Keep up the good work guys. Love the recent content coming out of Matador!

thanks for asking.

i tried to give a quick answer but couldn’t.

i’m going to answer this in detail tomorrow or the next day.

The journal has no free website (you have to pay to read the whole article) and I believe most readers don’t know how to use a computer anyway. And remember the journal is a part of the Robert Murdoch empire, the op ed pages are like reading FOX for highbrows.

Good reading here.
http://people-press.org/report/444/news-media

i still like reading newspapers too. in buenos aires i’d always go out on sundays to get a clarin and sit around reading it the rest of the morning. they always had (have) great literary supplements.

i didn’t really want this to come off as ‘doomsday’ either, more of just something to note.

i hope newspaper circulations go back up but i still feel like it’s all moving in a different direction.

can you send me the link to the article about the subscribers / web visitors correlation? sounds interesting.

thanks for the comment.

our team of ninjas is studying the analytics of the corresponding websites (all but 4 have sites) and we’ll follow up with this comparison in the next couple days.

-ab

how’ve you been?

i agree that a journalist’s work (i.e. reporting, writing, interviewing, etc.) and the medium through which this work is published / broadcast / distributed are two different entities, but i still see them as connected, not “disparate.”

i believe (albeit in very simplistic terms) modern newspaper production follows the model given to us by the industrial revolution (assembly line, hierarchy– boss >> managers >> workers) in both application and ideology. this includes the role of the journalist as a ‘cog’ in that ‘machine’.

the concept of hyperlocal news produced transparently (the writer is both in the story and transparent about his / her material connections) points to a new ethic, a new aesthetic, and a new economic model.

this ties into the conversation we had the other day about newpapers’ policies on ‘freebies’ – http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-on-writing/do-travel-and-leisure-style-no-freebies-policies-undermine-honesty-in-travel-writing/

how do we, as travel writers and journalists, find new ways to ‘monetize’, to sustain our work, when our newspaper jobs disappear?

how can we be ‘ahead of the game’, already creating something new and better?

in what ways can the “solid, long-standing journalistic, grammatical and educational principles” continue and evolve?

I agree that I’d like to see some comparison numbers showing the readership change on the corresponding websites – in order to see if its a change in medium (paper to online) or a change from conventional reporting (newspapers) to new media (blogs).

My suspicion is that it’s a little bit of both.

If it is, it’ll be because the watered down post-secondary education system will (continue to) patronize students; developing syllabi that gloss over solid, long-standing journalistic, grammatical and educational principles in the interest of making learning “Fun!”