Oh, buy the way, the title is supposed to be ironic.

It just occurred to me that some people would not get that.

The subtitle can be taken straight, Man, if that's how you drink it.

Jon Awbrey

There is widespread agreement that the increased number of closings and downsizings of conventional newspapers and magazines, largely as a result of the Internet revolution, is a serious issue. I haven't seen a case made that Wikipedia is a major contributor to this particular side effect of increased Web dependency, as contrasted with many of the other negative effects, such as the ones mentioned in my post to the "Online defamation/Slashdot" thread under "General discussion." But as illustrated by the closure of one of the two Denver newspapers last Friday after 150 years, this is a real and ongoing problem, and one with no readily apparent solution.

This assumes, of course, that it is a problem. It may be easy enough for old fogies to reminisce about the good ol' days of journalism, but most newspapers these days are not worth taking free at gunpoint. What with my budgie having died some years ago, most newspapers simply hold no value whatsoever anymore.

I could certainly believe this. Note that essentially everyone here to thinks the loss of a lot of newspapers might be bad is at least forty. The twenties-somethings and teeners are perfectly happy to say "Well, I am sure someone else can put out a poorly spelled pack of lies in an inconvienent format without much difficulty, if that is really needed." For my money, I would rather leave the paper as trees, and hope to slightly retard global warming, in terms of "benefit to me", than print up most newspapers.

Obviously my opinions on a lot of things have changed as I have gotten older. But I do not see myself ever being anything besides contemptuous of most news sources (whether radio, TV, print) as essentially useless and wrong. Cutting the fat, bloat & crap would see (to me) to consist of axing ~95% of it. I just do not need a ten minute piece of information on the injustice of some woman who has to pay a $35 fine because her dog crapped in a park where the "pick up after your dog" sign was poorly maintained.

The decline of the print media (at least in the U.S.) was a long time coming, and the fissures were already deep back when Jimbo was still a would-be pornographer. The news industry’s inability to figure out how to create a co-existence with print and online media – from both a content and advertising perspective – has been the main cause of the calamity. It is easy to blame the concept of the Net for killing newspapers and magazines, but most of the blame belongs to the self-inflicted injuries perpetrated by the publishing companies themselves.

That 95% of traditional news sources are crap does not mean that eliminating 95% of news sources is a good idea. It just means we'd have 95% less of the good 5%.

Just as an aside, a lot of people believe exactly that. To some irony. Actually, growing trees, cutting them down, and printing newspapers from them and putting them in landfills where they don't oxidize, and having the carbon thus stay down there for centuries (at least) actually does capture carbon and retard global warming a bit. It's a percent or two of our carbon use, but it's something.

The silliness begins in trying to stop all this, in the name of ecology. They're cutting down on paper production, recycling paper, trying to keep carbon out of landfills, etc. All of which costs a lot of money and works exactly against what you're trying to do. Meanwhile, people are actually trying to invent new kinds of corn that will make monomers for non-biodegradable plastics, in order to trap CO2 carbon very much more expensively. I saw that in Scientific American. Duh. Doh. It's very hard to do nothing, sometimes. Our present system of just burying newpapers (and cardboard boxes and packing and anything else made of plant material) works great as a carbon sink. Too bad the newspaper part is coming to a rapid end for other reasons entirely.

Now, I will admit that papermaking takes a lot of energy, and too often that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. But the cure for that is to make paper products from farmed trees (or hemp) using nuclear energy, and then bury them in landfill when you're done. Somehow, I don't think the eco-nuts are going to like any part of that.

Milton

We have to have a system of micropayments for print information. By which I mean we pay for information of higher quality by something other than AdSense. Just as happens with films, iTunes, and so on. And now VoiP from Google is about to take down the telephone system and complete what Vonage started, but again it won't be free. The problem with articles is that there's no iArticles. The internet and the free information killed that market in its cradle, so you never saw any paid internet replacement for newspapers. Now they're dying because they're trying to compete in a market where you cannot pay 5 cents for a more-accurate piece of news, even if you choose to. So we're in a world of hurt, until the payment system catches up.

Right now, if you want a science article, again, you can't get iArticle for 10 cents. You have to pay JSTOR $30 or pay some starving student to go down to the library and photocopy the thing, for the same price. And if you can't afford it, you go to MEDLARS and see what the government pays for you to see, on Pubmed (usually abstracts). Or look on ArXive or hope to God you can find some approximation for it free, on some website. There's no middle ground. And none for news, either.

Because of the lack of a micropayment system, what's coming is a very, very bad time for nuggets of basic information (by which I mean a megabyte or so-- anything that can be read in 10 minutes, or at most, one sitting). We're seeing it already. Wikipedia, as has been noted, is just the tip of a very much larger and very nasty process of turning all basic information into chunks of processed, prepackaged, spun-by-advertising sludge. Libraries, newspapers, magazines and journals are all going to be melted into grey goo and then resold with ads on them, or else not at all.

Fear it.

Because we all know that a market system leads to higher quality everything.

And the Invisible Hamfist of the Highest Bidder will lead us toward the Truth.

"Hell, if I'm gonna have to pay for it, then I'm gonna get a truth I wanna believe!"

Which is kinda how we got where we are.

Ja Ja

You obviously haven't seen this topic yet:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=23313&

Saw the topic but hadn't clicked on the blog. Interesting the real upheavals around 1500. Didn't know a lot of that. However, what he tosses off about micropayments is wrong. It's not that they only work when there's no competing business model. Near-micropayments work with iTunes ONLY because they sued the crap out of all competing "business models" and refused to release material to them, like a cartel. It worked well enough, but it was brutal through the Napster-phase.

Think it can't happen for smaller bits? Try to find your favorite Gary Larson Farside cartoon on the internet. Except for a few demonstrative exceptions (Thagomizer), and some recent piracies, you won't find most of them. On a Google image search I see perhaps 1%, and many of them are pirated and recent. They won't last. And it's not that I can't photoscan my entire set of books of Larson cartoons here and upload to my website. Like the Dodo Blog did with one of Larson's cartoons on the Dodo: http://www.dodo.blog.br/clever-dodos/

Now it's gone. Larson's people told them to remove it, and now you can't download it. There's just a poster saying it's been removed at request of Farside. This is a relentless war, but it's winnable because Larson's books still sell.

If that kind of thing happened relentlessly with ALL printed stuff (looking for text with google-like spiders) we would have a market. But we can't get a consensus to do it, so we're stuck. It may not always be this way. I'm hoping that we'll emerge out the other side with some way to pay print authors directly (and this includes journalists, historians, and other researchers who produce printed work product) but right now it doesn't exist. Which is what the blog notes about newspaper columns. They are in a Napster phase they can't get out of, because that social process was all decided before the bandwidth became available for music. And the decision was: printed stuff in article size SHOULD BE FREE.

Nobody knew what a monster they'd created.