Below, we have a link to the new blog of an excited former newspaperman.
Here we have a column in the Los Angeles Times saying it’s time to kill the Los Angeles Times — as a newspaper. David Sarno interacts with readers and says:
David New of Manhattan Beach was on the same page. “The question you and everyone else at the L.A. Times should be asking its print subscribers is: How can we save our paper?”
Well, it may sound radical, but my answer is this: We can’t save the paper, and we shouldn’t even try. Let me explain…
…by way of a distinction: Newspapers like The Times, which was founded in 1881, have distributed the news in paper form since they began. Until recently, there was no reason to use separate terms for the industry and its physical product — the word “newspaper” sufficed for both. But as we’re seeing now, that word is no longer enough: One “newspaper” is an institution whose mission is to gather, distill and present a world of information to its readers.
The other is just a piece of paper.
And as much as we cherish the newspaper that arrives on our doorstep every morning, as a medium for delivering news, it loses to the Web in too many ways. At the top of the list is, of course, currency. What you read on front pages is, quite literally, yesterday’s news — while what you see on home-pages is what is happening in the real-time present.
Nothing wildly new there, except where it appeared: in the newspaper. Yeah.
