arguing in the margins.
This thread has gotten unreadable by being pushed to the margins (physically by the page layout, thematically? perhaps)

Look, nobody is arguing about the decline / demise of good print journalism. The Voice is a joke, the LA Times is a shell of its former self. The NY Press, which started as a joke, isn’t even a joke now. I can’t discuss The Nation as I never read it. I don’t read the NY Times anymore. But … what we were arguing about is the timeline.

To reiterate: I blame television and a generation of tv zombies that was raised by a generation of tv zombies taking control of print media. You, as far as I can tell, don’t necessarily disagree (correct me) but you also blame the rise of the web. From my perspective, the damage was already done, the web came along at the end of the decline. Don’t forget, the web only started reaching a majority in the last ten years.

There’s actually an interesting book (how old fashioned) in the decline of print journalism and I’m sure one is being written somewhere so I’ll be curious to see if the book’s any good.

As for doom and gloom? Hunger is a great educator. The US is going to be getting smarter in the near future.

Empiricism
Well, if “personal experience” includes opening the newspaper and finding it eviscerated, as I did today…yeah, I guess so. The New York Times Metro Section disappears as of today, to be replaced by a reduced subdivision of Section A. I’ve relied on the Metro Section for local news since Newsday’s city edition folded several years back. 15 years ago, Newsday was winning Pulitzers for its international coverage. Then it dropped its international staff and just ran AP copy. Then it dropped its city staff as well. When they stopped carrying Brenda Starr, I stopped buying it, after 20 years of reading it loyally every day. For years, when the Village Voice cost a buck, it was so loaded with good journalism that I shelled out for it every week. Now that it is free, it is so devoid of content that I don’t even bother to pick it up. The Nation has virtually abandoned journalism for talking-head wonkdom. The Oakland Tribune, which was a great muckraking hometown newspaper when I hung in the Bay Area in the ’80s, is today almost on the level of the New York Post. The Brooklyn neighborhood weeklies have been bought by Murdoch and are rapidly headed in the same direction. But this must all be an hallucination of my doom-and-gloom imagination, right? Pass the prozac…

nasty again, the last resort
> Gingrich-era techno-utopianism

Watch your mouth. Don’t forget, we hippies perfected the internet. Your personal experience is all you bring up. Try being more open minded to other people’s opinions. More people might read your blog.

Pronoia clouds yours
You still seem to be infected with Gingrich-era techno-utopianism. I would say that my “personal experience” is entirely relevant.

bitterness clouds your vision
> ’50s, not the ’80s.

Critical mass. Television gradually becomes more and more pervasive in the culture (see: Vietnam, for instance)

You also miss that, while the internet was all over traditional media in the mid 90s, the actual mass of the population wasn’t actually on the web until the end of the decade at the earliest.

Your argument has everything to do with your personal experience and very little to do with objective observation. And is irrelevant bitterness.

“primitivism” vs. localism
I am not a “primitivist” of the John Zerzan variety, but I am definitely a localist and decentralist of the Leopold Kohr and Vandana Shiva variety. I wasn’t joking about abandoning (not “destroying”) the interstate system (not all “roads”), but I was also advocating development of alternative “means of communication and transport.” Are you paying attention, or just interested in scoring points?

local vs. complex
JG,

I used the word “primitive” because Bill (jokingly?) spoke of destroying roads.

In and out of itself, destroying useful things willy-nilly would be a step in the direction of a more primitive way of life.

In addition, complex economies need some scale. An extensive division of labour requires not only a large food surplus from the agricultural sector but also a large number of participants and therefore a large physical extant. Destroying means of communication and transport undermines that.

Roads and even cars have their uses beyond the car culture.

Sorry for being so hard to decipher.
If Bill wasn’t so hung up on his black and white worldview and his ideological touchlines, I’d take the whole blame for him missing the point.

Blogs ate your brain
I don’t deny that’s a factor, but I also don’t think it is a coincidence that the decline of journalism has paralleled the hypertrophy of the web. Remember, the first TV generation came of age in the ’50s, not the ’80s.

TV ruined the editors
The deterioration you’re talking about might be attributed to people who grew up on 60s, 70s and 80s TV reaching positions of power and crafting product for their peers. The journalism of the 70s was being shepherded by people who had come of age during what is probably the high water mark of American literacy – post WWII. (I’m too young?!? to opt in on whether that was a golden age though respect due Woodward / Bernstein)

By 1990 you had ingenue editors for whom culture was MTV and sitcoms. Can you see the difference between a publishing industry run by people who admire Hemingway and people who zone out in front of MTV or 80s sitcoms? You can’t have a vibrant writing industry with generations that don’t respect reading running magazines for people who don’t read in a culture of fast food ideas and products.

I’m not saying the web has helped anything (yet – if ever). I just think the damage was already done.

Video killed the editorial star

I never denied that the web has its lures.
Of course it does. That’s how the pathology works. But the big deterioration began in the mid-90s and greatly accelerated this decade. The ’70s were the (relative) golden age.