Get off my LAWN! "Grumpy Old Farts"

[GwenOnBass]

It is unclear to me if the central pillars of the Fourth Estate are up to the task of upholding a flawed structure.

 

[Charlie Tango]

I've had online subscriptions to NYT, WAPO and many other sites for years now, we need them so I don't mind paying at all.

Yep, same here. Since Bezos bought WaPo I haven't seen a mass exodus of editors and reporters, and haven't detected any influence. You see disclaimers any time his name is mentioned. Still get the dead-tree Sunday version also. I pay NYT for a crossword subscription in addition to their online. Gotta keep the little grey cells sharp. I also want to keep the little weekly in my mother's home town alive, so I've started taking that, too.

 

[GwenOnBass]

My luthier friend insisted that I get a fretted five string bass so I could have a better handle on his primary market. He would have just given me a long term loaner (aka pay me never) but we worked out a trade for one I actually wanted instead. I played it nearly exclusively for a solid year and I can at least cope now, albeit a but grudgingly. The frets are much more annoying to me than the big string is though...

That's what it appears to me. If you're [generic plural you] going to play a five string, play it like a five-stringer. Gigless as I may be, it's not high on my list of Things Immediately Required.

 

[bobyoung53]

Yep, same here. Since Bezos bought WaPo I haven't seen a mass exodus of editors and reporters, and haven't detected any influence. You see disclaimers any time his name is mentioned. Still get the dead-tree Sunday version also. I pay NYT for a crossword subscription in addition to their online. Gotta keep the little grey cells sharp. I also want to keep the little weekly in my mother's home town alive, so I've started taking that, too.

There was a little paper in my hometown that closed several years ago after more than 100 years. It was kind of sad.

 

[GwenOnBass]

Yep, same here. Since Bezos bought WaPo I haven't seen a mass exodus of editors and reporters, and haven't detected any influence. You see disclaimers any time his name is mentioned. Still get the dead-tree Sunday version also. I pay NYT for a crossword subscription in addition to their online. Gotta keep the little grey cells sharp. I also want to keep the little weekly in my mother's home town alive, so I've started taking that, too.

It's local journalism that really counts, IMO, and a fool's errand it may be. If you're a young Philbert Desanex at the Muthalode Morning Mungpie, how long you going to stick around when a real salary and benefits are dangled elsewhere?

The country club set that used to own the local daily papers sold off their shares long ago (for the most part). Sometimes they cared about journalism, except every publisher that ever was came up from ad side. Very rare to see an editor promoted to publisher. Usually editors are too crass for the country club set, or should be, if they're any good. Why am I standing on this soapbox? There's a guy on the corner selling cigarette singles instead of the daily morning edition ...

 

[Charlie Tango]

That's what it appears to me. If you're [generic plural you] going to play a five string, play it like a five-stringer. Gigless as I may be, it's not high on my list of Things Immediately Required.

For me, it's riveted on my list of Things Never To Even Mess With.

 

[Jeff Scott]

I used to worry that at some point I would no longer be able to get short scale double ball end strings. I bought some spares but it turned out that I’ve never changed them. All these years later, they are still available.

There's a bunch of smart cookies at Yamaha. They would never consider going down the Steinberger hole.

(Look, ma, it's larger than life!)

 

[beans-on-toast]

There's a bunch of smart cookies at Yamaha. They would never consider going down the Steinberger hole.

View attachment 4012312
(Look, ma, it's larger than life!)

Very smart. It has something in common with the Floyd Rose locking tremolo system.

 

[12BitSlab]

Re: journalism, @Morrighan knows far more about news gathering and newspapers than I ever will. So my observations are those of an outsider and may be WAY off the mark.

Newspapers somehow forgot that their real business is bringing compelling information to its readers every day of the week. Many of them looked at themselves as sellers of classified advertisements to a somewhat well defined audience. Besides the Classified section, they also had some news stories. Some newspapers didn’t have any stories that they developed and wrote. They merely ran with prepared copy from UPI or The AP.

Then the Internet caught on. The old guard’s revenue from classified ads dropped to zero. And the double whammy was that more websites than I could possibly count had the same AP/UPI stories on their sites for no charge.

A smart publisher should have figured out fairly quickly that their path to survival was providing compelling local stories that were relevant, well researched, and well written. That is, they needed to provide something to the market that their customers couldn’t get elsewhere.

What did many publishers do? They downsized the people who could have saved the papers and relied even more on syndicated content thus hastening their own demise.

The bottom line is that many newspapers forgot which business they were in and who their customers were. That is a decidedly bad combination.

 

[beans-on-toast]

An old article but it rings true today.

Invalid Link Removed

 

[Deleted member 268085]

Arthur Itis was not invited to my house, and yet.

I use Chrome for Zoom &c as unknown engineers do whatever it is they do to Firefox. I don't know, exactly, and only generally, nor do I particularly care. My early Web stuff — as if there was anything like a Web as we know it or could imagine it was on Mozilla. That came after "Web browsing" on DEC terminals, I've forgotten ... Rainbow? That seems right but that was another era ...

