Rocky Mountain News is DEAD

Discussion in 'Justice for JonBenet Discussion - Public Forum' started by Why_Nut, Feb 26, 2009.

  1. Why_Nut

    Why_Nut FFJ Senior Member

  2. zoomama

    zoomama Active Member

    Why Nut,

    This is sad and it is happening all over the place. Yesterday when the news of the San Francisco Chronicle announced it may be closing one of the newsmen said to the camera man,"Why would any who gets the paper for free on line pay 75 cents for it to hold and read." I have to agree. But there is something honest or romantic as in nostalgic about reading "the paper". Holding it and listening to the sound of pages as you turn it, the smell of the ink in the Sunday comics, stuff like that.

    Does anyone here have one of those new "books", called the kindle? I have been curious about them and read that they can old about 10,000 books in the one electronic thingy. There will go another institution if books go the way of the news print papers. :book:

    Times are getting serious now. The President told us it would get worse before it gets better. Yikes!!!!! :fan:
     
  3. Why_Nut

    Why_Nut FFJ Senior Member

    I have a Kindle and will never willingly part with it as long as it is functional. It is a marvel. The best feature (for my forum posting purposes, in any case) is that it makes every book, newspaper item, or magazine article on it entirely searchable. You know what that means? It means that when I need to look up, say, a Nedra quote in PMPT, all I do is hit the Search button at the bottom of the Kindle, type "Nedra" and it will present all the pages of all the books I have where Nedra is mentioned.

    This is A.W.E.S.O.M.E.

    I have literally 22 bookcases in my abode, plus three closets, every one filled with books. That is not even counting the tens of book-filled cartons which I never have gotten around to unpacking from the last time I moved, oh, almost 30 years ago. In the best of all worlds, there will come a day when every single one of those books resides either on my Kindle or on a small netbook computer. The amazing thing is that, since the Kindle is so portable, I end up reading more book material now than I had been before. For a commuter on mass transit in New York City, it is a godsend.

    The RMN had its day, but it should have seen the time coming when its paper-based paradigm would have ended. The best hope I have is that at least its archives are preserved on one of the online historical-newspaper search sites.
     
  4. Elle

    Elle Member

  5. Elle

    Elle Member

    I worry about all my grandchildren Zoomama, a few graduating from university, and the younger ones. I wonder what their future will be like with this economy disaster we are going through (?). Here in Canada, every other day another big company is closing down with workers being laid off.

    What a worrying time for Canada and the United States.
     
  6. "J_R"

    "J_R" Shutter Bug Bee

    Why_Nut do you think the Kindle2 is worth going for or would you wait for version 3 to come out? I have been thinking of picking one up but in reading the reviews have hesitated.
     
  7. Voyager

    Voyager Active Member

    The Free Press....

    People don't realize what we are letting go here....The Free Press is an intricate part of a Democratic society. Americans have an important tradition of Free Press in it's daily newspapers in every city and state in the Union. I truly cannot imagine our society without the Free Press representing the views of the populace without financial or political intervention.

    The decline of newpapers nationally leaves a huge information gap just at the time when we most need to keep informed of the movements of government in restoring our society to some form of normality. We should all be buying our local newspapers and supporting them with advertising every chance we get, because when they are gone, we will be wishing to God that we had our information sources back....We desperately need this form of communication in our society. Please everyone support your local papers and READ THEM!

    Our daughter and son in law were newpaper people unitl recently....Our son in law's newspaper, a Scripts Howard paper like the Rocky Mountain News, closed down one year ago because of the same reasons as the RMN....His paper too was an award winning paper in both writing and photograpy....In fact his photo editor went to the RMN when the Tribune closed here last year... (Our family has missed this evening Tribune every single day that it has been gone, after having read it since we were teenagers!)

    The whole newspaper industry in experiencing a turbulant time in terms of budgets and nonreadership....What is happening to our society? Not all news can or is reported online and the online reporting is so poor and onesided.....This is a crisis of great proportion....I say stop buying the TABs and purchase you daily papers reading the columnists and the local news that relates to your everyday life and community....Communication in a community is essential to the organized life of that community....

    Without newspapers things will begin to go awrey quickly....There is no news that can compete with written news and I am NOT talking BLOG news reporting....Good GAWD! Do you all remember the non professional grass-roots reporter with no skills and no ethics, Mame? We need to get back to basics and to our national and local traditions including the daily newspaper...

