Los Angeles Times cutting 74 positions

CoCo-

it's funny you mention that, mon ami. Somebody kept putting the channel on Fox in my mother's room, which made me extremely unhappy, but I suppose that's another story for another time.

I hope these journos land on their feet. I haven't.

 

Where is the balance between people paying $.25 a day for a newspaper and people just reading it on their phone?

 

In the non profit world you work for relatively rich people - donors with money to spend on their idea of what journalism should be. It is often, not surprisingly, vaguely partisan - right and left, usually in some sort of policy advocacy kind of way.

And yes, you do work for the readers in a pay universe. I'd argue most news-side writers don't even really think about it - unless it's some crank who doesn't agree with the coverage - and most sports-side writers think about it so long as it doesn't conflict with getting along with the teams they cover. .

 

Print is not addictive. It is a far more efficient way to learn a little about a lot of things. If you read a major daily every day because, I dunno, someone paid you to, you'd not only get that money, you'd be way more informed and probably more temperate. But it takes conscious effort to read each item without buzzing or humming or autoplaying videos or all that.

Phones are addictive. By design. And they promote addictive behaviors. That's why the concept of "swarming" stories works. People don't want to read 17 small stories on their phone, like you would in a paper. They either want to addictively scroll, or they want to read 12 stories about one thing.

There are people who know what they're doing with this, and produce good traffic numbers.

And there are people who don't know how to do it, and may still produce good traffic numbers, but not as good as they could be.

And there are people who could do it but choose not to, because they're above it or whatever and, depending on the beat, could be producing dismal traffic numbers. They fit the old model of the newspaper, which resembled a college English department, where the person doing the journalism equivalent of teaching Danish poetry got subsidized by the the classifieds and the department store inserts. Now, they don't. And I think on some level it's fun to have that person around, but the model has changed.

 

That’s the multimillion dollar question that no one has really answered over the past 25 or so years.

Ideally, in the beginning, the newspapers should have put a value/cost on the online news like they do for the physical paper, but in the early 2000s everyone in the business was sure the advertising would switch to websites when the readers did. Still waiting for that to happen.

I really don’t have delusions of grandeur for my newspaper career anymore, if I ever did, but as it gets closer to its end than its beginning, I want to be part of keeping whoever is still reading, in whatever format, informed about what’s happening in my community. Because I know this much: when an accurate and objective (ideally) source of information goes away, a lot of trash is ready to fill the void.

 

The other shoe.

 

I thought this biotech genius had news-gathering ops all figured out. Guess not.

 

Billionaires Wanted to Save the News Industry. They’re Losing a Fortune.

 

What was news to you in that New York Times story?

 

Print journalists right now:

 

The naïveté of the new billionaire owners. They expected to be greeted with huzzahs and ticker-tape from the newspaper employees, not criticism from within the ranks over business decisions. There is no public glory or employee praise to be earned in owning a newspaper today.

 

There never was, but it didn’t matter to the owners because they couldn’t hear any criticism over the sweet, sweet sound of constantly flowing cash. That sound is forever silenced.