And They Will All Live Like Cartoonists: The US Economy And Comics, Post #36

a few pieces on the tumultuous newspaper business, which is facing an all-time crisis in readership and revenue:

* the latest data shows an increase in overall newspaper site traffic and the time individual readers spend there. This makes sense to me as more core readers abandon print, by which I mean they're now creating customers for that material that are used to reading newspapers and spending some time doing so as opposed to attracting new readers who may not give a crap about newspapers at all.

* the New York Times is making vague promises it will explore pay models for on-line consumption, although there's no real reason to think that anyone out there has a strategy for this to work.

* the writer Warren Ellis earlier this week pointed out this article about the general state of newspapers vis-a-vis on-line opportunities. He did so with a grain of salt, which I will second with an option to upgrade to salt lick, but there's 1) an interesting way to frame the debate about newspapers' decline in there, as a supplier of services many of which have migrated on-line without enough in the way of a protest from the newspaper people, 2) a compelling way to take a second look at what newspapers do, by recasting them as something of a social community dominated by news and information experts. I find that fascinating because I come at newspapers critical of their adoption of service models over news models in the 1970s and beyond, while this analysis seems to accept that as a given in a way I'm not sure I can really argue away.
 
posted 8:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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