To all the newspapers I loved

https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/to-all-the-newspapers-i-loved

by mellosouls • 2 years ago

49 43 2 years ago

branko2f7.substack.com

I recently subscribed to the weekend WSJ just because I love to hold and read a newspaper. I really can not explain why.

piva00• 2 years ago

I've been considering subscribing to newspapers again to avoid the bombardment of news online. I used to love waking up, making coffee, and sitting with the paper for some 30-45 minutes to start the day. Reading the news online in the morning has the opposite effect, I just feel drained and scatterbrained.

Fnoord• 2 years ago

I remember arguing with a guy selling NRC trials. I was like all the news is available online. Online is where it happens. This was end of the '00 decade. iPhone was all hot and Nokia was in trouble. I couldn't imagine people would keep paying for newspapers. Why?

They're slow, old news. You pay for it and it still contains ads. Even the news on TV and radio was slower than the internet and also contained ads (we pay for public broadcasting / non-profit via taxation).

Only later on I realized in a world with limited time smarter folks read newspapers not for news but for interpretation. That doesn't have to be on same day as the news since it is an in-depth, well though, unique expert proposition (of course there is also pulp). Which was the USP the salesman was arguing.

How did it turn out? Internet became a world of tracking and advertising, the EU fought back with law.

And I just never liked the feel of newspapers because they're so large and thin it is hard to switch pages. I ended up damaging pages. Especially outside in the wind. Maybe the tabloid format (the status quo nowadays?) suffers less from it. But then again I am an e-reader person. A newspaper you can forget/lose/damage though, an e-reader or smartphone not so much.

I couldn't get into audiobooks (I miss too much / zone out) which saddens me. Because in-depth podcasts are definitely a guilty pleasure.

ekianjo3• 2 years ago

smarter folks read newspapers not for news but for interpretation

smarter people who have never heard of gill-mann amnesia?

mooreds2• 2 years ago

I have two personal reasons myself.

The browsability of a newspaper is hard to beat. I can discover news and info far easier than reading the paper on my phone.

Also, when reading the paper, I'm not constantly tempted to flip between different items (email, todos, other sites) so it feels more cohesive to me.

meyum33• 2 years ago

Man, I just got to read a paper edition of The Economist today. What a lovely experience. The crisp sound of paper, flipping through the pages with my own fingers, direct, effective, focused. All my memory neurons that wired together reading The Economist during my college years in those quite weekend mornings fired ferociously together. I can't even imagine how any gadget will ever beat it.

macintux• 2 years ago

When I was in high school, any opportunity to find a print copy of The Economist was a moment to be cherished. The annual subscription was way beyond my means, but if we took a school trip downtown, or if my parents and I went to a bookstore, I'd absolutely grab a copy.

The Atlantic, however, was ridiculously affordable. I had a subscription by the time I was in my early 20s for, IIRC, about $14 a year. Might have even been $14 for two years.

zubairq2• 2 years ago

I still grab the free newspapers every time I am in the airport as I still love the look and feel and to flick through them. And I sometimes buy a paper when there is an iconic headline and keep the paper for historical record. You could say I have a historical blockchain made of paper :)

ekianjo3• 2 years ago

do you check back often to confirm how wrong everything they said was?

zubairq2• 2 years ago

Yes I often check. More surprising than how often they got it wrong is how the people who got it right were ridiculed at the time. For example people who talked about the internet were mostly ridiculed in the early days

Departed7405• 2 years ago

In Belgium, the nation-wide free newspaper Metro available in stations will shut down.

loloquwowndueo• 2 years ago

Oh that paper is available in many cities but it looks to be disappearing one by one. Already dead in Montreal :

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/metro-media-bankrupt...

ThinkingGuy• 2 years ago

On the day each of his three children was born, my dad saved a copy of the local paper. I still have my copy.

treflop2• 2 years ago

I still sub to a bunch of mags and they’re dope.

Sometimes I’ll leave a stack of old ones out and someone will even take them.

cal85• 2 years ago

Which ones do you like?

treflop2• 2 years ago

The Economist - great news mag but kinda neoliberal

Foreign Affairs - essays on foreign politics

Woodsmith - woodworking tips and projects

Thrasher - skateboarding

Razorcake - punk rock, not very neoliberal

david_draco• 2 years ago

A bit ironic to buy "news" to "think nothing has changed in fifty years".

PaulRobinson2• 2 years ago

You will see people reading a paper on the London tube most days, because The Metro (AM) and Evening Standard (PM) are free papers, with stacks of them left near entrances to stations. The Metro has national distribution as well, so you're just as likely to see it on a bus or tram in Manchester.

There is a slightly weird thing about accuracy and impartiality in news I've noticed to be a major difference in the UK and the US.

