Gerard van der Leun isn’t:
The death of the P.I. and its “life in death” on the Web is only the second in a trend that will grow. And as the other papers fail into the Web we will hear, again and again, about the Internet, about Craigslist, about The Drudge Report, and a hundred other reasons these papers are dead. What we will never hear is that their editorial policies and news slanting were part and parcel of their demise. We will never hear about the willed insults, slights, and snubbing of fully half of their potential circulation pool. Journalists and editors write a lot about “taking personal responsibility” when it comes to others. You never hear them write that about themselves. There’s no mea culpa among liberal newspaper journalists these days. There’s only “The Internet ate my newspaper.”
It could apply to a lot of the corpses.
I think to some degree the internet did indeed “eat their newspaper,” by giving people who disagree with media orthodoxy a way to reach an audience previously unavailable to them.
Of course, that only describes the proximate cause of their demise, without addressing the underlying disease — which was the orthodoxy itself. Intellectual inbreeding, like the genetic kind, eventually dooms the population afflicted with it.
As one of van der Leun’s commenters put it, “So long, and thanks for all the fish wrap.”
Miss them?
I never even aimed in their general direction!
The only time I heard about Seattle P.I. was when Garrison Kleinor published his ugly and hateful meltdown rant. Not missing that outlet here.
Well, the Internet ate the newspaper companies in the same sense that the personal computer ate IBM, because in a very short time no one was buying typewriters anymore.
Except, of course, that IBM is alive and doing very well, and hasn’t sold a typewriter in a decade. Hmm. How could that be? What did IBM do that Ye Hometown Daily Fishwrap didn’t?
Probably not enough government regulation, I’m guessing.
Hey, thanks for the link. I appreciate it.