Next time the panel should be all bloggers. It would probably be much better.

CR, Years ago there was a form of Milken Conference in Beverly Hills called the Predators Ball.

Any relationship?

Jim

Thanks

Anonymous | 04.29.08 - 11:45 am | #

So true and thanks CR for the other sites.
I do have a problem with anything to do with milken, I had family and friends that lost pensions.
jo6pac
The race to the bottom continues.

Anon - "If you don't read newspapers you are uninformed. If you do read newspapers you are misinformed. Mark Twain"

Interesting. I seem to recall Mark was a former Journalist himself (worked out in San Fran after the Civil War before he got famous).

CR, irritations are the things that tend to form the lasting impressions in people's minds. Just ask anyone what they think about current politicians. You will get a litany of their failures and rhetorical questions about their likely ancestry. The WSJ guy is just reacting to what he knows. A blogger with credentials and credibility is an unfamiliar concept to him given all the cranks and blog inspired misinformation he's probably used to dealing with.

CR = NAME DROPPER!

haha

Hmm - interesting about the WSJ take.

Probably the better model is for journalists to USE blogs. Journalists are necessarily generalists, and many of the blogs on various topics ought to provide a great deal of background and topical research that should greatly aid journalists trying to write sound and topical articles.

As an interesting, possibly related aside, I have gotten several requests to join blogging networks created by news outfits. The latest was from Forbes. I guess their theory is that if you can't beat them, make money off them!

I cannot see any way in which blogs and newspapers aren't fundamentally complementary.

Calculated Risk | Homepage | 04.29.08 - 12:28 pm | #

That's just the abstract - is there a transcript or podcast available?

"To survive, newspapers will have to become media"

Make that multi-media. Sigh. Should never comment while prepping for the next meeting...

"The Federal Home Loan Banks said on Monday the amount of loans made to its member banks rose to a record high in the first quarter as a credit crunch crimped other funding sources for banks."
RPT-UPDATE 1-US FHLB banks advances hit record high in 1st qtr
| Reuters

JH,

If you want to make money (in anything), you should become your own expert.

Why do you think sales people on wall street get paid so much? The answer: wall street has no investment expertise, only sales expertise.

However, when I know a lot about a subject, it's just amazing to me how few people are really experts, and can provide truly deep insight.

That's the root of the old media problem.

Even for a "niche" publication like the WSJ, if they hired an "expert" in every aspect of the subject matter they cover, they'd have to have 2,000 writers on staff. For a paper like the NYT, it'd be more like 5,000. And no paper could afford to hire 2,000 writers, period, much less 2,000 true experts.

So they hire 100 people instead, and force everyone to cover five or ten subject areas. Problem is, no one can be an expert in 10 things at once.

All these writers can hope to be is better-informed than, say, 98% of the population on each topic. Which, as a business model for journalists, was just fine ... until the rise of the internet and blogosphere, where many of those 2% are out there spreading their specific subject matter knowledge - and will gleefully take you to task any time you venture into their area of expertise. Worse yet, not only is much of what's written by the 2% more accurate and more detailed ... it's free.

Combine that access to decentralized expertise with aggregators like Google and RSS, and the game is well and truly up for old media. Fare thee well ...

There is a network of information distributions via news wires.

Once decent bloggers like CR are able to patch into this, there will no longer be a need for newspapers.

I can see the best journalists becoming freelance and web based with ad-supported and subscription models.

This is Darwin at his best.

I'm not much exercised over the survival of newspapers. They'll adjust or not.

The real value is in expertise. No reason a significant news organization shouldn't retain a broad range of contributors. No reason, as well, they shouldn't disseminate their findings in more than one medium.

The less time they waste on 'video killed the radio star' the better. It was always about the performance.

this blog triumphalism bothers me. Dead-tree media still does a lot of useful reporting, which is not being done by bloggers. Who is going to pay for foreign reporting, when the web is chipping away at the revenue streams for newspapers and TV?

I don't like blog triumphalism either.

But. But but but.

We aren't talking about foreign reporting. We aren't even necessarily talking about the finer points of abstruse macroeconomics, most of the time.

We're talking about the business reporters getting a grip on RE reporting after having been on the story full-time for a couple of years now. How long does it take to get up to speed on that kind of domestic everyday economic issue?

Besides, these are the same people who can't report about domestic politics except to flap around about flag pins and sandwich orders. I don't actually know who is paying for that, but I can say I know they're paying too much.

NB: I spent most of the morning tracking down the details of a case old Gretchen brought up in today's Times that once again totally distorts and fails to report pertinent facts. So what ought I to do? It's a matter of real public policy interest--whether servicers are engaging in predatory foreclosure or not. Shall I write up the kind of long tedious post it takes to show why she's so wrong, or just blow it off? You tell me.

