] Though, in fact, I don't think it is gone. The death of print media may be greatly exaggerated. It's hard to tell the difference between an extinction-level event and an event that will reduce the population by a mere 85% when you're in the middle of it. And simple mismanagement has a lot to do with the newspapers' current plight.
But this is like arguing that, if Internet Explorer stopped working tomorrow, 90% of web users would be out of commission for years. Whereas, in fact, if IE stopped working tomorrow there would be a brief panic for a day or two until the world's techies, armed with handfuls of installation media for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, filled in the gap. After which things would continue much as before. (Except that many websites would be cheaper to build and would work better. But let's not get into that. ;)
There would be several years of intense pain on the edges as various people and companies who have tied themselves too closely to the IE codebase scrambled to adapt to the new world. But in ten years nobody would even remember IE, just as few people today remember Lotus 1-2-3.
Of course today's blogs depend on dead-tree reporters. Dead-tree reporting is available in abundance -- indeed, in many niches there is a massive surplus of it -- because it is subsidized by steady outside sources of revenue derived (in part) from monopolies on local advertising. It was hard to compete against that subsidy, while it lasted. But that subsidy is smaller now, and shrinking. [1] And we just don't know what happens next.
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[1] Though, in fact, I don't think it is gone. The death of print media may be greatly exaggerated. It's hard to tell the difference between an extinction-level event and an event that will reduce the population by a mere 85% when you're in the middle of it. And simple mismanagement has a lot to do with the newspapers' current plight.
I think that's an incorrect comparison, as IE6 does not directly or indirectly create content and the newspapers do.
While I enjoy my weekend newspaper, and feel that it far surpasses a good deal of the writing available in other mediums, to suggest a dead medium deserves some sort of protection even though it cannot survive on its own is basically counter to everything the free market stands for.
If there is a market for the product, as you suggest their is, then let them pay to enjoy it. If not, so be it.
If there is a market for the product, as you suggest their is, then let them pay to enjoy it. If not, so be it.
You would if you owned one. Why _we_ would want to, I have no clue.
In an industry that worships smart engineers this is pretty refreshing. I am biased being a designer but it's still a good watch for you Hackers and also a lesson for the newspaper industry (Hint: death is coming).
are you talking about the tech industry?
as an engineer/hacker, i think its pretty clear that design is important. its cold, hard facts that people like something that is visually appealing. the issue is, though, that this is a community of hackers, and so we're all mostly poor at artistic design, nor are we particularly interested in it, so we don't talk about it.
its definitely interesting, and this meshes well with the community because its a discussion on the numbers of how design works.
just my $0.02, though
as an engineer/hacker, i think its pretty clear that design is important. its cold, hard facts that people like something that is visually appealing. the issue is, though, that this is a community of hackers, and so we're all mostly poor at artistic design, nor are we particularly interested in it, so we don't talk about it.
its definitely interesting, and this meshes well with the community because its a discussion on the numbers of how design works.
just my $0.02, though
You must be in a different tech industry. At least where I work, a good designer is highly respected by all of the developers - by doing a good job understanding the customer wants, he makes our lives hell of a lot easier.
It's been a few weeks now since the Seattle P-I went web only. Anyone else notice how there were lots of news stories about that change, and now nothing?
Reporters aren't even interested. They just believe that going to the web equals death.
Reporters aren't even interested. They just believe that going to the web equals death.
Donation-funded reporting:
http://spot.us/
No.
Newspapers must drop the 'paper' from their name and embrace the web. Profit can come from diferent ways, like ads, classifieds, job boards, obituaries, etc.
Would you invest?