The Nation: Stop the Presses?

[marmar]

Stop the Presses?
posted by Jon Wiener on 03/12/2009 @ 12:21pm


"It's time to stop the presses" at daily newspapers, and turn them into online-only publications – that's what former L.A. Times staffer Rick Wartzman says. Writing in Business Week this week, he says it's the only way to preserve the mission of journalists everywhere: report the facts on what the powerful are doing, and what's happening to the rest of us, and do it with the skill, professionalism and ethics often missing in the blogosphere. We need journalists, he says, but we don't need newsprint.

Wartzman is not some teenage blogger. He's worked in the heart of print journalism: he's the former Business Editor at the L.A. Times, and for a while he edited the paper's West magazine. Before that he worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. (He's also written a couple of terrific nonfiction books.) He took the Times buyout recently and now is director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. He's not an enthusiast for reading the news on the web; he calls himself "a guy who loves to go out and pick up the three newspapers that land on my front lawn every morning."

But he calls the end of daily newsprint "inescapable" – an economic necessity. The alternative, he says, is simple: daily newspapers will go broke and disappear completely. Denver's Rocky Mountain News has already stopped publishing. The LA Times is owned by The Tribune company, headed by the evil Sam Zell (so much for journalistic "neutrality" online), which is in bankruptcy. Also in bankruptcy: the owners of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Hearst Corp. will probably close the San Francisco Chronicle sometime soon.

But if newspapers can't survive on newsprint, could they really stay alive, and possibly even thrive, as online-only operations? Wartzman worked out the economics with the current editor of the LA Times, Russ Stanton. "Based on its current level of online ad revenue," Wartzman writes, "the L.A. Times could support a staff of about 275 people at their present salaries," of whom about 150 would work in the newsroom. The good news is that, at this level, "The paper would be a solid moneymaker, boasting a profit margin of about 10%." ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/416799/stop_the_presses

[WI_DEM]

1. F**K that I spend enough time in front of a computer at work and on line

I enjoy reading a real paper newspaper. It's a shame that the wave of the future is going against them thanks to the internet age.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

2. Lord knows I spend enough time in front of the computer.

Call me old fashioned (although I haven't yet turned 30), but there's nothing like sitting at the breakfast table in the morning, reading the newspaper.

[Peace Patriot]

3. "...and do it with the skill, professionalism and ethics often missing in the blogosphere."

Oh, please! We really need an infusion of the kind of journalism that brought us the Iraq War, and the Bush Junta and their stolen elections and their Financial 9/11!

Lectures from the L.A. Times business writer. Right. Next we'll have Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove deciding who has journalistic "ethics" on the internet...and, um, Donald Rumsfeld, who, in an op-ed in the Washington Post on Dec 1, 2007, entitled "The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez," urged the government to increase its presence on the internet for more psyops against the left in South America. He also urged "swift action" by the US in support of (Bushwhack) "friends and allies" in South America, so we know he's been involved in rightwing coup and civil war planning.

The reason the print newspapers are failing is that they stopped doing journalism and became war profiteers.