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News & ArtsMonday, December 22, 2008
Media Today in the Slow Death of Newspapers
Posted by Brendan Kiley on Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 5:02 PM
The old New Media-is-Parasitic argument, this time with legs:
The Huffington Post, a venture-capital-backed new media site that mixes links to other sites content with hundreds of celebrity and volunteer blogger posts, is being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content.Whet Moser, an editor at alternative weekly Chicago Reader wants to know why The Huffington Post's newly formed Chicago-focused venture is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews and reprinting them in whole in order to get search engine traffic. And he found other examples taken wholesale from The Onion and Time Out Chicago.
Here's a link to the Reader complaint and a screen shot of the story reprinted by the Huffington Post.
Kevin Allman, editor of New Orleans's Gambit Weekly, sums up the fear and loathing in a sentence:
In other words: professional newsgathering organizations have paid professional writers to do professional work, and then Arianna comes in, creates links to their creations, and sells ads on her own page.
It's an old complaint but it'll get hotter as blogs get bolder, newspapers get weaker, and experts keep predicting that major cities will be without newspapers as soon as 2010.
If the newspapers dry up and blow away in the wind, what will the aggre-gators eat?
1
Blogs tend to be parasites. I think it's a huge shame that legitimate news is being hurt in part by shitty alternative sources that have yet to prove their value.
2
I try to pay attention when I quote others. I like to put in one or two sentences and make sure they're "teasers" so the person actually follows the hyperlink rather than just getting the gist of the story from the quoted text.
I try to pay attention when I quote others. I like to put in one or two sentences and make sure they're "teasers" so the person actually follows the hyperlink rather than just getting the gist of the story from the quoted text.
3
I know what to do.
1. Stop Google.
2. Take money from Google.
3. Give that money to me.
4. Anyone else who uses my stuff is also required to give me money. Like HuffPo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRTAZsh8Z…
1. Stop Google.
2. Take money from Google.
3. Give that money to me.
4. Anyone else who uses my stuff is also required to give me money. Like HuffPo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRTAZsh8Z…
4
Who needs newspapers when you have the internet? Blogs and everything else on the internet is 100% true, researched and verified, so why bother paying journalists and editors?
Now excuse me while I purchase another box of penis-enlargement pills.
Now excuse me while I purchase another box of penis-enlargement pills.
5
We are getting exactly what we deserve. The demand for cheap airfare has resulted in the horror of cattle-car air travel. The demand for free news is destroying the newspapers (television news was always crap).
6
The death of dead-tree media is sad, but a symptom. The replacement of professional journalism with shrill commentary, that's the disease.
7
I was wondering why The Huffington Post was no longer a "Friend Of Slog." Thanks to The Stranger I read it every day.
When I clicked on 15 links and all but four of them went to another web page (NYT, the St. Louis Dispatch, etc.).
What The Huffington Post does is more above board than most other blogs.
When I clicked on 15 links and all but four of them went to another web page (NYT, the St. Louis Dispatch, etc.).
What The Huffington Post does is more above board than most other blogs.
8
The integrity of news media has been slipping for over a decade. That the circulation and health of these businesses, which have been centralizing their publication and dumbing down their content to the lowest common denominator, has been declining is no fucking surprise.
And blogs are to blame for it?
In a capitalist society, a powerhouse of expertise and elitism (journalism) has been marginalized by AMATEURS?
Uh.... boohoo for newspapers. Maybe if they published things focused on ...oh, i don't know... news and commentary that is relevant, opinions that focused on both sides of the argument (eg. Dominic Holden's fabulous work on Drug War Bias) and maybe entertained a wider audience than shut in and recluses who don't know how to use a computer.
How do you compete in a digital age? Publish something that actually garners a better readership than online media. How many shrill commentaries in a thread can you stand to bear? How much time do you sprend reading them all? Please. Shit that is worth reading, you read.
The fact that news papers are falling by the wayside isn't a commentary on the dumbing down of society. Newspapers already accomplished that by focusing only on violent crimes (which are reported far out of proportion to their occurrence), "human interest stories" (which don't seem to focus on interest to many humans), and shoddy reporting just to make a deadline. If nothing happened today, don't fill dead space with drivel.
Wah. Blogs are the devil.
If newspapers can't fight a smidgen of competition, then they aren't a viable corporation and must respond to market forces.
Right? We all believe in capitalism and the right way to accomplish our economic objectives, right?
When newspapers published journalism of research and integrity everyday and not just research once a year that wins pulitzers, they were accredited sources. Now, newspapers run real journalism akin to TV sweeps.
No wonder. They're emulating their TV brethren.
Newspapers used to be respectable. Tell me how many pages in a news paper you read today and are grateful you bought that paper (ie learned something).
Who will the blogs the steal from? Primary sources. Those used to be newspapers. Now, that is changing. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing.
More...
And blogs are to blame for it?
In a capitalist society, a powerhouse of expertise and elitism (journalism) has been marginalized by AMATEURS?
Uh.... boohoo for newspapers. Maybe if they published things focused on ...oh, i don't know... news and commentary that is relevant, opinions that focused on both sides of the argument (eg. Dominic Holden's fabulous work on Drug War Bias) and maybe entertained a wider audience than shut in and recluses who don't know how to use a computer.
How do you compete in a digital age? Publish something that actually garners a better readership than online media. How many shrill commentaries in a thread can you stand to bear? How much time do you sprend reading them all? Please. Shit that is worth reading, you read.
The fact that news papers are falling by the wayside isn't a commentary on the dumbing down of society. Newspapers already accomplished that by focusing only on violent crimes (which are reported far out of proportion to their occurrence), "human interest stories" (which don't seem to focus on interest to many humans), and shoddy reporting just to make a deadline. If nothing happened today, don't fill dead space with drivel.
Wah. Blogs are the devil.
If newspapers can't fight a smidgen of competition, then they aren't a viable corporation and must respond to market forces.
Right? We all believe in capitalism and the right way to accomplish our economic objectives, right?
When newspapers published journalism of research and integrity everyday and not just research once a year that wins pulitzers, they were accredited sources. Now, newspapers run real journalism akin to TV sweeps.
No wonder. They're emulating their TV brethren.
Newspapers used to be respectable. Tell me how many pages in a news paper you read today and are grateful you bought that paper (ie learned something).
Who will the blogs the steal from? Primary sources. Those used to be newspapers. Now, that is changing. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing.
11
Newspapers often cater to the lowest common denominator, where as blogs will often cater to a specific target audience, I don't think newspapers should expect to thrive if they continue their 19th century ways.
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