Barack W. Obama

February 12, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Congress, Kindle, economy | Leave a Comment 

Andrew Sullivan comes right out and accuses Republicans of wanting to sabotage not only President Obama but the U.S. economy. He’s not an especially enthusiastic supporter of the stimulus bill, so it’s hard to imagine he finds it impossible to accept that congressional Republicans, including ex-Commerce Secretary-designate Judd Gregg, are sincere in their opposition to this hastily assembled, impossible to comprehend, unprecedentedly expensive, soon-to-be-signed mess. Instead, Sullivan and other Obama boosters seem to be appalled that all Washington refuses to embrace their bracing post-partisan vision and march lockstep behind the President whether it agrees with him or not.

Perhaps one reason Republicans don’t do so is that, so far, Obama doesn’t lead very effectively. As a matter of fact, he’s beginning to remind me of George W. Bush, whose conception of Presidential persuasion was to state what he took to be obvious about the war on terror and the evildoers and then act weary and vaguely peeved when people didn’t see the world the same way he did. Over the last week, Obama has sounded so harsh and pedantic that Sullivan may be barking up the wrong end of Pennsylvania Ave. looking for the politicians whose actions and statements may actually be hurting the economy.

Now that he’s got his bill, I’d like the President to begin talking up the productive and recuperative power of the American people and encouraging me to spend it if I have it. Just a word from you, Mr. President, and I’ll even order a Kindle 2.0.

Smell The News

January 16, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle, News media | 3 Comments 

Since I got my Kindle for Kristmas in 2007, the Nixon Foundation’s copy of the New York Times has languished in my office until, after the decent interval I have decreed in the event I should for some reason choose to bestow my favor, a colleague takes it to be enjoyed by those who still read newspapers on newsprint. After all, the entire editorial content downloads to my Kindle every morning, for about $14 a month. On a handy device the size of a trade paperback, I can read it (or any one of 25 books, blogs, magazines, or other newspapers I’ve downloaded) before getting up or while having breakfast. Since Kindle news consumers pay for content, the device and ones like it seem to me to hold the key to the revitalization of the newspaper business.

Or so I believed until this morning. For whatever reason, I didn’t read the paper before coming to work. As usual, the printed Times awaited on a credenza. It asked nothing of me. It has grown used to my neglect. But this morning, across five columns (shrunken columns, since the paper got narrower a couple of years ago), was a color photo of the US Airways Airbus A320 floating in the Hudson River. The Kindle edition would’ve had the photo, but small and black and white. I’ve seen plenty of on-line photos of yesterday’s miraculous event, and it was all over the cable and broadcast news last night.

But five columns in the paper! That means something right off the bat, because usually a photo above the fold in the Times is three or maybe four columns. They invite a glance. For an experienced newspaper reader, five columns demands special attention and even wonder.

And yet the emergency landing wasn’t the lead article, according to the Times’s lights. That privileged spot was reserved for a one-column headline on the far right that read, “Senate Releases Second Portion Of Bailout Fund; A Victory For Obama; Democrats in the House Offer an $825 Billion Recovery Plan.”

And yes, I can see their point. The saving of 155 lives is a big story, and so it got five-column art plus a five-column hed over a news story and human-interest sidebar, all above the fold. Last night on TV, the plane was almost all we heard about. But while CNN and Fox News were hyperventilating, editors at the Times wanted to make sure that readers realized it may even be more important that our representatives, on the same day, took a giant step closer to spending $1.175 trillion in taxpayers’ money within weeks or even days after Jan. 20. That’s what newspapers do — they reach beyond the urgent to the important. They whisper in our ears what we need to know while other media shout what we want to hear.

Below the fold there was another dramatic photo from the Hudson, showing three women in their orange and yellow life vests in a raft floating near the stricken aircraft. The remaining articles are on Gaza (where the three-week war has resulted in 1,000 deaths), AG designate Eric Holder’s confirmation hearings, and Japan’s so-called outcasts, the buraku. That’s not a subject people will usually go looking for with their browsers and BlackBerries, not something that will make the “CBS Evening News” or the “O’Reilly Factor,” but deserving of our attention nonetheless, and available only because highly paid editorial professionals have done their work covering a world that they know better than most of us do.