In the UK you can print in a newspaper anything that is legal, including non-libellous lies. There is no need to show both sides of the argument, and as a result the paper can come across as an unhinged political mouthpiece of their owner, with editorial pages just dialling it up. The Times and the FT are the only papers that even attempt neutrality, really.

TV news however is very strictly regulated by Ofcom - partisan news channels like GB News are constantly running into issues, because they aren't meeting the regulatory requirements for fairness and impartiality. There are no editorial "entertainment" shows like you would see in the US on BBC or Sky News - if they bring in a pundit from the right wing, sat right next to them is a left wing pundit to call them out, and vice versa.

In the US it seems inverse. TV news is insanely partisan (on all sides, I literally can't watch any of it when I'm travelling in the US, and CNN in the US is atrocious compared to CNN International), but even though the newspaper industry is unregulated and has First Amendment rights, the standards for accuracy and fairness seem much higher than in the UK (supermarket tabloids - staffed for many years by ex-UK tabloid hacks - aside). I wish other nations could learn from that.

I really don't know why this is the case though. The market for newspapers seems to be causing them to regulate more widely towards this, and there's something news on the internet could learn from that: perhaps clickbait isn't the way to go strategically.

317070• 2 years ago

To be fair, compared to most EU countries, the level of accuracy and fairness of news in the Anglosphere is abysmal. If Die Zeit or Le Monde (Diplomatique) report something, in my opinion they tend to set the standard. In most (large enough) EU countries, people tend to have 1 or 2 decent sources for high quality news. Factual, avoiding emotion, reporting on what happened.

In Dutch, there is a word for English news: "hijgerig". The type of heavy breathing you do after running a sprint.

Unfortunately, that style is increasingly being copied.

ekianjo3• 2 years ago

Le Monde is toilet paper level. Nobody told you?

ajb2• 2 years ago

Yes, although:

"The Times and the FT are the only papers that even attempt neutrality, really."

... this may be a case of not being able to hear your own accent.

mdcurran• 2 years ago

The Times could perhaps be leaning “right”. But the FT is, in my opinion, a legitimately neutral publication. At least through Britain’s default neoliberal lens.

dangus• 2 years ago

A note about TV news in the US: what you’re describing is 24/7 cable news, which is distinctly different than traditional nightly news and its offshoot streaming services.

Channels like MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News follow the aggressive style you describe.

However, programs like ABC, NBC, CBS, and ABC evening/nightly news are not like that at all. Unfortunately, you can’t really get those broadcasts abroad.

For a while, CNN’s international broadcast was a much different channel akin to the BBC world service, but I think now it follows the Fox News content formula.

On the bright side, I have noticed some emerging streaming options like the CBS News and ABC News streaming apps that offer a similar style of moderate journalism.

Finally, in the US the local TV news is another half-decent source of information that usually has a moderate slant. Networks are affiliated with the national networks and often mix in major national stories along with local ones. However, it has its own issues especially on locally relevant biases. I think their focus on local crime has a tendency to reinforce stereotypes and promote fear – it can sometimes feel like you’re watching white flight [1] television. Weirdly, one of my biggest problems with local news is weather event sensationalism: if you watch local news you’ll be convinced to cancel your whole life’s plans for big storms that don’t tend not to pan out. Crime and weather, weather, and traffic are basically the only two topics where something is consistently happening, so they get outsized attention.

There’s also some consolidation happening where the local news networks are owned by very opinionated and biased owners, like the Internet-famous Sinclair scripted message that all their regional networks were forced to recite verbatim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

PaulRobinson2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the clarification, but I was also comparing like with like: UK 24/7 cable news is strictly regulated, as per my comment.

Local news is less of a need in the UK (the entire country is half the size of California), and breaks down into two categories: BBC local news which is comprehensive, and basically every region is well covered with TV and radio journalism; and, private sector which is a license requirement for ITV (the main commercial broadcaster), and a dying small newspaper trade.

We don't however have anything like Sinclair which is something to be grateful for.

doubloon• 2 years ago

This might be because the US video news you likely encountered was Cable News ( CNN, Fox , MSNBC ), which evolved under a different legal tradition than US printed news or US over-the-air broadcast radio and TV news. Sort of like how facebook/twitter have evolved under Section 230 of the DMCA rather than under the legal limitations of traditional broadcasters or publishers.

avgcorrection2• 2 years ago

And there’s a funny story about Chomsky... He went to the dentist and the dentist said, well your teeth are alright but you gotta stop grinding them. He said, I don’t grind my teeth. The doctor said, you do, your enamel is worn off. So Mrs. Chomsky was there and he asked her: does he grind his teeth in his sleep? No, no he doesn’t do that. Well they both got terribly interested—when did it happen? Well they finally found out that in the morning while having coffee, and [Mrs. Chomsky] might be out of the room, he would start to read the New York Times and his teeth would GggRRrGRrr hahaha

— Gore Vidal

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4507208/user-clip-york-times-...

drewcoo• 2 years ago

Today's subway riders "watch people around them?" That's creepy and rude. Has NY changed so much?

