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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   37657 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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This was actually a lot easier in the pre-digital world, and persisted until relatively recently—until the 2010s I had a newspaper delivered to my house every day. The nice thing about newspapers was not just that they curated the news for you but that they were laid out in a way to encourage browsing rather than dedicated reading. Even if you skipped half the articles you could still glance at them and get the gist of the news. Newspapers still exist, but it's not the same. I cancelled my subscription after unreliable delivery meant that the paper was either coming late (i.e. after I left for work) or not at all. Then the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cut print editions to a few days a week and made you download pdfs the rest of the time, and, accompanied with a price increase, this was the last straw. But what really doesn't exist anymore is newspaper culture. By this I mean the utter ubiquity of the daily paper in people's lives. When I was a kid, everyone read the paper, and I mean everyone. Blue-collar workers like my dad would get to work a half-hour early to drink coffee and read the paper. If you didn't have a subscription, no problem. You couldn't enter a bus, or a break room, or a coffee shop without someone having left one lying around, or, in the case of the coffee shop, one provided by the establishment for customer convenience. There was a time when "Did you see the article about..." was a reasonable conversation starter, even among strangers, because even if the guy hadn't read it chances are he was at least vaguely familiar with it.

This is a fascinating peek into the news culture of the pre internet era. I do wonder if the industry of journalism was better because these people actually had more power, and news wasn’t so commoditized. Maybe actually being important to the everyday person gave journalists a lot of status, and that encouraged them to take their ideals seriously.

The actual secret reason is nobody really knew what people read when they bought the newspaper. So, you couldn't cut the foreign policy stories, local news, etc. OTOH, the Internet knows exactly what you're clicking on, and media responded accordingly.

the WSJ print edition used to be decent 13 years ago when I read it; I dunno if it still is.

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