This is appalling-- Ann Arbor losing its newspaper.

hands-on impresario
Tegel  Design +  Planning

On Jul 16, 2009, at 7:35 PM, Lawrence Kestenbaum  
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Gabriel Orgrease wrote:
>
>> i have been wondering w/ all this talk about the plight of  
>> newspapers how
>> you may be dealing w/ all that
>
> The Ann Arbor News, Ann Arbor's century-plus-old daily newspaper shuts
> down July 23, putting a great many out of work.
>
> From that date forward, this city of over 100,000 population (metro
> area about 400,000) will have no daily newspaper.
>
> Instead, we will have the weekly Ann Arbor Journal (offspring of the
> same chain that owns the small town weeklies around here), and the
> web-site-based twice-weekly Ann Arbor Dot Com.
>
> Oh, and there will still be the student-run Michigan Daily, five days
> a week during the school year, with very little interest in anything
> outside the boundaries of the University of Michigan.
>
> In retrospect, I think the 20th century will be seen as the brief
> golden era of authoritative, mainstream, mass audience, nonpartisan
> news media.
>
> We are in the process of returning to status quo ante, before high
> speed printing presses, when no one could make any money from
> publishing news.  Without profit as a possible motivator, the raison
> d'etre of news media will only be propaganda .
>
> In the 18th and 19th centuries, pretty much every newspaper was tied
> to a political party or political sugar daddy.  In the 21st century,
> we will have media catering to narrow shards of the shattered mass
> audience, and "objective news" will seem quaint and archaic.
>
> No news organization will ever again have the kind of reportorial
> resources that metro newspapers and TV networks have today.  Yet
> everyone will be taught not to trust anything from outside their
> particular echo chamber, and no one will be in any position to sort
> out radically different versions of the same "news".
>
> The NY Times was one of the first to break out of the old model, and
> it will be one of the last to succumb to the new one.
>
> Ralph Walter wrote:
>
>> Nice to know we've got a Mr. Glass-Half-Full among the rest of us  
>> Cassandras.
>
> I think we're looking at a nearly empty glass in the very near future.
>
>                                                     Larry
>
> ---
> Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
> Washtenaw County Clerk & Register of Deeds, http://ewashtenaw.org
> The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com
> P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
>
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