In 1962, fifty years ago this month, striking union printers shut down four New York City newspapers in resistance to computerized, automated technologies that were being introduced in newsrooms across the country. Five other area papers shut down voluntarily. The strike lasted 114 days and sounded the death knell for four newspapers. For a brief period, New York was a laboratory that demonstrated what can happen when newspapers vanish. Today, new technology is again shaking American newspapers as the Internet drains away more and more advertising revenue. Is this
The Long Good Bye? [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 30, 2012 -
25 comments
You want us to pay you for directing eyeballs to your sites? Newspaper publishers in France want a law whereby Google (and other search engine services) have to pay for each click made from the search engine to their sites. You click on a link to a French newspaper site from a search engine, the Search Engine has to pay the newspaper for that click. If the law is passed it's likely Google
will no longer include links to French sites that require payment for said links.
posted by juiceCake
on Oct 19, 2012 -
107 comments
Ephemeral New York 'chronicles an ever-changing, constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.'
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 11, 2012 -
5 comments
Analog, Warren Buffett and Digital Media - Why Warren Buffett invests in newspapers: " You essentially have a business that will make a lot of money if you are terrific, it will make a lot of money if you're lousy," Buffett said, "...how good a newspaper is depends entirely on the wishes of its owner. There is no correlation between profits and excellence," Buffett added, "there's really nothing like that in American business." Enjoy nearly a full
60 minutes of Warren Buffet's (all too rare) public teaching style in
this recently uploaded video from 1992.
posted by spock
on Sep 28, 2012 -
15 comments
A fellow tried to impress his friends by fitting a billiard ball in his mouth -
he died. A young woman laced her corset too tightly -
she died. A woman fell down the stairs, which caused one of her hairpins to penetrate her skull -
she died. And, of course, many people had horrible encounters with mill and farm machinery.
Predictably, they died. (warning-occasionally graphic descriptions of death and dismemberment, mostly from the late 19th century).
[more inside]
posted by cilantro
on Sep 21, 2012 -
59 comments
Newspapers have two principal sources of revenue, readers and advertisers, and they can operate at mass or niche scale for each of those groups. A metro-area daily paper is a mass product for customers (many readers buy the paper) and for advertisers (many readers see their ads.) Newsletters and small-circulation magazines, by contrast, serve niche readers, and therefore niche advertisers — Fire Chief, Mother Earth News. (Some newsletters get by with no advertising at all, as with Cooks’ Illustrated, where part of what the user pays for is freedom from ads, or rather freedom from a publisher beholden to advertisers.)
Paywalls were an attempt to preserve the old mass+mass model after a transition to digital distribution. With so few readers willing to pay, and therefore so few readers to advertise to, paywalls instead turned newspapers into a niche+niche business. What the article threshold creates is an odd hybrid — a mass market for advertising, but a niche market for users. Clay Shirky on the economics of newspaper paywalls and why article thresholds seem to be the way of the future.
posted by storybored
on Jan 10, 2012 -
15 comments
PR Industry Fills Vacuum Left by Shrinking Newsrooms - "You would go into these hearings and there would be more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three" ..it's getting tougher to know when a storyline originates with a self-interested party producing its own story.
posted by thisisdrew
on Jul 12, 2011 -
43 comments
The Newspaper Map: browse thousands of local, regional and national newspapers from around the world, based on geographical location. Filter and translate languages, see newspaper archives back to the early 19th century, and find fourth estate Twitter and YouTube feeds. A
mobile version is also available.
via
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Jun 7, 2011 -
7 comments
19th-century newspaper ads for patented stomach cures and digestive aids [...] foregrounded mince pie as the K2 of digestive summits. But for every published warning on the dangers of mince, the newspapers published a poem, essay, or editorial praising it as a great symbol of American cultural heritage or a nostalgic reminder of mother love and better times bygone—or even, as the State of Columbia, South Carolina, asserted in 1901, a beneficial Darwinian instrument that had "thinned out the weak ones" among the pioneering generations.
