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The boys are back! That’s right: you can hear Peter, Rob and James on the same episode of the Ricochet Podcast. They consider Eric Adam’s unwitting vindication of the migrant-to-sanctuary city assistance program, along with the precipitous decline of Hollywood’s major studios.
And Barton Swaim visits to expand on his excellent Wall Street Journal column, where he applies the left’s favorite terms of the Trump era to the president of whom they are more obviously applicable. He also has some encouraging words for those of us who worry for the future of the printed word.
Song of the Week:
- Sound clip from the open: Eric Adam’s comments on the migrant crisis that threatens to “destroy New York City.”
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Well Rob, that omnipresent pr0n on Twitter you talk about hit me today. I’ve been with James in the past and wondered what you were talking about. I was on this Noam Blum post today and Rosii was in the comments. Her picture was blocked with a nudity content warning and I didn’t click but it was unexpected.
Really?
After that, you don’t think immediately of:
Since the conversation had moved on, I did not have the opportunity to return to the topic of reviving the print journalism model. So:
Giving away the print edition but charging for online is an interesting idea. Opening up a restaurant that feeds everyone for free but charges money for people to look at the menu online is also an interesting idea.
The print readership and the online readership are different species. The former skews older, in the sense that a cemetery skews older. They are more committed to the concept of a newspaper, of a daily summation, a tactile instrument of information conveyance, a specifically designed instance of organized information that presents the day’s events and concerns in a series of folded folios. World, Local, Variety, Business, Sports. It’s an old model, a venerable model, and an excellent way of arranging the flood of information.
This old model is supplemented by the online incarnation, a nimble version that provides the information received since the Paper of the Day cast it all in stone. The ideal reader is someone who has an attachment to print, and hits the website throughout the day. They are happy to pay for the paper. It’s madness to stop charging the people who are happy to pay.
The online reader is fickle and brand-indifferent. They come to the website from a variety of directions – shared links, Facebook, the rare effective Twitter link, the search result burped up by the all-powerful Google. They want to snack or nibble or maybe just try that one thing, once, before shooting off in another direction to follow a link to the Daily Mail or maybe a celeb ‘gram post or maybe a TikTok that showed up in the FOR YOU pane of Twitter. They live in a vaporous swirl of information and momentary amusement or outrage, are more interested in novelty than accuracy, and are indifferent to news-org brands. They don’t want to pay for anything. They hit a paywall, they back out, and find a way to pirate the information.
A small percentage will subscribe, though. Converting the tsunami of clicks to a dependable stream of paying customers is the challenge facing every newsgathering organization. The people who subscribe are good customers, because they’ve recognized that the institution behind all this information has some stature and cred, and provides many things beyond the narrow interest that drove you to the site in the first place. If you exhaust your free views of Local Football Team stories, you might subscribe, discover what else the organization provides, and you settle in to be a regular subscriber who builds a connection with the brand.
(This is hard for most papers, because they have been hollowed out by distant corporate malfeasance, and have few local resources left to provide unique content. The big chains and investment groups regard the papers as short-term prospects and extract all the value built up over the years until the installed base dies or cancels.)
I agree with Barton that print can work, but it has to provide an easy noncommittal transaction to hook the noncommittal. No one carries change anymore, so the coin-op paybox model is toast, but waving your phone or watch at a box that gives you a thick sheaf of interesting words and pictures is a possible model. Especially since print is now where online was 15 years ago: the interesting alternative. Online, at the start, felt like a liberation from the dull static world of print. Now the solidity of print is a respite from the weightless gales of online life.
I would still get a daily newspaper, but the local one has gone up to at least $2 per day and $4 or $5 for Sunday, and it’s also a shadow of the past size. That’s ridiculous, and I simply can’t justify it. Although…
Sequoia Capital lost a ton of money in the FTX disaster. I can’t understand that. No accountants. No real board of directors. Everybody on the board was suspicious. I can’t understand why anybody would trust Anthony Scaramucci on anything. The government didn’t do a damn thing about it. Now it’s not even in the news because the news is state controlled media. I forget the guys name, I think it’s Gary Gensler, is a democrat operative. He was the regulator over it. FTX gave zillions to the Democrat party. The whole thing is just incredible, and now poof it’s gone from the media.
This is what you get when you print money all of the time. We have been doing this since 1996 at least.
