His severance check safely deposited, long-time LA Timesman Mark Heisler, now an ex-staffer, speculates out loud about the future of his beloved institution, the newspaper:
Within newspapers, it’s assumed we’ll wind up as websites, whether or not some of us continue to print and it takes 10 years or five (or one recession).
I used to think of today’s interim as an ongoing effort to fit the building through a garden hose. The parts that didn’t fit—us—they would make fit, until the Times, which once had 1,400 editorial employees was down to today’s 500, on its way to 100, or 50.
If there’s finally no newspaper you can hold in your hands, and only a small percentage of the old revenue, there will also be no more newsprint, presses, trucks, gasoline to put in them and a physical plant, which account for all but a small percentage of the old cost.
The question is, what will be in tomorrow’s newspapers, paper or pixelated?
With all that newspapers have lost, they have something no other outlet has: the staff, institutional knowledge and experience to put things in perspective.
But it's not just the content, it's also the form of the newspaper that is superior to the on-line version, or so writes Jack Shafer for Slate, citing a recent study [pdf]:
The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders"; and that print readers remembered "more main points of news stories." When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw.
Although the number of readers tested in the study is small—just 45—the paper confirms my print-superiority bias, at least when it comes to reading the Times. The paper explores several theories for why print rules. Online newspapers tend to give few cues about a story's importance, and the "agenda-setting function" of newspapers gets lost in the process. "Online readers are apt to acquire less information about national, international and political events than print newsreaders because of the lack of salience cues; they generally are not being told what to read via story placement and prominence—an enduring feature of the print product," the researchers write. The paper finds no evidence that the "dynamic online story forms" (you know, multimedia stuff) have made stories more memorable.
In other words, the perspective that Heisler misses — the "salience cues" — embedded in the form of the physical paper, will make the same story in print readable and memorable.
Whereas, as Shafer says, it's difficult to finish any story longer than 1,000 words on-line.
Well, too bad. It's the 21st century — who has time for paper?
Scan it and weep.
Kit Stolz 
I beg to differ. I recently canceled my print edition of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat (A New York Times Paper), in favor of a paid e edition. The e-edition is laid out very similarly to the print edition, but is far easier to navigate. I find I am reading more complete articles because I don’t have to find where they continue on page 12. I am saving immense amounts of newsprint, which only lived a day before making it out to the recycling container. It is available everywhere and makes it much easier to clip (email) articles for friends and family. As it is a paid subscription I feel i am still supporting the reporters out looking for news. Best of all I can read my paper while it appears I am hard at work.
I don’t live in the blogosphere and Google News is not my cup of tea, but I enjoy my local newspaper in a format that works for me.
LikeLike