Across the bottom of the page, a 12.5″ ad for a new cable TV series. I really haven’t been paying attention. For decades the Times has run classified ads on the bottom of p. 1, but I don’t remember seeing a color display ad. All power to them if it helps them stay afloat. Thumbing through the sections, I came to Weekend Arts, with a breathtaking photo above the fold of the White House (brilliantly lit thanks to Pat Nixon, who raised the money to install the lights) and looming against a royal purple sky. It’s a 16-page section on Washington during Inaugural week, with information about restaurants, historic sites, art galleries, and logistics. Reading on my Kindle, I might’ve skipped the section entirely. The paper version is someone you want to slip into your briefcase to look at later.

But what actually seduced me this morning was the paper’s odor. Do you remember the acrid and yet sweet smell of ink on newsprint? I grew up with it. My parents and godfather were newspaper people, and on Saturdays my mother would take me to her office at the Detroit Free Press or the Arizona Republic. While she worked, I’d play with the thick black copy pencils, Underwood manual typewriters, and smelly three-ply NCR paper (my mother called them “books”) reporters used to write their stories. When she had something to send down to the composing room, she’d let me roll it up and put it in the pneumatic tube.

The composing room itself, with the now long-gone Linotype machines clattering madly, was an explosion of sound and sparks. The smell of ink and paper was everywhere, and it came off my spurned newspaper this morning like pheromones. Not even a Kindle, with its lightning fast Internet access and revolutionary text pricing, can make a newspaper kid that happy.

I imagine people my age are equally nostalgic about the memory of thumbing through our Zeppelin and Stones albums even as we thumb our iPods and let the records rot in the garage. But while digital music sounds just as good as vinyl, no new medium has as yet replaced the experience of absorbing, in one evocative and intelligently-ordered and -designed package, the creative work of editors and reporters. And since that work is essential to a well-informed public and thus to freedom and democracy, we should think twice before spurning newspapers unless and until something better (if not necessarily their olfactory equivalent) comes along.

It Was The Year Of The Kindle

December 23, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle | Leave a Comment 

Save democracy: Buy one for a child, college student, or nursing home.

Kindling Journalism’s Future

December 7, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

Hallelujah! The New York Times has 10,000 Kindle subscribers. But experts wonder if Amazon is selling enough of the electronic readers. Newspapers should help by buying hundreds of thousands of them for promotions.

Hat tip to Patrick Appel

Then Put The Cat Out And The Bulldog To Bed

November 20, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

Hat tip to my friend Tracy Wood, Vietnam war correspondent, investigative editor, newspaper consultant, and (if anyone is) an architect of the resurrection of American journalism: The story of how a Longmont, Colorado newspaper owner invited his employees to park cars at his holiday party. At least two have accepted so far.

The Death Of American Journalism

October 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Kindle, News media | 2 Comments 

Those not desiring an Obama Presidency are by and large not feeling nostalgic about the newspaper business this week. And yet this posting at a very cool website, Lifehacker.com, misses the point of the stunning announcement by one of the nation’s most important papers:

The Christian Science Monitor, a Pulitzer-winning daily newspaper, announced yesterday that it will stop printing daily editions and focus on its web site, as well as use the savings to keep foreign bureaus open. Media pundits have been claiming the End of Print for decades, but the CSM is the first large-scale news operation to really take the plunge. We’re obviously pretty keen on free digital information at Lifehacker, but also wondering if we, and maybe our readers, will some day miss the portability, the lack of battery power or Wi-Fi connections, and the general look and feel of print newspapers. Are you in the same boat, or do you think the writing is on the wall when it comes to news delivery? Would you settle for a half-way solution, like a Kindle-esque news reader or print-on-demand papers?

Keen on free digital information? Me, too! But the content at CSM, NYT, LAT, WP, and AP is the work of highly trained and motivated reporters and editors who devote months or years to becoming experts in what they cover. Many work in expensive-to-maintain bureaus in Washington, London, or Beijing, where really important things happen that are sometimes pretty complicated. Newspapers pay them what are called salaries from revenue generated from subscriptions and advertising. Even TV news professionals, skilled though they may be, depend on newspaper reporting.

As for the free digital information we all love so much, if it’s good, it’s usually being given away on traditional new organizations’ websites, which hope that you’ll look at advertising while visiting. Otherwise, the free information is either gathered from these sources and repackaged or pastiches of opinions, rumors, or lies produced by people sitting in their bedrooms or Starbucks. When the traditional news-gathering organizations atrophy, what will we have left? Right: The crap.

Lifehacker seems to think news is all about the medium instead of the content. Both the NYT, still the greatest newspaper in the world, and the LAT, which used to be great, are bleeding pages and personnel. What happens when they have to close their Beijing bureaus? Who’s going to tell us what’s going on in the next superpower — the Xinhua News Agency? The State Department? Wonkette?

