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Sunday, August 31, 2003
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 Sunday, August 31, 2003
started 8/31/2003; 1:41:56 AM - last post 8/31/2003; 11:30:40 AM
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Doc Searls - Sunday, August 31, 2003 
8/31/2003; 5:41:56 AM (reads: 8322, responses: 2)
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Absent with leave 
| | Missing Tom, who must be having too good a time in Mexico. |
Why is no spam funny?
| | Hey, if you'e going to send salesproof sales messages to the entire universe, and it costs you nothing to do it, why not crack a joke? Sell Dicks of the Rich & Famous (who's gonna check?), Flat Screen Massage Cream, Electric Butt Brushes, Botox By Fax, Reversible Skin, Edible Pets, Chairs with Tits, Email to The Dead or Xtreme Mail System Errors? |
All the Journalism that's fit to keep
| | A couple weeks ago I took a tour of the Santa Barbara News-Press. It's a small daily, circulation around 50,000. But it does a pretty darn good job, I think, in spite of the fact that it seems customary (again, at least to me) for locals to denigrate it. Yes, there is some cause. A few months back I witnessed a geyser downtown from a broken fire hydrant or something. I watched it from our house on a hillside overlooking town. The water seemed to rise to at least half the height of my vantage, 500 feet above the event. Yet the next day there was nothing about it in the paper. Likewise, when at least a thousand people showed up to watch Mars from atop a local park a couple days ago, causing traffic jams, the paper seemed to miss the story completely. |
| | Yet I was moved by the tour. It reminded me of what it was like to work in a daily paper... the merciliess deadlines, the extreme limitations of time and print space, the impossibility of doing full justice to any story, no matter how simple, the long hours of often extremely hard work, the thrill of successfully applying the arts of writing, photography, copy editing, layout and publication, day after day after day. Like teaching, newspaper writing is a calling. You make lousy money, but you know you're doing a Good Thing. |
| | What impressed me most about the paper was the way it was organized architecturally. The editorial people were on the top floors, and the advertising people — the ones whose hard work paid to keep the paper going — were down in the basement. Seemed to me the paper had its priorities straight. Advertising is a primary source of income, but a secondary reason for existence. |
| | Our tour guide, the photo editor of the paper, talked about how hard it is to get new subscribers when so many readers were getting their news elsewhere, or just seemed to give too small a shit. Yet he remained no less motivated, for the simple reason that daily papers remain highly civilizing forces for the regions they serve, and he felt privileged to be part of one. |
| | And guess who else is hip to the core mission of local journalism? Try the Providence Journal's advertisers, at least two of which are stepping in to side with the paper's workers in their long-running conflict with management. Nice to see. And not something I'm sure we'd see a few years ago (though I'm not even sure why I say that). |
Wild Western Shakespeare
| | The play was performed as a western, and it worked extremely well. It's a fine cultural event where you can sit in beach chairs, watch a play, drink wine and quietly munch on Italian greens, while the crescent moon sets in the West and Mars rises in the East over a stage that looks like a saloon, while actors toss around sixteenth century one-liners in old cowboy movie accents. |
| | Highly enjoyable, and even more highly recommended to those of you who live here or might be passing through this corner of California in the next couple weekends. |
| | It's even worth a trip if ya'll are up thar in San Francisky. |
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adamsj - Why we hate our local papers
8/31/2003; 11:26:25 AM (reads: 594, responses: 0)
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Because there's only one! How many two-paper towns are there left, anyway?
Back home in the northwest corner of Arkansaw, we have a good situation: There are two local newspapers.
One, the Morning News, had traditionally been the Springdale newspaper and has always been the best of the local papers. (Yes, I had a column there for a few months, but this had been my opinion for the previous ten years.) It's now expanded to cover the entire corner of the state.
The other is sort of an unholy trinity: The Northwest Arkansas Times, traditionally the Fayetteville newspaper, which has always been inferior fishwrapper (though I wouldn't wrap anything in it I planned to swallow, it's fine for carp), the Benton County Daily Record, the Bentonville paper, and the northwest Arkansas edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Little Rock paper (and that's a story in itself, how the Arkansas Gazette, oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi, was destroyed), are in an agreement to stuff each others' newspapers.
What makes this interesting is that the the Times was bought by the Record's parent company, CPI (who used to print my newspaper--they did a beautiful job), which is majority controlled by the Walton family. The Democrat-Gazette is owned by the Hussman family, who have a small newspaper chain. The Morning News was bought out by Donrey Media, which itself was bought by the Stephens family. The Stephens family is big Democrat money and power in Arkansas, while the Waltons are their Republican big brothers. The Hussmans find the Waltons congenial.
In other words, this is a proxy war between the two most powerful families in the state.
How's it turning out?
The Morning News is still the best newspaper in the area. The Record is about what it always was--an okay, not special hometown daily. The Times will never be anything but fishwrap, never has been any more and never will be. The Democrat-Gazette is a pretty good paper (better than I like to admit--the Gazette has a place in my heart). Oddly, both the Times and the D-G have a self-consciously diverse op-ed page, which in both cases kinda sucks. The Morning News' page is not so assembled, and yet it's as diverse, and much more civilized.
For anyone who'd like to look for themselves:
The Morning News
The Democrat-Gazette, the Daily Record, and the Northwest Arkansas Fishwrap
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Mark Turner - Chapel Hill News
8/31/2003; 3:30:40 PM (reads: 649, responses: 0)
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It's the Chapel Hill News, now owned by the Raleigh News and Observer, and therefore not initially listed on my media page since it doesn't have an independent editorial voice.
I think its natural that folks loathe their local papers, particularly once they're exposed to the wealth of news sources available on the Internet. As you mentioned, there is only so much time and space for news in a newspaper. The Internet is limitless. One can't help but feel short-changed when the local paper can't fit in a story that is easily found online.
Doc, I really enjoy your writing, particularly the non-geek stuff that doesn't fit in Linux Journal. Keep sending 'em our way!
Mark Turner
P.S. Links for above in case they get filtered by Moveable Type:
http://www.triangle.com/triangle.com/communities/chapelhill/index.html
http://www.markturner.net
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