It May Not Be The Primary Cause, But It Certainly Can't Be Helping Matters

There are any number of factors that have led to the ongoing downward spiral of the print newspaper business (and with it, one of the traditional homes for comics art in North America). With attractive, fascinating options out there to discuss such as the way certain publications were recently saddled with massive amounts of debt according to old profit margins, the rise of the Internet as both a competitor and difficult-to-use tool and the shift away by younger readers in particular from the sort of harder and more detailed news on which newspapers built their display-ad monopoly, it's hard to discern the impact newspapers simply sucking may have on their current plight. For example, this was a headline in the on-line version of a top five newspaper yesterday:

"Boston pitcher suspended for six games after MLB rule he tried intentionally threw a pitch near the head of a batter: MORE>>"

Not to get all cranky old man about it, but that's barely English. I write poorly on this site a lot of the time -- I killed Len Wein in a headline last week -- but it's baffling to anyone that remembers newspapers as recently as the '60s or '70s imagining one of these institutions lobbing that kind of fundamentally garbled turd onto its readers. When I wrote sports headlines in 1986 for a moderate-sized daily, three or four people looked at them before they were released.

I think if you polled a lot of people about newspapers, you'd find a lot of small things like this contributing to a slow bleed that weakens some of these publications' resistance to the bigger, more directly pressing issues. Little stuff like home delivery that lags far behind what 11-year-old kids provided in 1974, prominent columnists that spend a chunk of their time on TV or radio and as a result write pieces that don't reflect deliberation and first-hand sourcing, a move towards bigger art (photos) at the expense of contextualizing sidebars you used to see everywhere forty years ago. That stuff adds up.

Pointing out the headline led to a defensive retort led to a quick cancellation of the service.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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