Dead Trees: RIP for Newspapers?!

 

In a recent edition of the Washington Post, Michael Kinsley poses a thoughtful parable about dying of trees for newspapers! Print journalists may enjoy reading it, as I do.
Excerpt:

Some evil force is causing people to stop reading newspapers! ...
This alarming possibility threatens all of us, because reading newspapers is, in the end, what makes us Americans. We are prudent, practical, common-sense people. And what could be more common-sense -- more downright American -- than chopping down vast swaths of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and carted across the country to printing plants where they are turned into newspapers as we know them (with sections folded into one another -- or not -- according to a secret formula designed for maximum mess and frustration and known only to a few artisans) ...
Newspapers are essential to every American, and none more so than the fools and ingrates who have stopped buying them. It is up to us, as members of the last generation that experienced life before computer screens, to make sure that future generations of Americans will know what to do when it says "Continued on Page B37." ...
As with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the government would buy vast quantities of newspapers on the open market and store them somewhere for a rainy day (when they can be delivered sopping wet, as the newspaper industry prefers whenever possible). One possible location for the reserve might be my mother's apartment, where there are already neat piles of newspapers dating back to Watergate that she is going to get to soon. If you go to inspect the reserve, please don't tell her how the 2000 election came out. She wants to be surprised...

To be continued here.

Jack Smith  |  *Feedback  |   0 comments   |     |  11:49 AM

WIKIPEDIA Zooms Ahead

 

According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, Wikipedia's share of U.S. Internet visits placed it at number 13 in the Hitwise Education - Reference category at the beginning of 2004. However, by the week ending April 16, 2005, Wikipedia's total Internet share of visits skyrocketed by 618 percent, making it the second most visited reference website overall.
Steve Outing, at the Poynter Institute E-Media Tidbits has posted his analysis of Wikipedia's Traffic Up. He says:

I'm not surprised. What seemed at first to many of us a crazy idea -- an open encyclopedia written and edited by anyone who feels like contributing -- has turned out to have affirmed the wiki model as a legitimate and important publishing orce.

Jack Smith  |  *Feedback  |   0 comments   |     |  12:31 PM

Big Media Companies Weigh Blog Strategies

 

A Reuters report says that established media don't regard blogs as a direct threat to their ad models -- yet. But they are flirting with the format, fearing their news could be upstaged by the unbridled mix of opinion and humor offered by individual bloggers....

Jack Smith  |  *Feedback  |   0 comments   |     |  1:25 PM

Newspapers Podcasting

 

More and more newspapers and newspaper-run sites are jumping on the bandwagon all the time.
The Seattle Post Intelligencer has published a list of newspapers that podcast.

Jack Smith  |  *Feedback  |   0 comments   |     |  1:17 PM