Earlier this afternoon, I was at the Hesperia Chamber of Commerce, having been invited to monitor the counting of ballots for the three open board of director seats. (Sorry, I can’t announce who won until Tuesday’s story, since even the three winners won’t know until sometime on Monday.) This is, I suppose, an unintended side effect of building a certain degree of credibility in the community.
I’m also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
I just heard that Peter’s song, “Christmas in Victorville,” was played this afternoon on the Barb Stanton show on Talk 960. I missed it myself — it’s been a crazy, crazy day — but I don’t know if the full story of the song, which is not a complimentary one, was explained. Peter wrote the song years ago, when he was in the midst of his divorce and not feeling a lot of warm feelings for his life or his home in Victorville. All of the things he sings about — the drug lab next door with the guns, for example — were real, but he simply mentally edited out all the positive stuff in his life at the time, as people are wont to do in that situation.
Raise your glass high
And curse the desert sky!
Christmas in Victorville:
Why, why, oh why?
You can hear an MP3 of the song at his blog.
(This isn’t the first time a Peter Day song has been heard on Barb’s show, of course. After his appearance on her show on January 12 this year, he decided to knock out a theme song for her, and she uses it midway through her show pretty much every day. Yes, it’s Peter wailing on the guitar and singing “Baaaaaaarb Stanton, she talks the talk, she talks the talk!”)
Well, I was wrong. The show’s not more interesting, now that it’s down to the last few people. I find these folks fairly uninteresting, although I do like Danni and Rafe enough as people to hope that one or both of them make it to the final two.
At this point, I have 2,291 points in the Survivor Fantasy League, which isn’t where I want to be, but it ain’t bad. Our team, Ellis Truss, is on the national leader board last time I looked.
Two Sundays from now is the finale, including the big party at Chez Ellis. Hopefully next season will be back at a beach locale. We need more guys fighting sharks on the beach.
It feels strange to agree with a Slashdot article, but it’s finally happened:
A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter’s, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.
The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers’ primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that’s what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a “B” or “C” section.
Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week’s home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.
It’s time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.
Some newspapers (and newspaper chains) will probably not survive the shift from news-as-monologue to news-as-dialog. Most will, although those that wait too long to adjust will have much of their audience, influence, and ad revenue taken away by more agile competitors.
The smartest newspapers will follow my survival recipe or come up with their own way to become an integral part of their community instead of a building full of people who have been sprinkled with Secret Journalism Powder that makes them better and smarter than their readers. These newspapers will not only survive, but prosper. They may even become the prime outlets for bloggers in their communities, which will increase their readership and ad revenue. Extreme ____-wing bloggers won’t want their words associated with the hated Mainstream Media, but most others will be happy to have a widely-read, influential outlet for their work.
Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become “snapshots” of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.
Senior citizens and others who can’t afford (or don’t want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those — a substantial part of the population — who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they’d get on the Web.
Except for the Florida business, a lot of this sounds eerily like things I’ve been ranting about for a while, either at poor Peter or online.
The good news is that it was my publisher who e-mailed me this article. That speaks well of the online destiny of the Daily Press family of papers.
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