Posts Tagged ‘newspapers’
Friday!
* John Maynard Keynes, dirty hippie. Via MeFi.
Finally, Keynes’s essay challenges us to imagine what life after capitalism might look like (for an economic system in which capital no longer accumulates is not capitalism, whatever one might call it). Keynes thought that the motivational basis of capitalism was “an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals.” He thought that with the coming of plenty, this motivational drive would lose its social approbation; that is, that capitalism would abolish itself when its work was done. But so accustomed have we become to regarding scarcity as the norm that few of us think about what motives and principles of conduct would, or should, prevail in a world of plenty.
* The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as a case study for local journalism today: I’ve been told by people in a position to know that the paper has decided that covering all the news is beyond their scope now, with its shadow staff and limited resources. So, they have decided to go all-in on what some at the paper call “Pulitzer Pursuit.” That’s where their best reporters are tasked and that’s where their resources go.
* “Weird” is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face. A climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered a late-night knock to find a dead rat on his doorstep and a yellow Hummer speeding away. An MIT hurricane researcher found his inbox flooded daily for two weeks last January with hate mail and threats directed at him and his wife. And in Australia last year, officials relocated several climatologists to a secure facility after climate-change skeptics unleashed a barrage of vandalism, noose brandishing and threats of sexual attacks on the scientists’ children.
* The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia.
* And science fiction, infinite science fiction, but not for us: scientists have discovered two exoplanets a scant million miles apart.
David Simon Is Not Making Sense
David Simon has written an article for Columbia Journalism Review that is absolutely, completely wrongheaded, arguing that The New York Times and The Washington Post should simultaneously erect paywalls for their online content. Contrary to Simon’s assumptions, this would only destroy newspapers faster; paywalls have never, ever worked.
What newspapers actually need to do is find successful funding models for the digital age, up to and including reestablishing themselves as nonprofit organizations if necessary. More conversation at MeFi.
Monday Night Bloggity Blogs
Monday night bloggity blogs.
* Samuel Delany’s “The Star Pit” as a radio show. Really good.
* More on the surprise Dollhouse renewal, including word that “Epitaph One” will likely be aired after all and an interview with Joss. Too bad about Terminator; Bill Simmon links to a Fox executive explaining the one had nothing to do with the other, except insofar as it did.
“[Sarah Connor] has completed its run,” Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly confirmed at a press conference this morning. “I think it had a nice little run. It was a good show. It was not an either or [with Dollhouse]. We did see it tailing off a bit [in the ratings]. It had a nice creative core, but, ultimately, we made the bet on Dollhouse, so that’s it for [Sarah Connor]… We make no apologies. We gave it a lot of support and some consistent scheduling. We tried and thought it was time to move on.”
* Benen and Yglesias explain how the right’s schoolyard strategy on Pelosi and torture may be making a truth commission much more likely.
* Rick Perry has abandoned neosecessionism. Score one for the Northern aggressors.
* I was so outraged by the very idea of this I completely forgot to blog it: someone’s written a Catcher in the Rye sequel and their name isn’t J.D.
“Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he’s not at a prep school, he’s at a retirement home in upstate New York,” said California. “It’s pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He’s still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he’s disappointed in the goddamn world. He’s older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn’t have all the answers.”
Bunch of phonies.
* Maureen Dowd plagiarizes Josh Marshall and everyone has a really good time with it.
* The New Yorker covers the sixth mass extinction event. Print edition only, because analysis of an ongoing mass extinction event isn’t something you just give away for free. A few more links at Kottke.
* Kos and Yglesias on epically bad ideas to save newspapers.
How the Media Works
The Washington Independent has a great piece on how poorly sourced half-truths and outright lies are laundered through the British press before appearing on Drudge and right-wing cable news programs. Via Attackerman.
Quoted for Truth (The Status Is Not Quo)
Three top blogs—Climate Progress, Glenn Greenwald, and Duke’s own American Stranger—separately highlight some inadvertently telling passages in the Newsweek profile on Paul Krugman.
By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking.
In American politics the establishment press is the problem, not the solution, which should mitigate all the late gnashing of teeth over “the death of newspapers.” For a lot of reasons, blogs are not the ideal format for public discourse, but they’ll have to do; the establishment press has blown the mission beyond all repair. Blogs are all we have left.
Thoughts on the Newspaper Apocalypse
Thoughts on the newspaper apocalypse from Wire creator David Simon.
“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”
Like it or not—and Simon doesn’t just dislike it, he thinks it can’t work—this is what blogs are for now.
Still Still More More
Still still more more.
* Marc Bousquet says the appointment of Wilma Liebman as chair of the NLRB is a good sign for advocates of grad student unionization. One of the most striking things about meeting grad students from other schools at conferences is always the recognition of just how good we actually have it at Duke—our situation is pretty far from perfect, but a lot of people at other institutions really do have it much worse.
To admit graduate students in the humanities with no or almost no funding isn’t just insane, it’s cruel.
* Iceland to appoint first openly gay woman as prime minister. The gynocracy (lesbocracy?) is finally here.
* Matt Yglesias, who of course now blogs for a nonprofit, says nonprofits are the future of journalism.
* Science fiction book covers that channel pure id.
* Create your own original Star Trek story: a flowchart.
* What? A Blade Runner sequel? Has the whole world gone crazy?
* While we’re on the subject: some articles about Blade Runner. Via MeFi.
All the Newspapers
If the media isn’t liberal, why’s Obama on the cover of every newspaper? Via Ezra Klein.
NYTimes
We all know print journalism is dying and practically dead—but could the New York Times ever actually shut down? And what would that mean?
All Is Quiet on New Year’s Day
All is quiet on New Year’s Day.
* As the Bush administration blessedly draws to a close, it’s important to remember the casualties of the War of Terror, people like Alberto Gonzales. (via)
* More people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers. More importantly:
The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently.
That’s good, good news.
* Howard Dean, Vermonter of the Year. Maybe next year, Ben and Jerry.
* Batman casting rumors you can believe in: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin.
* It’s the future, and Microsoft still sucks.
* Top 10 space stories of 2008. A different 10.
* Top 10 cryptozoology stories of 2008.
* James Howard Kunstler’s predictions for 2009. Prediction: Pain. Via MetaFilter.
* Thank god for philosophy grad students, the only graduate demographic upon Lit students can look down.
Midday Links
Midday links.
* MTV cut down a rainforest to film a series of the world’s most trivial show, Road Rules/Real Word Challenge.
* Will the collapse of the financial markets delay professorial retirements and thereby destroy my chances of tenured employment? Phil Gramm will pay for this.
* The Department of Homeland Security has partnered with Sesame Street in a desperate bid to completely evacuate its last shred of credibility. Godspeed.
* The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation’s aesthetic-industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.
* That one was a joke, but the NEH has announced grants of $25,000 for the development of multidisciplinary courses on the “Enduring Questions.”
* Toronto may ban the coffee cup, or else tax it into oblivion.
* ‘Showdown or Shutdown at the Star-Ledger.’ Who mourns for Northern New Jersey’s finest journalistic institution?
Gerry Canavan 