Over in Slate, Jack Shafer takes a grim look at the newspapers that land on his front door each morning, calling them "already chewed news" and worse. Of course, he's a self described insomniac, checking news sites throughout the day and into the wee hours of the morning. He says:
I'm not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow's news today. This time-shift is as historically significant as the great migration of newspaper readers from afternoon to morning dailies, or the adoption of AM news radio by sequestered commuters. Where the newspaper was once considered the day's complete news, it's now just all-the-news-that-fits. The genuine news enthusiast trolls the AP wire, foreign news sites, and the usual aggregators for the biggest picture.
And more grimness, but not unremitting, Shafer admits that content outside of the front pages is new and fresh, and that if he was crunched for time, he'd still prefer picking up the paper and flipping through than trying to find online. And he closes with some positives:
Powers writes that "the public exodus from newspapers is not a rejection of paper, but an objection to using it for hard news and other utilitarian, quick-read content … that gains little or nothing from arriving in that format." Ceding supremacy to the Web has been an important first step in the daily newspaper's evolution to its next state. The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper.
Yep. I continue to get more insight from the long form journalism I see in daily and weekly and monthly publications than pretty much anything I see on the web. In some ways, what I (and maybe Jack) use the web for is to find out *what* is happening in the world, particularly in things I know I care about, and I look to the printed and longer video pieces to tell me the "why" about things, in particular things I didn't know I cared about. National Geographic is a great example, there is rarely a "what" in there, but there is always a "why" and I wouldn't give up my subscription.
Color me optimistic.