As a dinosaur, I like dirty, crinkly newsprint to clutch with my morning coffee. As a mammalian, I am increasingly disappointed with its content. Newspapers seem equally divided between Things I Already Know More About, and Things I Couldn't Give A Rat's Ass About.

Interesting how the newspaper discussion dovetails with CR's comments about the thin quality of the conference presentations. Proves that the whole world is now run by people who only completed the survey courses.

Very few newspapers will survive. Do you have an idea how much energy it takes to put a newspaper on your door every morning?

I once visited a pulp mill in Northern Florida. The mill only shuts down once a year for maintenance. Otherwise, it had to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To feed the mill, loggers had to bring trees in from the forest around the clock, from up to 50 miles away. The amount of energy loggers burn cutting and hauling trees is huge. Then, the pulp mills are energy gluttons. That's just to get the paper you throw away 30 minutes after you read it.

Every morning, a million trucks and cars rev up to deliver papers to your door. They can't do it profitably now with gas at $4 a gallon. It probably cost about one to two dollars a week to transport/throw your paper, depending on where you live.

Every time a subscription is dropped, the incremental cost to transport/throw a paper rises.

If newspapers still had local advertising monopolies, they might survive. But local advertising is the fastest growing category of Internet advertising.

Within 10 years, 90% of the daily newspapers in America will not print daily print editions. Manufacturing daily newspapers is one of the largest purely domestic industry left. But not for long.

From age 14, I grew up working in daily newsrooms, learning to be a writer. There was no other education like it for a writer. .

It's very sad.

Tanta,

If that was not rhetorical I vote for long and tedious!

Yes, Tanta. Absolutely.

That 'ruthless foreclosure' meme is gaining credibility through repetition and no solid rebuttal is out on RSS.

Someone needs to plant a steely toe in that one.

so true> JH | 04.29.08 - 12:59 pm | #

One would have to be an expert at nothing,
to believe Newspapers have expertise in anything, because whenever one's area of expertise is reported on, it's clear Newspapers misinform.

Rich says: "Very few newspapers will survive. Do you have an idea how much energy it takes to put a newspaper on your door every morning?"

(long description of pulp-to-front-door process deleted)

It does take a lot of effort. That's why papers are mostly advertising. It's the only way to raise enough money.

If e-paper ever takes off, though -- "paper" that can be digitally refreshed over the Internet -- that'd save a lot of pulp. You'd buy your e-book at a subsidized price from the local paper, plug it into a modem or something to refesh it in the morning, and take it on the bus with you. Should be able to use it for other publications, too.

E-paper is always five years away, but one of these days...

I don't think the print media is too slow; I think it's too fast

I agree. The core competency of a newspaper today is not paper manufacturing. Or home delivery. Or even news, in the sense of a first-alert bulletin on recent events.

It's writing. Or, as the lingo has it now, "content." And there will always be plenty of work for people who provide that. Heck, there are more informational mouths to feed today than ever before.

There's always demand for glib B.S., too. But you can get that anywhere.

"Print media is too slow. This generation needs data as it is unfolding, immediate access."

Print has been "too slow" since the invention of radio and television, and yet the newspaper industry stayed profitable -- partly because it could offer subscribers the opportunity to read and reflect, not just listen and watch. And the best papers, in their best moments, also offered some expert analysis of what was going on.

But now, blogs and the internet are performing those public service functions very well, even as they siphon off ad revenue.

At this point, blogs are "complementary" to newspapers as newspapers were to television. Every day, I read newspaper or wire service reports that I learned about on CR or other blogs. And the bloggers analyze and critique those reports. But so far that relationship doesn't generate much of any revenue for the newspaper to make up for their losses from craig's list etc. So the newspaper's business model is in doubt.

I'm trying to envision a world with no mainstream media to provide a starting point for debate and discussion. That's where we seem to be headed.

Tanta writes: Shall I write up the kind of long tedious post it takes to show why she's so wrong, or just blow it off? You tell me.

Pollice verso sez...thumbs up! (to the Heavens with the Wretched one!)

I'm so sorry. My quotation of Tanta should have read: "Shall I write up the kind of long tedious post it takes to show why she's so wrong, or just blow it off? You tell me."

The one pasted was relevant to a tax issue in Maine.

I hope it makes some sense now!

Unsympathetic said: "Herb Greenberg."

He's gone on to be an analyst now. Did you see that? I can post the link.

OK, CR

"and it was fun to finally meet face to face. "

When are we going to have a chance to meet you ?