I am one of the last Mohicans who reads the print news

Ok, by this point I'm wondering if the article is AI-written. Several things are patently untrue but patterned after existing text elsewhere.

batch12• 2 years ago

Today's subway riders "watch people around them?" That's creepy and rude. Has NY changed so much?

I am not from NY, so maybe that's why I don't find it creepy or rude to pay attention to my surroundings when stuffed in a rolling can instead of staring at my shoes, but to each their own.

rmason2• 2 years ago

In Journalism school I used to read 3-4 daily newspapers. Slowly it dwindled to one. Since COVID they no longer deliver it to my door. Guy drives by at 30 mph and just chucks it. He has unerring accuracy to land it in a puddle if there is one nearby. Or he forgets to deliver at all.

The newspaper will not take phone calls from subscribers. The customer 800 number routes you to India where you can hear roosters crowing whenever you call them. They always promise to send a 'strong letter' to the circulation manager but nothing ever changes.

The paper is a third the size it was in the seventies. I am close to cutting back to the digital equivalent which is a poorly formatted PDF :<(. The Detroit newspapers only publish 4 days a week. They stopped accepting letters to the editor. They couldn't be working any harder to drive people away.

mooreds2• 2 years ago

You forgot to mention the price increases. As our daily paper has become thinner, they've charged more and more for it. For example, from Jan 2023 to Jan 2024, it increased on price by 60%.

I want to support local journalism. It is important to me and my community. But paying more to get less makes is hard.

bwb• 2 years ago

I think in the past more advertising paid since your attention was also the product. Easier to got to FB now since you can measure ROI and reach way more people.

It does seem like the news industry is in a real bind.

rmason2• 2 years ago

Yes, I am paying $85 a month for a paper that publishes six days a week and never on holidays. There is almost zero investigative news. When the Dr. Larry Nassar story broke at Michigan State it took close to a week before it appeared. Grant you the counter culture weekly in Lansing published on it a day after the Indianapolis paper broke the original story.

ta12432• 2 years ago

I'm happy the price of my local weekly paper (about £2.50) for a town of about 10,000 (most of the paper is the wider county which has a 300k, the first 4 or 6 pages are specifically local)

Because if I (and the others that do pay) don't pay it for local news, then nobody will cover local news, and I value local news coverage far more than £2.50 a week.

Think of it as paying for a youtube channel on patreon.

heelix• 2 years ago

The paper's back end systems must be a train wreck. We've got the opposite problem - bought a house where the previous occupant had a subscription and they can't seem to update the delivery. Every time it snows I have to find the paper before I snow blow the driveway. If we are ever gone, we end up with a pile of papers in our driveway. We've called, and can connect eventually to a human, which usually gets us a week of paused delivery. I wish I could rid myself of this litter.

master-lincoln• 2 years ago

Could you sue them for littering your property as you have no business connection to them? Maybe threatening this with a letter already helps

dash22• 2 years ago

Strong recommend for Branko Milanovic's substack. He is a very unusual combination of (1) a serious economist who does highly respected work on global inequality and (2) a real, old-school, Proust-reading European intellectual. (He's the guy, IIRC, who first drew the famous "elephant graph" of global inequality.)

3abiton• 2 years ago

Any highlights?

dash22• 2 years ago

His book reviews. Or this: https://brankomilanovic.substack.com/p/impatience-a-deep-cau...

eszed• 2 years ago

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people read newspapers on public transport, there were all sorts of (mostly unspoken) etiquette rules around how to do so.

For instance, everyone would silently angle themselves (and their newspapers) so as not to interfere with anyone else's newspapers. As more people joined the bus or train, you'd switch from opening your newspaper up all the way to folding the pages back on themselves - advanced users developed abstruse folding techniques to follow stories that jumped from page to page.

When you disembarked was usual, and considered polite, to leave behind on your seat the sections you'd finished. People who were poor, or had been in a rush, or who had not happened to have a quarter in their pocket would descend, and sometimes engage in one-word negotiations over the sections: "Sports?", "Front page".

It's a vanished world.

ta12432• 2 years ago

When I started work in 2003 in London, buying the Evening Standard from the newspaper chap on the way to the station was a normal thing, but the morning paper was on the way out as a free paper "The Metro" had taken root.

The launch of an evening version ("The London Paper") soon put an end to that, and the standard eventually became free in 2009. A couple of years later smartphones started to take the place of the "something to look at" - at least on the surface lines.

To all the newspapers I loved

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