The answer is for someone to figure out a way to charge a dime to read the article without having to create an individual account at the BugTussle News Gazette website that will never be used again (or, when you come back six months later you have to reset the password and/or create a whole new account anyway).
It’s downright amazing how truly terrible our “local” newspaper has gotten since Gannett bought it.
I get my local paper. I am 53. I will get it at long as it runs. I also read it online more, but I want to paper to live and my subscription is like the YouTube channels I support on Patreon.
I wish the paper was more worth reading. I wish it was delivered in the morning again, not in my mailbox. I wish there was more to it.
Gannett has bought virtually every newspaper in Ohio except the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And that’s useless, too.
From the time I was in on my school paper in Jr. High, for several decades to come, the newspaper was an essential part of my daily life. From 2001 through 2016 I worked at a hotel as a night auditor, so newspapers were delivered and I had time to read them. And I did for many years, but eventually I started to realize that by the time the newspaper arrived between 2 and 3 am, I had read the stories I was really interested in online. I had read the box scores and the movie grosses and the big story of the day and several editorials and when the paper arrived, the only thing I was interested in was the comics, but that section shrunk and I could look up the three or four I really cared about online as well.
Where I live, I can get local news from a local blog that does a really good job and I get news immediately. (It’s this blog, if you care – West Seattle Blog… )
I still prefer and read physical books. But newspapers are no longer appealing to me.
Did I hear correctly? Rob thinks he’s more conservative than Trump?
I had my fill of newspapers after delivering them in the frozen tundra of Vermont when I was a kid, at 5:30 in the morning, every day of the week, and when the customers I served asked for the change back from two dollar bills (the weekly rate was $1.90), I knew I wanted to kill them.
I mean, move on.
The best thing about the Sunday newspapers was that during the winter, they were still extra warm in their stack (from the printers). Once I loaded them up in my newspaper bags (one on either hip, the straps across the chest like a Chewbacca bandolier), you could slip your hands between the papers to warm them up.
The worst thing is that Sundays were giant publications and enormously heavy to tote around.
My brother had a paper route in the early 1970s. One of his customers was a hardware store. There was a gas leak and the store blew up one morning. They still owe him for a week of delivery. He mentions it to us from time to time.
I read the Wall Street Journal every morning on my tablet. But I display the print edition using WSJ’s android app.
I do something similar with National Review’s print edition and the Anchorage Daily News, and even the Fairbanks News-Miner (the way their app displays the print edition is flawed).
I’m a former paperboy, delivering papers in the early 1970’s (I delivered the Amarillo Daily News in Clovis, New Mexico). Before I became a paperboy, it was common to hear about paperboys buying and selling their routes. But it started declining even when I got into it. I think by the 1980’s, papers were delivered by adults in vehicles, and they were no longer thrown on a subscriber’s portch, but placed into a labeled newspaper tube recepticle that is common today.
I consider the delivery of paper to houses to be wasteful. I have found a way to enjoy the way print newspapers are displayed without that wastefulness.
I hope newspapers and magazines continue to provide print editions online.
Uhh, a print edition cannot be online, by definition. And vice reversa.
It looks like one to me. It quacks like a duck…
But does it stain your fingers with black ink? Can you wrap garbage in it?
I was going to mention taking it into the bathroom, but people do all kinds of crazy things with phones, laptops, and tablets.
That brings memories of my time as a paperboy. Every morning I would get a stack of unfolded papers that I had to roll up and wrap with a rubber band so you could throw them on the porch.
My hands were ink stained after I was done. Writers call themselves ink stained wretches. Well, I felt like a wretch, and I was inked stained. Though maybe I didn’t know what a wretch was at the time.
I appreciate that a newspaper being a “physical thing” rather than “digital and weightless” makes print journalism more difficult to tamper with.
In 1999, before the internet was very useful for foreign travelers, I was in Beijing to observe (not to celebrate) the military parade for the 50th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic. Of course it was impossible to get close. Entire subway stations at Tiananmen Square were closed. An American from our embassy was in the crowd watching the fireworks later and informed me that only two embassy personnel get actual invitations.
The next morning I eagerly went to the hotel gift shop for a copy of the International Herald Tribune so I could read all about it. An entire page (so 2 pages of printed news, or perhaps 4) was missing! I asked the sales girls for another copy and they assured me they were all like that. They made sure I understood that they hadn’t removed the page, but that the government had done it!