Paper News Connects to Readers, Is Terrestrially Social
Paper books are seen in greater frequency on public transit these days. I have to write more about this another time, but the Washington Post ran a story on a conglomerate's plans to find $250 to $300 million in savings by cutting "duplicate" jobs such as local sportswriters. Cutting a local sportswriter is not cutting the fat out of a news operation, instead cutting a local sportswriter is cutting the bone and removing part of the heart.
Another way they plan to save money is to cut into the print costs. Yikes. It turns out, according to one commenter, a newspaper chain in Arkansas is handing iPads out to customers so they can eliminate their paper editions:
Hopefully I'll find the time to compile the evidence I've gathered that the print reading experience is significantly different than digital. Professional writers like Susan Orlean, Toure Nolastname and Salman Rushdie all say they proofread their drafts on screen to find one set of changes, but reading on paper throws their prose into relief and reveals another set of changes they would have never caught on an iPad or computer monitor. They evangelize to other writers the value of printing their work during the composition process.
The reporter union's president gets the last work in the Washington Post story, and in this blog post:
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Another way they plan to save money is to cut into the print costs. Yikes. It turns out, according to one commenter, a newspaper chain in Arkansas is handing iPads out to customers so they can eliminate their paper editions:
"Here’s another approach that’s being pursued by a family-owned newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazzette. The paper has been shutting down its print editions across the state and is giving all its subscribers a free iPad so they can use a digital subscription. If they don't know how to use an iPad the paper will send somebody out to train them. Nobody is losing any jobs over this (yet) and the hope is that eliminating print costs will enable the paper to offer a larger product on the online app. It's too soon to know if this is going to work but the publisher, Walter Houseman, is betting the company on it. His paper has done a better job than most in its circulation category at filling the pages with news and local/state coverage. It's not what it was but it's more than many counterparts are doing. We'd better hope he succeeds or else Gannet/Gatehouse might come knocking on the door. Read more about this at http://www.inlandpress.org/stories/arkansas-democrat-gazettes-pitch-to-subscribers-to-save-the-paper-give-up-paper,9364 "
Hopefully I'll find the time to compile the evidence I've gathered that the print reading experience is significantly different than digital. Professional writers like Susan Orlean, Toure Nolastname and Salman Rushdie all say they proofread their drafts on screen to find one set of changes, but reading on paper throws their prose into relief and reveals another set of changes they would have never caught on an iPad or computer monitor. They evangelize to other writers the value of printing their work during the composition process.
The reporter union's president gets the last work in the Washington Post story, and in this blog post:
"Creating real ties to the community -- that's the only way these things are going to work," he said. "And I just don't think that corporations think that way."
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
