On Journalism in 2022
2022-01-20 17:08:54.102076+01 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
It's Twenty freakin' Twenty Two: How come the local paper (Petaluma Argus-Courier aka Petaluma360) is still sending me an email that sends me to articles in some sort of analogue of physical paper? It's not more usable to page through thumbnails of the physical pages and then click to get a sidebar of the text than to get a list of headlines and subs which link to digital-native versions of the articles. It's like "Hey, we're still trying to hold on to newsprint and ink for as long as we freakin' can, rather than adapting to the new reality, but why are we having trouble surviving?"
In other news, the regional daily (Press Democrat) has just closed its printing plant and gone to printing down in Fremont.
I still think back to that meeting in 1994 that Mike Harrison and I had with the muckety muck at the Chattanooga paper (I think it was the Times, and not the News-Free Press, though at that point they might have already consolidated management) pointing out that this digital future was coming, and they could either be ready for it or not.
And he told us he'd worry about it when we figured out a business model for him.
I really should up my donation to the regional weekly (North Bay Bohemian), because I definitely don't need daily filler from my newspaper, and they're the ones doing actual investigative journalism in the region.