    Voyager
     
  8. Jayelles

    Jayelles Alert Viewer in Scotland

    I've never heard of a Kindle. I must look it up. I like a paper book. I write all over them:)

    I'm also one of those people who reads the papers online - quite religiously too. I used to buy a daily newspaper faithfully decided to stop paying for it as a mark of protest when it came to light that it was printing false stories about the Madeleine McCann case. I felt so conned and angry. I know others who feel the same and who also stopped buying newspapers. A lot of these papers have only themselves to blame for their demise.

    The first thing I do in the morning is read the paper online. I'm also irritated by the increasing focus on celebrity. I get really mad when I read a headline like "67 year old Actress starting to look her age". Hell's teeth! I think the media abuse their privileges.
     
  9. RiverRat

    RiverRat FFJ Sr. Member Extraordinaire (Pictured at Lef

    I heard earlier

    No more Ramsey Mountain News........:violin: The are going to miss out on this new investigation - IF there really is going to be one. I don't feel too bad for them as they did have it good there for a decade and maybe didn't budget as wisely as some of us have..........
     
  10. Why_Nut

    Why_Nut FFJ Senior Member

    I agree to an extent with all this. The information itself needs to be constantly amassed and then presented for an audience. But is there something sacred in putting that information only on pulp made from trees? I would think not necessarily. Paper is very expensive to make, ink is very expensive to buy. Bytes on the internet, however, are cheap and getting cheaper. And interestingly this is where the Kindle comes in. The Rocky Mountain News could continue to publish every single thing it currently does, but in Kindle format for which they could charge for subscriptions just as the New York Times does, and purely online. But it looks as if all involved just could not make that mental leap to divorce themselves from the connection that information is not made more credible just because it is printed on paper. So, in the world where the fittest survive, the RMN falls, while the Huffington Post thrives.

    There is not one single thing which prevents online reporters from having editors. There is not one single thing which prevents editors from editing content before it is put online. If a newspaper is defined by its quality, that quality arises from the people who work on it, not the physical medium which hosts their work. Hollywood learned this lesson a while ago when it stopped insisting that the only way it wanted to make money was by putting images on celluloid, and learned to embrace the internet and its far-cheaper production and distribution model. Newspaper organizations have to learn the same lesson -- it is what you are publishing, and not the way you publish it, that matters.
     
  11. Elle

    Elle Member

    Zoomama and Why_Nut,

    You made me very curious about this "Kindle" so I looked it up on Amazon.

    Amazon have "Kindle advertised : 90 used & new from $250.00

    http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA

    Kindle is a word I used to hear in Scotland many moons ago. My father would say to my oldest sister. "Kindle the fire!" In other words. Prepare the newspapers and firewood, coal etc. "Set on fire!" I guess this was a good word to use for their product.
     
  12. Voyager

    Voyager Active Member

    Hi Why Nut...

    The problem about publishing online is that no one has yet figured out a way to make a profit doing it. I know this because when the Tribune closed here last year permanently, they had thoroughly explored those avenues...The times are just not right yet for profitable online newpaper reporting. That is not to say that some day this might not become feasalble, but at this time it is not.

    Thanks for responding...This is an issue of great importance in a free society, and I don't think that many people realize how crippled a free society can become without an active free press.

    Voyager
     
  13. Cherokee

    Cherokee FFJ Senior Member

    This is an interesting discussion.

    I understand the concern for the demise of the printed newspaper, but it is inevitable. Just as the movie and music worlds are having to adjust their models or die, so too does ANY information industry that thrives on mass consumption.

    Society hasn't always had newspapers. There were town criers and there were royal decrees, but not until the masses began being educated in one way or another (usually rich males were first), did newspapers come into being. The reason they were invented was because at the time, it was the best way of disseminating information. You had paper (not clay or papyrus) and ink as ready tools, and with the invention of the printing press and moveable type, a way of printing words fairly quickly and not having to copy them by hand.

