BendTech

Bend’s own Duncan McGreary (owner of Pegasus Books of Bend) has an interesting post on technology’s impact on the comic and book industries. There’s a lot of followup commentary from myself, ‘blackdog’ and ‘RDC’ that (I think) is pretty interesting. And we (mostly) managed to avoid the persnickety name calling that usually takes place.

John Temple, former editor & president of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, has a great blog in which he discusses the changing face of the journalism industry. It includes a post-mortem presentation he gave to Google on what went wrong at the Rocky, that should probably be required viewing for anyone who’s been in the newspaper business for more than 5 years.

Related to that, the IndieReader has a (rather bleak) piece on what happens to journalists after they’re laid off.

A few days ago, I promised a post outlining what I would do if I were in charge of a local newspaper and wanted the business to survive. I had hoped this would be a good wrap up piece for my examination of newspapers. Unfortunately, I find myself stymied by how rapidly my views on this subject are changing. My draft post, which I had ready to go, went something like this… (more…)

['Didn't really intend for this to be a series, but our first post on the plight of the Bulletin generated so much interest that it seemed worth a quick followup.]

You couldn’t ask for a better example of how the Bulletin’s online subscription model gets in the way of what people would like to do with that content than Nicole Santa Cruz’s article [bendbulletin.com subscription required] yesterday on local Twitter usage.  To the frustration of the subjects in the article, there’s no way to share it with their followers:

bendproper: #inbend I’ll bet @bendbulletin could have gained some readership today from local twitter users. Instead it’s a #paywall #fail

thesachambers: Apparently the Bend Bulletin published article about Twitter today… no wonder so many new followers… can’t read it though

juliejulie: @lorsturm Ha! I actually don’t see many new followers after I’m in the Bend Bulletin because there’s no live link to spread around!

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At last night’s tech talk, there was some discussion about the impact that social networks are having on, of all things, newspapers.  The main thrust of the (rather brief) conversation had to do with how people are relying more on their friends and peers for news and information, and less on mainstream media.  This inspired me to dust off a draft blog post I’ve been tinkering with for  a while and actually post it.  So here ya go …

It’s not hard to find news about newspapers in distress these days.  What’s interesting is the changing tenor of the discussion. For example,  Clay Shirky’s recent article about the newspaper industry, is garnering a lot of attention, and has a distinctly “The Emperor Has No Clothes” feel to it:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

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