The protection of freedom depends on well-informed populaces, which depend on professional journalism, which runs on money. That’s why the Kindle is such a miracle. It’s cool and green, and its users pay for content. Get one today and help news organizations save democracy by developing a new financial model. Because there’s no such thing as free digital journalism that’s worth a damn.

Kindle Love

October 15, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle | Leave a Comment 

Hugh McGuire on what the publishing industry can learn from music industry. An iPod for books — aka the Kindle — is key.

Digging Out The Truth

August 9, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Bush Administration, International Affairs, Kindle | Leave a Comment 

The New York Times is regularly updating its on-line coverage of the violence in South Ossetia. The Kindle version of Saturday’s paper had this classic paragraph:

President Bush discussed the conflict by telephone with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the national security advisor, Stephen J. Hadley, for about an hour after attending the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino said. Mr. Bush held another conference with Mr. Hadley and his deputy, James Jeffery, on Saturday morning before attending beach volleyball practice.

Phones And Newspapers Won’t Mix

July 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

An entrepreneur in Encinitas, California thinks he can save the newspaper business by sending content to cell phones:

Verve’s chief executive, Art Howe, says he is convinced that people will always want local news and information — just not in the format of a print newspaper. But to be useful to readers, mobile versions of Web sites “cannot just be Internet lite,” Mr. Howe warned. The A.P. recently released a popular iPhone application developed by Verve that lets users scan the day’s headlines, send articles to friends and save articles to read later.

“Mobile is actually a better way to reach people than print or even Web. It’s versatile, immediate, travels and is just as compelling,” said Mr. Howe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and former owner of 50 local papers.

Maybe — but I still think the answer’s the Amazon Kindle, to which the whole paper downloads each day.

RIP Russert. Long Live His Business.

June 16, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Culture, In Memoriam, Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

Tim Russert’s death struck a loud chord with people of a certain age and those who love them. A fellow pastor told me Friday that he got a “lose weight or you’ll die” lecture from his wife. I got a variant: “Slow down or else.” The next ring in the circle of mourning was a richer sadness (by virtue of being more other-directed) at losing a lover and teacher of our messy and glorious politics, a national friend, and an archetypal son. Then our sympathy for his wife, father, and son. Please don’t miss a poised and thoughtful Luke, named for the Great Physician himself, offering healing balm during his “Today Show” interview.

David Carr adds yet another ring to the circle: Mourning for the death of Old Media:

The day that Mr. Russert died, I was in a press room for Bonnaroo, a music festival in Tennessee. When I got an alert that Mr. Russert had died, I announced it to the room and for a minute, no one said anything. And then finally, a woman down the table said, “Wasn’t he on TV?” You could assign the lack of political interest to the context, but Bonnaroo is a very political space, with lots of youth voting organizations and a big Obama campaign presence. About 50,000 people listened rapt as Chris Rock riffed on the campaign and more than that as Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam spoke urgently about the need for immediate change. Mr. Russert, a huge music fan — Bruce Springsteen was his second-favorite deity — would have loved the spectacle of it, but Bonnaroo carries with it a reminder that politics is being dispersed and re-democratized. The people who run campaigns, newspapers and networks will head to the conventions this summer convinced that the future of the country remains in their hands. But there are clear signs that game is changing. My dad may not ever believe it, but Sunday could end up being just another day of the week.

That definitely makes me want to cry. A young colleague (having just collected his college diploma summa cum laude) told me today that most young people get their news from YouTube. But how exactly do they do that? Doctoral candidate awakens, stretches, makes green tea, and then says to herself while cradling a MacBook Air in her lap: “I wonder how anti-terrorism efforts are going in Pakistan? Plus I’d better check in on the planning for the G-8 meeting, and while I’m at it, I haven’t read anything in a while on the latest trends in microchip development. Hey, and I’ll bet there’s been a shakeup in the Obama campaign!” She then performs multiple Google and video searches.

Give me a break. Nothing in the new media is a reliable substitute for a group of editors and reporters pledged to fairness (even if some of them have their fingers crossed) and pooling their efforts and expertise to produce the comprehensive survey of the world’s events and trends called a daily newspaper (whether you read it in print, on-line, or on your Kindle). When it comes to news, “dispersed…re-democratized” are big words for “dumb.”