    Newspapers developed into what we know today with their advertising and different sections over the years into a model. It had a publisher, and an editor, and sub-editors, and columnists, etc. With the advent of photography, photos were added. Later, TV news became a competitor, but did not completely annihilate the newspaper. All it did was make the competition for the latest breaking news more fierce, and as a result, it cheapened "journalism" into something else - a race for ratings, money, readership vs. viewership, and eventually, the coverage of celebrity and invention of "news."

    Then along came the internet. It became a new model for dissemination of information and product (such as movies and music), and the old guard didn't know what to do. They were used to be in charge of what was given to the masses for consumption. Suddenly, the internet leveled the playing field again in a way that made it difficult for the news, or movies, or music, or ANYTHING to be controlled.

    The music industry has tried to do business as usual and continue to put out "albums" or CDs of music as it has for years, but sales keep declining. The old model of A&R signing an artist, controlling that artist's output in an album, putting maybe two or three good songs plus filler IN that album, then marketing it with kickbacks to DJs and music chains is dead and dying.

    In the music industry, there was lots of money to be made by middle men. They have been reluctant to give up the old model, but the general public LIKES the idea of only buying the songs they want and not paying for the rest. They also like to hear new artists that have not been hand-selected by someone in LA or NY. The internet gives the power of choice back to the people instead of a well-heeled few. Only those music companies who adapt to the new paradigm will survive.

    The same is true for newspapers. They must adapt to what is happening is this new age.

    I understand the concerns about a society without a free press, but just because the press is on the internet doesn't mean it isn't "free." In some ways, it is MORE free because it isn't encumbered by the political views of an editor and publisher, etc.

    I speak from personal experience as I worked as a proofreader for a newspaper when in high school. I was honestly surprised to find out how much was controlled at the local level according to the whims of the managing editor. Several times, we received an AP story off the wire and the editor would have me insert paragraphs of his own writing into the story as if it was part of the "official" reporting. He would change things ever so slightly, but it recast the news in a different political slant, and that's when I became very aware of the power of controlling what people read. I also realized then that AP stories didn't come with headlines, those were made up by the editor, and that a story could be given a slant depending on what kind of headline it had. A person could actually change the entire tone of a story by controlling the headline.

    What we are going through now is a shift in how we receive information. Instead of a commuter reading a printed newspaper, he can read it on his IPhone, Kindle, or some other portable device. Just as the printing press revolutionized the world, the internet and portable communication is revolutionizing it yet again. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle, so in the meantime, there will be a time of transition until a new model of information consumption is settled.

    I don't believe books will cease to exist. There is something too wonderful about their very physical existence. In addition, if the battery dies, the computer crashes, the electricity goes off, then we are without that information. But the printed word is going to have to learn to live along side the virtual word as devices like Kindle, and others, make it easier for people to access information from various sources all over the world.
     
  14. BobC

    BobC Poster of the EON - Fabulous Inimitable Transcript

    I agree with Why_Nut. The form that news takes is merely switching to a new form. Lots of news venues have figured out how to make money online, and I say good for them. As a person who worked for a major newspaper for years, I can say I don't miss those holier than thou, phony liberal types at all. They openly mocked conservative white males and that got really, really old for me. A good half of my coworkers sneered at the commoners and felt they were better and ever so much better than those who supported them. On one of my last days there one of my snooty liberal newspaper "friends" told me if not for them (newspapers), our society would devolve into racists. I'd had enough of her at that point and told her, quite rudely, that JOURNALISTS are paid to be unbiased reporters of facts, NOT social directors--AND I told her that those straight white males she constantly looked down on were paying her salary. Then I informed her that the reason we were losing readers hand over fist was that the majority of people out there were tired of the phony liberal nonsense.

    Something old and ugly is dying off and deservedly so. I can't wait to see those snobs actually having to work for a living and brush elbows with the commoners. Good riddance.
     
  15. Texan

    Texan FFJ Senior Member

    oh BobC

    I do agree with you! It seems to me that journalists are supposed to be unbiased but I sometimes see both newspaper and TV journalists that believe they know better than the average person and must educate us (read that as cram their ideology down our throats and attempt to either make people that don't agree look stupid or try to shame them into agreeing).

    I am not saying all journalists do this - there are fine journalists who are ethical and know what their purpose is. I am just saying some step out of bounds just like some celebrities that think they know what everyone's politics should be. Who do they think they are? Their opinions mean nothing to me. :hopmad: I'll get off my soap box now.
     
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