Nielsen folds Kirkus Reviews →

This is very, very sad news. With most newspaper book critics gone and Kirkus now shuttered, the traditional review landscape is looking very sparse indeed. (via Daring Fireball)

"

We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started.

"

Richard Rodriguez writes a haunting obituary about the death of American newspapers — and, by extension, the soul of America itself. (via)

"I don’t have answers, just a feeling that the journal-as-proving-ground model has gotten creaky, at least when it comes to attracting readers. Maybe it still works for the writers and the agents and the publishers. I’d like to know where the readers are in this equation."

Jennifer Howard, reacting to reacting to news that journal TriQuarterly is going online-only. This trend will probably only continue. As Howard notes, not many of these journals were read much in their heyday, and with new media competing for audiences’ attention it’s likely they’ll be read even less in the future.

TriQuarterly is currently running on a Blogger site; hopefully that will change soon. It will be interesting to see if these publications will be able to survive and thrive online. As writers realize publishers are becoming less necessary, perhaps we’ll see online journals act as gatekeepers to author-hosted short stories, with original criticism mixed in. Time will tell. (via The Millions)

Copy editing: Man vs. Machine →

Jason F. of 37signals — a web technology company — has helped write a book in the process of being published. Here, he explains why he prefers old-school pen and paper copy editing to the high-tech “track changes” style made possible by word processors. Sometimes old tech just does the job better.

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."

Clay Shirky writing in his blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. This is only a small snippet of a long, thoughtful, depressing, and ultimately hopeful analysis of the huge changes the Internet is forcing on newspapers and book publishers.

"Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations. What works in today’s web landscape are lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy — operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content."

John Gruber hits it out of the park in his article Charging for Access to News Sites.

This seems to be the crucial factor separating the news sites making money from the news sites hemorrhaging money. As Gruber points out, the old media dinosaurs who refuse to see the light about online profitability are precisely those whose jobs are all about management, and not about content.

"The issue is not saving newspapers. The issue is, among other things, seeing that good journalism survives. It’s also about making sure that people who “consume” media demand better than they’ve been getting, by persuading them to become activists in the way they consume."

Boing Boing guest blogger Dan Gillmor writing in Saving Newspapers, Part MMIX: Collude and Conspire. Here’s some cold water for the increasingly hysterical “save our newspapers!!!1” crowd. They’re not going to get saved.

"

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

"

The Wire’s David Simon, writing in his article In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police

"Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority."

I’m guilty as charged. (From this NYT article about the Christian Science Monitor’s announcement that, after more than 100 years, it will cease publishing a daily paper. It’s only going to get worse from here.)

The Classic Rock Magazine Is Switching to a Smaller, Rack-Friendly Size →

Like going from LP albums to jewel cases, Rolling Stone’s new smaller format just won’t have as much room for personality as the old one did.

"…having a journalist “badge of tribal fealty” enables one access to public officials and records, while scribes with the “blogger” label induces those same authority figures to cast aside requests for information that the public has a right to know. … Governments must inject more transparency into their activities and records, but this task may be an inherent anathema to those holding power."

AZspot: Blogging and Journalism

At the same time, most organizations are pretty lax on their definition of “press.” When I was in j-school, we needed press credentials to get into the county jail to write a story on overcrowding there. Our professor made us nice ID cards that nevertheless identified us as contributors to one of the j-school’s blogs. The fact that we had verification that we were writing for something, though, was apparently enough.

Newspapers are thriving in many developing countries →

In places like India and China, newspaper readership has grown along with wealth and literacy rates. People like to know what’s going on in their community and practice their new reading skills — two things a newspaper lets them do.

India’s strong tradition of press freedom means that local papers are largely left alone by government officials. China is an interesting case — though all papers are state-owned, some Communist officials see newspapers a tool for helping fight corruption.

What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web →

(via azspot)

Some of Esquire’s classic covers, from the days when magazines were big enough to hold some great art on the front.

The Coming Death of Paper as an Information Storage Medium →

Whatever can be digitized will be digitized. Hardware can not compete with software in elegance, simplicity, and cost. From the iPhone to online banking, digital things are superior to physical. Soon the clerk in the bank is not going to be retyping the wire transfer from a piece of paper. Soon we will be electing the president of the United States via electronic voting.

The author thinks books will survive, though — while newspapers/magazines are “dirty,” books are “magical.” Time will tell, I suppose, but probably by the time everyone is carrying an iPhone around all that newsprint will seem rather old fashioned.