In a column at financially-troubled leftist British newspaper The Guardian, David Leigh, the newspaper’s investigations executive editor, proposes a £2-a-month levy on broadband internet connections, with the proceeds to be given to newspapers.
“When the day comes that the newspapers are forced to stop printing altogether,” he writes,
“…it will be a disaster for democracy.”
Yes. If only there was some way to almost instantaneously transmit images, sound, and text electronically, through either airwaves or cables, instead of having to wait until tomorrow to read today’s news.
h/t
Printing papers daily newspapers will end eventually. Then magazines will go digital. No argument there. Print mixed with extremely high quality video and pictures… bring it on.
Yes, DavidS, tis the skill of the person using whatever tools available… or tools that a person can create to suit the current need.
The opening posts here read more like rants against the skilled workers (it is arguable if journalists and reporters are skilled trades or not, of course) than against their tools.
None of us will be well served in the information age if there’s less primary source information being gathered.
CGH comes closest to the mark, I think. The media are going to survive, even most newspapers. Even the Guardian. But some lefty losers will go out of business and most will shrink — including the Guardian, and the CBC (yay!).
By the way, pay walls are coming for most Canadian newspapers over the next six months. All the big ones are planning it, right down to Regina and Saskatoon. No more free lunch. Big inflection point for the news industry . . . and link farms.
Some form of legacy media will survive – but they will have evolved. Those that do not evolve will die, their niche in the market having been replaced by the Internet. The newspaper reporter and radio reporter and tv reporter of old will disappear – to be replaced by something new.
Creative destruction at its best.
One thing is certain, the Ministry of Truth will require fewer workers when all that needs changing is digital edits. No more pesky legacy books, magazines or newspapers to worry about, no libraries where originals are kept…just a big server farm linked to every spook outfit in the world…what could go wrong?
BTW anyone who gets cable tv and pays the “fees” there to get to watch junk pickers, or dress buyers or phony “investigators” chasing straw men should realize we already subsidize media here.
Hey listen up people I’v been butting heads with these lefty progresives for along time and I try to read their poison regularly because it gives you a good look at how they think don’t ignore a good intelligence source into what those f$?&ers are up to because it eventually trickles down and bites you on the ass ask me about a 6cents a ltr carbon tax
fp said: “None of us will be well served in the information age if there’s less primary source information being gathered.”
Pfft! None of us are well served NOW, fp. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but most of the SDA links to newspaper stories are MOCKERY of those stories. Most of the links to actual -news-, aka “primary source information” is to BLOGS, where people who actually know something talk about it.
I won’t speak for Kate, but at my own blog I link to science stories sourced from the scientist’s press releases a lot more than “news” stories. Mostly because the newspaper writers get things horribly wrong most of the time, and put spin on things that misleads. The rest of the time I’m posting a “news” story to illustrate the bias in it, not because it has actual information anybody wants to know.
Nobody reads the paper anymore because there’s nothing but socialist propaganda in it, not because we hate the printed word. I have a personal library that contains hundreds of books and thousands of magazines. I buy magazines all the time, because they cover their subject matter and have information I want to know in them. I learned a whole lot of cabinetmaking out of Fine Woodworking magazine, for example.
Newspapers, radio and television are all bleeding audience because of the nature of their content, not because people suddenly are all in love with the internet. The only thing available on the web that’s not on the MSM is sensible, truthful discussion of the real issue that affect our lives.
‘The lean pickings from web advertising on a free newspaper site will only pay for a fraction of the high-quality investigative journalism that commercial newspapers generate.’
Dry British humour, don’t ya just love it!
I never watch TV, I get all my news off the internet. We have cable in both our homes, here and south of the border and are forced to pay the highest price, that is so my husband can watch the golf channel. That is all that is ever on at our house. When will we get pay per veiw so we don’t have to pay for all the garbage?
Rizwan,
I could wax lyrical about my interactions with the TV licensing authorities, but I’ll keep it simple, the old TV detector van ploy was just that, I believe these days that technology has progressed, but originally it was just a ploy an empty van with a metal coat-hanger on the roof, to intimidate the population to comply with paying the fee (who would have thought a government could be so deceitful and a public service so dishonest with its stakeholders ha ha ha) However having got rid of a TV more years ago than I care to remember I have been through the wringer of threatening letters registered letters and calls all supposedly to check or ensure I pay their little tax, so much that a few years ago having received a recorded delivery notice for a failure to deliver a letter, I traipsed 9 miles to pick it up from the post office, ( I was waiting for an important business document I thought that was what I had missed). I was so pissed that I sent the TV licensing office a bill for a mornings work, they declined to pay the full amount but made a token payment of £25 for inconvenience, I told them that if they persisted with the letters I would consider it harassment and take legal action to stop. That actually worked for 3 years. Then it started again, I’ve saved all the letters and one day when I have nothing better to do I will try to get a desist order against them. In the meantime when the inspectors turn up I tell them they need to come back with a police officer and a warrant to inspect the premises, that works as well, I’ve never seen them again.
If it was fun I’d laugh, but its not, its just one of the painful results of living in a slave society.
“Tax on pneumatic tires to shore up buggy whip industry”
The best comment at the Guardian under Leigh’s article:
That’s a good one.
“instead of having to wait until tomorrow to read today’s news.”
Carefully edited by “The Five Hundred” to make sure you plebes draw the right conclusions.
Phantom, I surfed through your site… and found no science reviews. Maybe September was a slow month in the world of science….
I did note some mockery… of, again, primary source material, or blogs that have already linked to something gathered by traditional news sources.
Yes, wire services are primary source traditional news gathering operations. Usually print biased.
I would suggest there are too many blogs and bloggers on the net and not enough people going to their local council meetings, for instance. Then writing about it as a real person, who may suffer real consequences for whatever they then write. The net has merely allowed anyone to prove almost anything they want by finding an article posted somewhere (or linking to a blog opinion, that’s probably riffing off a msm original story).