scarlettina (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scarlettina) wrote2009-03-12 08:45 am
scarlettina) wrote2009-03-12 08:45 am
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The experience of news as we knew it: a personal perspective
People who don't live in Seattle may only just now be hearing about the demise of one of the city's two local daily newspapers, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's the lede in the New York Times' coverage of the decline of newspapers in general. I've been following the news partly because my brother is in the business (he does event marketing for Newsday). He tells me that he still has a job--for now. But I digress. The direction in which news is going in Seattle is a little alarming. Just ask ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
varina8, the professional journalist, and she'll give you an earful.
I remember reading Newsday every single day, growing up on Long Island. As a kid, I didn't read much hard news, but all of the stuff in Part II--a combination of Living, Style, and Entertainment--was must-read stuff for me. (I didn't go a day, growing up, without Peanuts, B.C., Ziggy, and Ann Landers.) I came to hard news later, living in NYC and reading The New York Times every day with some Newsday on the side.
When I moved to Seattle, I was astonished to find that the local papers didn't really cover national news much. It seemed a little Mickey Mouse to me. And the locals I met early on disparaged both the Seattle Times (a shill for conservatives) and the P-I (referred to by some as the Seattle Public Insult). All of this lead me to continue using the NYT as my primary news source, with smatterings of news from The Stranger (one of our two local weeklies--the reporting is occasionally excellent but, with a few notable exceptions, often unreliable due to bias). It's only been the last five years that I've really started paying attention to the Times and the P-I. True, the Times is more conservative than the P-I, but each offers value and together they make a pretty good source for local news.
And now we're losing the P-I. The idea that the city will have only one local news source in print--and that, we're told, will rely mostly on AP reports and news from other aggregators as well--is just bizarre to me. It's alien in the way that being in a foreign country and stumbling onto some completely new and ferociously unappealing custom is alien. It flies in the face of everything I've ever learned or thought about monopoly and competition in the marketplace, the value of multiple viewpoints, the value of local news and more. And if the Times does rely on aggregators, then our only mainstream source of local news will be broadcast, The Stranger, and the Seattle Weekly, which I stopped reading quite some time ago--which should make things, um, interesting. I think it's a bad idea.
Now, I totally admit that I haven't done much of anything to support my local papers. I only read the paper versions occasionally. I've become much more dependent on the Web for getting my news. My bad. But there's the part of me that grew up on newspapers, commuted to work with newspapers and then had to wash my hands when I got to the office because they were so dusted and darkened with ink, that just rebels against the idea of losing newspapers altogether. For me, a lot of this--I admit--is as much about losing the experience of reading a newspaper as it is about the value of multiple news sources, the importance of local reporting and so on. It was a piece of growing up that I'm sorry to see diminish and that I fear disappearing. But times, they are a-changin', it's been coming for a while, and I've adapted to new media with nary a thought to what it's replacing.
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
varina8, the professional journalist, and she'll give you an earful.I remember reading Newsday every single day, growing up on Long Island. As a kid, I didn't read much hard news, but all of the stuff in Part II--a combination of Living, Style, and Entertainment--was must-read stuff for me. (I didn't go a day, growing up, without Peanuts, B.C., Ziggy, and Ann Landers.) I came to hard news later, living in NYC and reading The New York Times every day with some Newsday on the side.
When I moved to Seattle, I was astonished to find that the local papers didn't really cover national news much. It seemed a little Mickey Mouse to me. And the locals I met early on disparaged both the Seattle Times (a shill for conservatives) and the P-I (referred to by some as the Seattle Public Insult). All of this lead me to continue using the NYT as my primary news source, with smatterings of news from The Stranger (one of our two local weeklies--the reporting is occasionally excellent but, with a few notable exceptions, often unreliable due to bias). It's only been the last five years that I've really started paying attention to the Times and the P-I. True, the Times is more conservative than the P-I, but each offers value and together they make a pretty good source for local news.
And now we're losing the P-I. The idea that the city will have only one local news source in print--and that, we're told, will rely mostly on AP reports and news from other aggregators as well--is just bizarre to me. It's alien in the way that being in a foreign country and stumbling onto some completely new and ferociously unappealing custom is alien. It flies in the face of everything I've ever learned or thought about monopoly and competition in the marketplace, the value of multiple viewpoints, the value of local news and more. And if the Times does rely on aggregators, then our only mainstream source of local news will be broadcast, The Stranger, and the Seattle Weekly, which I stopped reading quite some time ago--which should make things, um, interesting. I think it's a bad idea.