Newspapers, Save Thyselves (Pt. 8)

June 5, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Kindle, News media | 1 Comment 

Paul Krugman at the New York Times gets how the Amazon Kindle will revolutionize book publishing, by cutting costs and forcing cuts in prices:

[W]e may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink. That’s certainly my impression after a couple of months’ experience with the device feeding the buzz, the Amazon Kindle. Basically, the Kindle’s lightness and reflective display mean that it offers a reading experience almost comparable to that of reading a traditional book. This leaves the user free to appreciate the convenience factor: the Kindle can store the text of many books, and when you order a new book, it’s literally in your hands within a couple of minutes. It’s a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books. How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.

But he overlooks the device’s potential for saving his own faltering industry by making newspaper reading hip again and getting readers to pay for expensive-to-produce content rather than reading it for free on web sites. For more Kindle love, check out Barry Sonnenfeld’s column in the July 2008 “Esquire” (the one with Mike Myers on the cover; not yet on-line).

Affordable Kindle Love

May 28, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

Amazon has taken $40 off the price of its revolutionary digital reader. Act now and save journalism.

Will They Show Up Nov. 4?

May 13, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

In his book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein doesn’t exactly extol the wisdom of the youngest members of one of Sen. Obama’s core constituencies. According to David Robinson, reviewing the book in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

…[T]he present is a good time to be young only if you don’t mind a tendency toward empty-headedness….[Bauerline] argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy….The kids are using their technological advantage to immerse themselves in a trivial, solipsistic, distracting online world at the expense of more enriching activities — like opening a book or writing complete sentences. Mr. Bauerlein presents a wealth of data to show that young people, with the aid of digital media, are intensely focused on themselves, their peers and the present moment.

So what else is new? What’s exceptional about the current youthful cohort is a much lower rate of newspaper reading than in earlier generations. Reviewer Robinson’s hope is kindled by Amazon’s new iPod for text:

The new Amazon book reader may bring the best of predigital life forward into the present…

Indeed — especially newspapers. Under Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s circulation is up. It’s been Kindled from the beginning, and every other newspaper in the country (most of which are experiencing frightening losses of readership) should as well.

The Dumbest Generation comes out Thursday. Deeply discounted at Amazon, it will cost you $16.50 between hard covers. As of today, it’s not listed as Kindle-available (let’s get on the stick, Penguin — you managed it with Anthony Summers’ fraud of a Nixon biography). If and when it is, it will cost you $10.

Rewriting the Book

May 12, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

Kindle love in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Newspapers, Save Thyselves (Pt. 7)

May 11, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

On a cruise ship off the California coast, with my feet up and Kindle comfortably propped on my chest, I read this in John Markoff’s “Slipstream” column in today’s New York Times — an article about the need for a portable computing device somewhere between a laptop and BlackBerry:

To date, the best example…is the Amazon Kindle book reader, which is the size of a paperback book. A quirky first generation effort, the device has been criticized as having an odd user interface design and a flickering display.

My eyes brimming with tears (not because of the non-flickering display but because my beloved device had been dissed), I effortlessly adjusted the font size and continued to read. Turning a few more pages with a minute click of the thumb, I was heartened when Markoff wrote:

At one time, I thought a [midsized] slate might…become the perfect canvas to help resurrect my industry in a post-paper era. It’s probably just a daydream.

It wasn’t a daydream, Mr. Markoff — you were right! The Kindle is poised to save the newspaper industry, but newspapers have to be willing to spend a lot of money to make it happen.

First, every canny publisher should Kindle his or her newspaper — which is to say, make it available for automatic downloading to Kindle subscribers each morning in exchange for a monthly charge. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post cost $10 a month, the New York Times $14. Those are little pots of gold for struggling newspapers: Direct payments for their expensive-to-produce content as opposed to giveaways on websites. In exchange the reader gets the complete paper in a format that’s preferable to the printed version (and green to boot) and dramatically easier to read than the computer and hand-held versions.

Second, newspapers have to buy about a million Kindles and give them away in promotions focused on college-age and young adult readers who, in their finite wisdom, have decided they know better than newspaper editors what kinds and categories of news they should view each day. The Times should give away (or sell for a song) 100,000 Kindles with trial subscriptions preloaded. The Kindle also makes it easy to subscribe to blogs and sells bestselling books for $10. The screen doesn’t flicker except when you turn pages and then only for a fraction of a second. Once you get used to the interface, as with the iPod, it’s a breeze to use, and future versions will undoubtedly be better.