Yeap, whitelist TB for your adblocker ...

You don't go back to DARPAnet like I do, do you? We had many terabytes of research data online at Fermilab, where I was a beamline tech in the late '70s.

Weren't no WWW back then.

Oh, gawd. Rainbow. Almost threw up my lunch.

 

[Deleted member 268085]

It is unclear to me if the central pillars of the Fourth Estate are up to the task of upholding a flawed structure.

Not if they're the same outfit responsible for the leaning tower of Dallas.

 

[GwenOnBass]

All true

There are the costs of newsprint. Some large newspapers bought their own forest operations. There are unions. There are greensheets. Classified was once the bread and butter for a paper. Inserts (the ads that are inserted into the paper, vs. ads that are printed on newspaper pages) don't count against the ad line. A high ad line depends on a thriving community with local merchants. Big Box Store Number 9 has no interest in advertising locally. Or banking locally.

A hawt reporter would read all the legal filings and other proceedings that lead to the city zoning for Big Box Store Number 9, and the tax rates paid &c &c

These things are difficult convey to a reader when

The structure of the school system is [different impossible thing]

and so on and so on

What are you going to do when what sells is the Page 3 Girl

 

[GwenOnBass]

You don't go back to DARPAnet like I do, do you? We had many terabytes of research data online at Fermilab, where I was a beamline tech in the late '70s.

Weren't no WWW back then.

Oh, gawd. Rainbow. Almost threw up my lunch.

Our school PDP-8 was on a timeshare with the nearby university, possibly owing to the probably insignificant coincidence of our teacher's former tenure at DEC. When I showed some computer science student I've forgotten, precisely, a <ahem> computer game I'd <ahem> managed a copy YES that is it, he said you're changing your major. Pffft I'm gone I'm a comparative lit major and we're the nerds who quote Jane Austin and Chaucer so we can pose for art students before biscuits and tea

so what are you going to do with an English major?

<grabs bass>

 

[spiritbass]

Something like this perhaps?

Had to look up "crepitation". I'm glad I'm not that decrepit...

 

[GonePlaid]

The answer is simple. At Apple News, for a low cost subscription you can read hundreds of newspapers and magazines. A basic service is free, if you want more, you pay monthly. Much like how itunes and later streaming changed the industry. The days of papers selling individual subscriptions are quickly drawing to an end.

When billionaires started buying papers to control what people see with their version of the truth, it was all over. People are smarter than that.

Some people are smarter than that.

 

[beans-on-toast]

Today would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday. Imagine that!

 

[GwenOnBass]

A book I took to heart to the point its paperback spine was broken was the gift of a gentleman who urged me on to my degree. "A Treasury of Great Journalism" or some such hackneyed title, it was his when he was a graduate student at Columbia School of Journalism in the early 1960s. He went on to a Big Deal First Job at Newsweek and so on

what we most enjoyed talking about, though, is sailing

and if you've been in and around newspapers enough to be a newspaper rat yourself, the sea looks mighty inviting. I recall ( paging @alaskaleftybass ) newspaper people have the same personality set as people who move to Alaska.

While I may yet travel to Alaska (not crossing it off in this life), I do know the feeling

Oh yeah the book. Page after page of news stories as published from the time of the French Revolution forward. Good reading. Might be more fun, or less fun, when you see what it takes

The coolest newsroom I've ever the pleasure

is a multi-story affair where the old press used to be. The ground floor is open, and there are open desk areas on the second story that is the periphery of the old press pit.

 

[GonePlaid]

A book I took to heart to the point its paperback spine was broken was the gift of a gentleman who urged me on to my degree. "A Treasury of Great Journalism" or some such hackneyed title, it was his when he was a graduate student at Columbia School of Journalism in the early 1960s. He went on to a Big Deal First Job at Newsweek and so on

what we most enjoyed talking about, though, is sailing

and if you've been in and around newspapers enough to be a newspaper rat yourself, the sea looks mighty inviting. I recall ( paging @alaskaleftybass ) newspaper people have the same personality set as people who move to Alaska.

While I may yet travel to Alaska (not crossing it off in this life), I do know the feeling

Oh yeah the book. Page after page of news stories as published from the time of the French Revolution forward. Good reading. Might be more fun, or less fun, when you see what it takes

The coolest newsroom I've ever the pleasure

is a multi-story affair where the old press used to be. The ground floor is open, and there are open desk areas on the second story that is the periphery of the old press pit.

If you ever saw the final episode of "Burn Notice", the exploding building was the Miami Herald building on Biscayne Bay. They got their rolls of newsprint via barges that tied up to the seawall. I had a part-time gig taking bundles of The Miami News(PM paper)out to distribution centers in the only Mercedes-Benz's I've ever driven.

 

[GwenOnBass]

My brief but intense tour of Miami was at the start if El Heraldo, if I recall correctly.

Households that take papers are factored into a penetration rate. A hundred percent rate of subscriptions to households is a publisher's fantasy ... no, not really. That's a 100 percent penetration rate. That's where a publisher's fantasy begins .... How to accomplish that is an entirely different dream, one found in the vicinity of whiskey.