Now, I totally admit that I haven't done much of anything to support my local papers. I only read the paper versions occasionally. I've become much more dependent on the Web for getting my news. My bad. But there's the part of me that grew up on newspapers, commuted to work with newspapers and then had to wash my hands when I got to the office because they were so dusted and darkened with ink, that just rebels against the idea of losing newspapers altogether. For me, a lot of this--I admit--is as much about losing the experience of reading a newspaper as it is about the value of multiple news sources, the importance of local reporting and so on. It was a piece of growing up that I'm sorry to see diminish and that I fear disappearing. But times, they are a-changin', it's been coming for a while, and I've adapted to new media with nary a thought to what it's replacing.
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
no subject
When we first moved into our condo we got a free trial subscription to the Seattle Times and then we got the same thing when we got our house. Each time it was a profoundly negative experience.
Aside from making my fingers filthy which I hate, there's the irrelevance. I only ever read one or two stories at most, making how much of a percentage of the rest of the paper a complete waste of time? The local things were things I wasn't interested in (not living actually in Seattle proper) and the national news were things I'd already heard about elsewhere. It's hyperbole to say I spent more time washing and drying my hands after handling the paper than I did actually reading it, but not by much.
I remember I thought the proper thing to do would be to use the websites instead. No ink, right? Unfortunately, at the time, both of their websites were just horrible. I can't remember which was which, but one had a dramatically ugly interface that made me to not want to go there ever ever and the other had a search engine that sucked so poorly I'm surprised it could find the word Seattle.
So I abandoned both local newspapers in toto. Clearly, these were two publications that did not want to compete in an open market.
I accidentally found out about NWCN when I was channel surfing and went to their website and it had interesting stories, an interface that while not world class at least didn't poke me in the eye and was, gasp, searchable. And it turned out their email bulletins for breaking stories—both national and local—broke (still break) faster than any other news organization I've seen for both national and local news—including the Seattle Times for Seattle-related stories.
I still subscribe to the Seattle Times email bulletin just in case, but really there's no point. Half the stories are about sports (sports is not news) and the other half break well after both NWCN and CNN for national news.
Take the fact that Seattle's police chief is the new drug czar. How'd I learn about that? NWCN news bulletin which included a sentence about the fellow, then from CNN which included a sentence about the fellow, then—nearly an hour after that#151;Seattle Times email bulletin which said nothing other than Chief [insert name I forgot] might become drug czar. Full stop.
Awesome work, guys. Waiting longer than anyone else for less information. Top quality.
And I recently (month or so ago?) subscribed to both ST's and the PI's Twitter feeds. ST's is actually pathetic, updating almost never, which I find kinda incalcuably silly since, I thought, news happens all the time, like when people are alive and not zombies. But even zombies would be up to something. The PI feed is good in that it's actually updated, but it's updated in big clots with five or six stories at a time, which is bad Twitter behavior.
Incidentally, the best Twitter feed for news I've found so far is BreakingNewsON (http://twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn), which in its quest to be first is the first to blurt out the very first thought in its head and then add detail later, so you're likely to get five tweets for one story over an hour. But, if you can stand that and story corrections as it unfolds, they have broad coverage of international news and events that far surpasses anyone else's feed, including CNN's. I learn things not only first but they're often the only feed that mentions things at all, particularly international events.
Wow, what a tirade.
The two papers lost for good reason: They're simply inferior compared to any other possible outlet for any kind of news or entertainment they cover.
no subject
I was interning at the Kitsap Sun in the summer of 2006, when they decided to rebook (change the order of the sections) their paper, and lead with local news instead of national/international.
I thought at the time that that was a brilliant idea. They knew that their readers were undoubtedly getting broader-scale news from other sources, and that their much-smaller paper was in no way going to be able to compete on that level. So they revised their focus to be on items of local interest to their specific readership--going in-depth on Kitsap County news in a way that no one else was.
Unfortunately, their haphazard (at the time) embrace of Web tech still put them behind, but I still think they did the right thing in terms of editorial decisions. (And it's a darn shame my living situation doesn't allow me to work there, because I'd go back in a heartbeat. Damn good people there.)
It's a shame that so little of that is happening elsewhere. Everyone else is trying to be the WaPo or LA Times or something, instead of just stripping down and doing what their reporters do best: What's happening HERE.
no subject
For NWCN, I just use their email bulletins and accompanying print (well, web) stories.
no subject