As someone who has refocused my reading on paper based books this past year, I have an emotional attachment to the idea of a newspaper I guess. Although the concept of reading physical paper books is not something I switched back to for simply emotional reasons. And truth be told, when I watched the 60 Minutes story, I found myself reflecting on the fact that paper-print journalism is not the only way to achieve quality journalism...
Anyways, here is an excellent documentary on The New York Times as it grapples with the similar pressures that led to these changes to the Times-Picayune. Highly, highly recommended.
PS: Semi-related, I find myself wondering sometimes what it says about our attention span as a society that multi-page articles have led to the introduction of the phrase #longreads into our vocabulary.
PPS: ...and for you soccer fans out there, did you catch the Barca piece on 60 Minutes as well?!? Cool stuff. Ives posted it here in case you missed it.
5 comments:
We went without a physical paper for awhile due to rising costs. I have played with various online or tablet means of news consumption since. We started getting the paper again and I was just mentioning to Susan today the big difference that I noticed immediately. With the physical paper I read entire articles. With online or tablet reading I just read headlines or do some serious skimming. I like a physical paper.
Interestingly enough, I have never had a paper subscription I don't think. Carlee is bound to correct me...
I get where you are coming from though. I get my news from tweets or something like Flipboard, Zite or Reader skimming way too often...and that is in essence, headline only unless I follow thru. Often find myself saying that I read something, and then correcting that with the fact that I just read the tweet.
Great piece on 60 minutes...and Page One made me truly appreciate good journalism and the effort the NYT is making toward staying relevant.
Regarding digital vs paper, I find myself reading significantly more articles with digital, but sticking to paper for books. Thanks for the Page One suggestion.
As a proud alumna of the LSU Manship School of Journalism, it terrifies me to think of the state of dailies in the US. The NYTimes recognizes what it will take to remain relevant in today's world and is attempting to adapt. I have not seen Page One but will definitely do so, as instant Netflix has made it incredibly easy for me to do so. Isn't that one of the things that makes digital so attractive, it makes things so easy for us.
Hey Chris! Totally agree that the direction the dailies are headed in is scary. I'm hoping that institutions like the NYT figure out a business model that works in these times. You're right, digital = easy, for sure. News organizations who don't let easy translate to lack of depth...that's what we need.
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