So wrote Cliff Doerksen in his wonderful, James Beard award-winning article
Mince Pie: The Real American Pie. Doerksen not only gives the history of this once most American of foods, he also makes two mince pies from 19th Century recipes to see if they are indeed all that. This is but one of many great articles Doerksen wrote for The Chicago Reader in recent years (links to a selection below the cut). Sadly, Cliff Doerksen
passed at the age of 47 just before Christmas.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 29, 2010 -
73 comments
“They threw out what Tribune had stood for, quality journalism and a real brand integrity, and in just a year, pushed it down into mud and bankruptcy,”. Tribune Company - Tales of a Bankrupt Culture: 'Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of
Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company.
Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.''“They threw out what Tribune had stood for, quality journalism and a real brand integrity, and in just a year, pushed it down into mud and bankruptcy,” said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst with Outsell Inc., a consulting firm. “And it’s been wallowing there for the last 20 months with no end in sight.”'But even as the company foundered, the tight circle of executives, many with longtime ties to Mr. Michaels, received tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Oct 7, 2010 -
44 comments
Last week, the New York Times magazine
published an explosive article about the phone-hacking exploits at the Rupert Murdoch-owned British tabloid
News Of The World under the then-editorship of Andy Coulson, now the
the Government's chief of communications. Following the NYT's investigation, questions about the "unhealthy" relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the
press (particularly Murdoch's
News International, which also includes The Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times), and further claims that an independent inquiry was abandoned so as
not to upset the Metropolitan Police, assistant Met Commissioner John Yates was
questioned [video; 4 mins] on Tuesday by the Home Affairs select committee. Following an
emergency debate in Parliament today, which concerned the fact that MPs of all parties may have had their phones hacked (and therefore had their
Parliamentary Privilege breached), the
Standards and Privileges Committee, the most powerful committee in Parliament, is to
open an inquiry which will be able to compel witnesses to give evidence. Meanwhile, former News of the World reporters are coming out the woodwork, claiming that hacking at the paper was
"rife", and the pressure is on Coulson to resign his £140,000 job at No. 10, with a
poll [pdf] which says 52% of the public says he should go.
[more inside]
posted by Len
on Sep 9, 2010 -
46 comments
Frankenstein Defeats Evil Computer. Mysterious Grass-Roots Gal-Revolt Rocks Gotham! Are Hippies Slowing Down Space Progam in Protest? Headlines ripped from the pages of such great newspapers as the Daily Bugle and the Gotham Gazette await you at
Dateline: Silver Age.
posted by gamera
on Apr 30, 2010 -
16 comments
"What are you f**king playing at?” Mr Murdoch asked Mr Kelner in a loud voice and in front of dozens of bemused journalists."
This week, 300,000 copies of the UK's
Independent newspaper were distributed for free advertising the paper's claim to editorial independence stating, "Rupert Murdoch won’t decide this election – you will".
According to the Financial Times, Murdoch's son James subsequently stormed
into the Independent's newsroom brandishing a copy of the edition, protesting it besmirched his father’s reputation. "
Lively times," the
Guardian observes.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Apr 22, 2010 -
62 comments
Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper. "Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink."
posted by chunking express
on Dec 10, 2009 -
91 comments
“With t.o.night, you too can remember the good old days, when Mom, Dad, Junior, Little Suzy, and Skip would all sit around the radio and listen to blogs on the Internet.” The solution to the decline of newspapers? Launch a new one, charge nothing for it, fill it with wire copy and stories from a city blog, publish it weekday afternoons, and hire kids to wear “poor-boy caps” and shout “Extra! Extra!” while handing it out.
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on Jul 30, 2009 -
8 comments
"Do you love me? Will you answer this all absorbing question the next time we meet? Will you utter that winsome "Yes" fraught with all the golden dreams of heavenly realms, or will you pronounce the dread "No" and consign my soul to darkness and despair?"
Advertising for Love, a collection of funny, strange, poignant and bizarre personal ads from nineteenth-century American newspapers.
posted by verstegan
on May 29, 2009 -
10 comments