Fixated as the text industries are on fickle young people, the Kindle is perfect for older and visually-impaired readers as well. Relatively few books are printed in large-print editions — but the biggest Kindle font makes each of the nearly 120,000 Kindled volumes a large-print book. Need a gift for someone in a nursing home or convalescent hospital? A Kindle would be an almost infinite blessing.

Since I got mine for Christmas, I’ve rarely picked up the printed Times, and I’ve already read ten books on it. Future editions and Kindle kompetitors will probably combine text content with other computer functions like an improved browser and e-mail, but I’m greatly taken with the idea that this is my dedicated book and newspaper device, distinct from my computer and hand-held. With its leather cover and classy Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde screensavers, an essential element of its genius is that it retains the aesthetic of a book. It’s modern and old-fashioned at the same time. It also may well be magic, with the power to make people, especially young people, want to read those indispensable and expertly assembled documents knows as newspapers again by making it cool to do so.

Newspapers, Save Thyselves (Pt. 5)

April 28, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle, News media | Leave a Comment 

With their astonishingly useful Kindle, Jeff Bezos and Amazon have set out to save text and rebuild our attention spans. Every newspaper in the world should be Kindled; it makes it cool for people under 50 to read good journalistic content again. Papers should buy hundreds of thousands of Kindles and give them away in promotions. Below is from Bezos’s 2007 investors’ letter, which is all about the Kindle:

Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools. I realize my tone here tends toward the missionary, and I can assure you it’s heartfelt.

Kindle Size That

March 10, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Kindle, News media | 2 Comments 

In Border’s last night I picked up a copy of Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life — but then I put it down again. The discounted price was $25. Amazon’s tempting hardcover price is $15.60, but I’ll keep resisting until I can get it on my Amazon Kindle for $10. Egon in “Ghostbusters” was right: Print is dead. Text isn’t. The Kindle’s going to save it.

Like a true zealot, I want to hold you by the shoulders and make you understand. Every morning before I awaken, the New York Times downloads to my Kindle — every word, sans advertising. It’s 1000% easier to read than on your BlackBerry and 500% easier than nytimes.com on your computer. You can’t balance your computer on your knee and turn pages with one finger while you drink your coffee. You can’t prop your computer on the edge of a book and read it while you’re eating your Cheerios. Your computer doesn’t let you carry around several daily newspapers, the five blogs you’re reading (constantly being updated), and 15 (or 25, or 50) books in a leatherbound package the size of a trade paperback. Your computer doesn’t automatically download beautiful at-rest screens depicting Jane Austen and Alexandre Dumas nor let you change the font size with one button and a click. Addicted to newspapers since I was 16, I’ve picked up the paper Times twice since Christmas (when the Kindle arrived through the blessed agency of my wife). I also feel good about paying for my paper, which I don’t do directly on the BlackBerry or the Internet. Maintaining great newspapers’s correspondents and bureau chiefs in the style to which they have become accustomed is essential to the future of democracy. I’m willing to pay my fair share.

The Kindle Times download costs $14 a month. That’s real money which the Times needs as it fends off challenges from investors who act as though they have a secret plan for saving newspapers. If they do, I hope they share it as a public service. Here’s my free advice to the whole industry: Go Kindle. So far relatively few papers are Kindled. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Boston Globe are the other biggies. The other day I was talking with a local newspaper executive who had just been at yet another meeting to talk about what to do about declining circulation and advertising revenue. She’d heard of the Kindle but didn’t sound that interested until I told her about the $14 I pay for the Times. “Maybe we’ll look into that,” she said. At this point I can’t imagine why any newspaper in the country wouldn’t.

The first-generation Kindle costs $400, but that’s got to come down. A friend recently got the comparable Sony reader as a giveaway for flying first class. The Sony doesn’t have the Kindle’s free Internet connection. Still, getting the devices into people’s hands will enable them to begin having the kind of influence on text markets that will give publishers the information they need to plan for the inevitable revolution in how we read. Kindle now offers nearly 110,000 books, virtually all for $10 or less. The offerings are irritatingly spotty — where’s Lush Life? — but they’re getting better every day. Once you’ve bought a Kindle book, you own it forever. The system keeps all your notations, and you can store them on Amazon’s server when you don’t need them on your Kindle. If you’re into the look and heft and smell of books, if it’s reassuring to line then up and gaze at them, let me help you get over that. I used to feel the same way about CD jewelcases. I wanted the cover art, lyrics, and production credits. Then I went to iTunes and paid $10 for music for which Tower Records was charging $16 or $18. Tower Records has taken its jewel cases and gone home.

