instant history

One of my favorite places to stroll around in Manhattan is the Meatpacking District, just a few blocks from where I lived the summer I worked at the New York Daily News.

The giant trestles, unused since the 1980s, once used to hoist freight trains safely above pedestrian traffic but now stand silently rusting above passersby below. The structures were built to last, and last they did, well past their usefulness, past not only their own era of trains but past a period of local poverty and crime and into a new one of redevelopment.

Could their builders have imagined an era where they became more ornamentation than bare utility?

Last week, walking through the same neighborhood, I was reading other people, on Poynter's Online Journalism e-mail list, debate the same question about newspapers: Are these structures that have outlived their function?

What kicked off the discussion was a link to a PRI podcast with Stephen Engelberg, Managing Editor of ProPublica.org, who said 90% of newspaper revenue goes to non-news gathering functions. "This notion of a piece of paper delivered by courier to your doorstep is really quite quaint and 19th century and its very costly," Engelberg said (here's the MP3, that bit is around 12:18 according to the poster).

Eventually, someone responded with:

My 15 year old daughter thinks it is funny that I read a newspaper every day. It's such a "Dad" thing to do... There is no way to get her to read the thing...

I wanted to meekly reply, "Has she seen Sudoku?" After adding the puzzle a paper close to my heart saw print readership shoot up well over 50% in less than a year for that coveted "lost demographic."

But even the best of such strategies, I fear, are just stop gaps for most papers.

Further Reading:

• The Friends of the Highline have put together a history on those trestles.
• Subscribe to Poynter's Online News discussion
• Inferior, web-based Sudoku which lacks its print brethren's tactile feedback.
• Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that newspapers suck on the Web muses Patrick Thornton.

Chris Anderson's Long Tail has an analysis of how various mass media are faring -- and it doesn't look good.

How much of print journalism's current woes stem from Long Tail economics is up for debate, but a tendency towards concentrating on local over national stories in local media suggests that editors and publishers are responding to the trends.

Anderson's post also suggests that papers are not alone in their struggles to retain customers in the internet age. TV, radio, music and DVDs are all "down."

WashingtonPost.com, ever at the forefront of all (web) things risky and bold, has contracted with Inform to start linking out to other newspapers and blogs contextually.

The New York Times has the story, and mentions that The New York Sun and The Daily Oklahoman will be joining in the deal.

The Times claims that it is less an effort to reach out to other papers than any effort to fight off aggregators like Google News and that product's Yahoo! counterpart ...

Which are now getting paid by those aggregators:

"Recently completed deals, which include arrangements in which media organizations such as the Associated Press will be compensated on a pay-per-click basis, could herald a major shift in the relationship between the old media and new Internet gatekeepers." -- San Jose Mercury News

Reuters reports that 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism while 65 percent don't. The survey found that 77 percent write to personally express themselves, rather than for fortune and glory.

Pew did the survey, entitled "Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers".

After the L.A. Times' hastily withdrawn wiki editorial, few imagined papers would tread that path again. But tread they did, though perhaps using the wisdom of the masses a bit more wisely to collate data rather than to form an opinion on said data.

Ben Smith's political blog, The Daily Politics, got tired of not having one regularly updated, definitive source on where various New York State Assembly members stood on gay marriage. So Smith created and spotlighted the wiki, which is available here.

So far, even with the wisdom of the collective masses, only 30 out of 150 members have been pinned down.

The vast majority of the edits appear to have been done by Smith himself.

Scott Jaschik gave a great talk Friday at Cornell. The co-founder of InsideHigherEd has been causing some waves in the world of HigherEd coverage. My notes after the jump.