The internet is nothing but regurgitated newspaper news!
Jon Carroll writes a stirring tribute to newspapers. It’s here on The Gate.
Mostly it’s the same old, same old we’ve been hearing for years, although there was one line that was new to me: “if someone steals a newspaper, so what? If someone steals your laptop, not so good” I’ll go along with him on that. If someone steals my newspaper, I say “So what?”
He recites the same preposterous claims we read all the time, mostly how websites don’t make money and probably never will. Now, of course he offers no support for this absurdity, but it’s conventional wisdom, so we’ll let it in the paper.
He says “Web sites mostly just aggregate what the newspapers have already aggregated, plus opinion.” Again, he offers no support for this condemnation. But it’s a variation on a theme we read all the time from newspaper people (the only source of information for most towns is newspapers! etc.), so it must be true.
I don’t know which of the internet tubes runs past Mr. Carroll’s office. Must be the same one that runs past Ted Stevens’ office. I wish he could tap into the one that runs past my house. It’s chock full of original information (local, national, international) that I never see in my local papers. In fact, more and more the papers are reporting on things learned from the internet.
It takes some work to find it all, but I manage. A few searches, some RSS feeds (none from newspapers, BTW), emails from friends and colleagues, and I’m fine. I don’t even have to waste my time digging through endless pages of ads from department stores and car dealers looking for where the newspaper editors buried what I’m looking for, only to find it was printed last week. Or not at all, which is becoming the case more often as papers cut staff. But I digress.
It’s not that I don’t learn much from newspaper reporters. Shoot, I’m making fun of something from a newspaper reporter right now.
But with rare exceptions, I don’t learn it from newspapers. I learn it from newspaper websites. In fact, I never would have read Mr. Carroll’s piece if I had to rely on newspapers (I guess the series of tubes must intersect somewhere between here and San Francisco).
If you’re now turning red with rage and shouting “But the newspaper is the cash cow that supports the website!!!!!!,” I urge you to read more of WhapWhap. The point is true in because the web is relatively new.
It’s true in part because of accounting tricks. Which medium gets credit for classified revenue, for example? But at this point, which medium are people really buying into?
The point also ultimately doesn’t matter. If people continue to dump the print product, papers are going to have to make it on the internet. If they can’t it’s because they’re not nearly as important as newspaper people think.