The miracle of the iPod and Kindle has as much to do with reforming and, one hopes, revitalizing markets for content as with the convenience and fun of the gadgets themselves. When I hear that educated young people are too cool for newspapers, first I feel old. Then I realize that I’m reasonably cool, too, since I probably know more than they do about how China is dealing with political dissidents in the runup to the Olympics just because I saw the Times this weekend. If they read about China on MSNBC or a blog, that source probably got a lot of what it knew from the Times. We need great newspapers because they cover the world with depth and discernment that takes a load of money in a culture that seems to believe that knowledge really is free. So get a Kindle and help reform the text market. Give a Kindle to a kid and make good old-fashioned journalism cool again.

***

March 22: Lush Life is now Kindled. Thanks, Jeff and Richard!

June 5: Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland is not yet Kindled. What gives?

Newspapers, Save Thyselves

February 21, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Kindle, News media, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

If the New York Times delivers to Paradise, Thomas Jefferson — who said he hated to imagine a free society without newspapers — had a bad morning one day last year when he realized (he definitely would have realized it; indeed he would have done the measurement himself, with a home-made instrument) that his paper was about two inches narrower. An editor’s note on the front page disclosed that the change had been made to bring the paper in line with the industry standard (Thank goodness! We’d been worried) and that, incidentally, there would be less room for news. This month the Times announced the first-ever reduction in the size of its editorial staff. The Los Angeles Times, down to 800,000 daily subscribers from a high of over a million, has lost two editors over demands from corporate headquarters in Chicago that they lay off more reporters and editors. Our hometown daily in Orange County, The Register, is also shrinking before our eyes, having itself narrowed to that all-important industry standard and, just recently, axed its stand-alone daily business section.

Front-page headlines would be blaring if the fast food industry or the airlines were suffering these kinds of setbacks, whereas, my friends in the industry tell me, publishers have spent the last decade in denial. The New York Times has been state of the art in meeting the digital challenge. I can read it for free on my computer; it offered me a convenient desktop icon for my BlackBerry; and it now downloads to my Amazon Kindle for dimes a day. And yet even the Grey Lady is shedding inches and correspondents. So here’s a news flash:

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY IS DYING!

Lest anyone think that the proprietors of a blog bearing the name of the 37th President take any satisfaction from this, we take our cue from RN himself, who was considerably out of sorts by 6 a.m. if he hadn’t gotten his three-dailies dose. He read the Times not only to learn what the other side was up to but also because, he believed, it was the greatest newspaper in the world, with massive sums invested in supporting bureaus all over the world. No matter how much good reporting their correspondents and producers do, Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Bill O’Reilly learn much of what they know about the world from our best newspapers. The insidious thing is that papers will die gradually (and secretly, since this is not journalists’ favorite subject). One day, conceivably, the New York Times won’t have anyone in Beijing anymore. The Associated Press might not be able to afford a bureau, either. Where then will we get our in-depth coverage of the rise of the next superpower — CNN? The Daily Worker? “The Huffington Post”? Messrs. Jefferson and Nixon would be of one mind and heart in proclaiming that the greatest current challenge to having a well-informed electorate, and perhaps to democracy itself, is the decline of the daily newspaper.

Which is the main reason why the best newspapers shouldn’t behave like the worst blogs, as the Times did today with its scurrilous story about John McCain. Everyone’s talking about the senator’s alleged affair even though the Times never alleges one. Instead — and this took four reporters, mind you — they wrapped atmospherics about how the defiantly honest McCain has fared in ethically-challenged Washington around statements by two former campaign “associates” that they thought he was spending too much time with a female lobbyist. Presumbly the associates didn’t want to associate their names with the allegation lest the unsuspecting politicians with whom they’re currently associating decide that they too will be dis-associated one day. The extent of the ex-aides’ actual knowledge, as reported, is that they believed McCain and she hung out together too much. Would they have so charged, and would the four reporters have so written, if the lobbyist were a man? And if what McCain attorney Bob Bennett says is true, why did the Times fail to reveal information he gave them about 15 requests by the lobbyist or her clients that McCain rejected?

Many Republicans are understandably asking why the Times endorsed McCain while working on this story. If someone tries to tell you about the sacred dividing wall between the editorial-op/ed and news pages, I can tell you from personal experience that it’s exceptionally permeable. The story’s timing is fishy as well, but it’s dangerous to speculate about motives. All I know is that if newspapers want to survive, they have to be a lot better than this.