I will keep banging on that this is a particularly North America ailment. European papers and what's left of magazines - and I include the Brits in this - still have art critics and books coverage. Perhaps it wasn't the internet per se that killed the books sections in Canada and the US: perhaps it was the 'traffic' era of the media, when all the paywalls came down and the media were run by the people who thought that digital advertizing and engagement will come to the rescue.
Some of this has been (modestly) corrected. The Globe and the Star both now have a young theatre critic/reporter on staff... but, yes, virtually no book coverage. Book content has been particularly devastated in this country... which may be connected to the situation described in your last three newsletters. With national publishing, down went book culture.
Great memories of drive-in movies. It was fun as a kid when I went with my family, as a teenager when I went with my friends, and as a parent it was a cheap way to entertain the kids for a night. I miss those days.
“The business model (of newspapers) was killed by the internet.”
No, newspapers failed to adapt to the digital world of web sites and social media. Canadian publishers had the option of working together to create a national digital platform to serve their readers. It could easily have included regional and city-based subsections to cater to local needs as well.
Instead, they allowed US tech giants to enter the Canadian market and scoop up the majority of online advertising dollars. As we all know, most of our local media have gone out business in the last 15 years. It’s all because of hubris and the belief that people will pay for news. Turns out, the product just wasn’t worth the price of admission for most people.
On occasion, nostalgia is a comfortable place to dwell. But living in the past doesn’t bode well for the future.
Bezos deserves a lot more blame than you give him. The Post lost online circulation to the Times when Bezos dictated the ideology of op-eds. More readers fled when he killed the paper's 2024 presidential election endorsement and the bleeding continued when he stood with the other centibillionaires at Trump's inauguration. Trumpists didn't subscribe to pick up the slack. The NYTimes turns a profit because it remembers who its readers are. Bezos has the money to make the Post an international paper of record. He wouldn't do it, even though it was the only route to profitability. Bezos chooses to ignore the Post's subscriber base, and the paper pays for it, just as the Citizen does in Ottawa by being a paper in a one-industry town with contempt for that industry. You might not agree with the paper's op-ed pages' lean to the centre and centre-left or its proposed endorsement of Harris. At the same time, just as in book publishing, ya dance with them that brung ya. Bezos couldn't stop thinking like a monopolist whose Amazon is the only real option for many North Americans, even customers who hate him. So this is on Bezos.
Really enjoyed this piece, thank you Kenneth. A great piece on what journalism means and hopefully this obituary will be followed by the birth of new reporting.
This is one of the best things I've read on the Post situation, and probably the only piece that made me laugh. Cultural obituaries are almost always premature, and the impulse says more about the declarer's nostalgia than the thing itself.
But I want to resist any consolation, or at least complicate it, because some deaths really are deaths. Like you said, a team of editors and reporters at an institution with resources, standards, and a mandate to cover the world is different thing than a gifted individual writing from their kitchen.
That's not coming back in a new shape. It's a loss. The meritocratic framing of the new landscape is true but also it's a story we tell ourselves to avoid grieving what we've actually lost.
I loved this piece. I just don't want to let us off the hook.
I will keep banging on that this is a particularly North America ailment. European papers and what's left of magazines - and I include the Brits in this - still have art critics and books coverage. Perhaps it wasn't the internet per se that killed the books sections in Canada and the US: perhaps it was the 'traffic' era of the media, when all the paywalls came down and the media were run by the people who thought that digital advertizing and engagement will come to the rescue.
Some of this has been (modestly) corrected. The Globe and the Star both now have a young theatre critic/reporter on staff... but, yes, virtually no book coverage. Book content has been particularly devastated in this country... which may be connected to the situation described in your last three newsletters. With national publishing, down went book culture.
Great memories of drive-in movies. It was fun as a kid when I went with my family, as a teenager when I went with my friends, and as a parent it was a cheap way to entertain the kids for a night. I miss those days.
So odd to think that Hartfield wrote about the decline of book reviewing in 1959.
“The business model (of newspapers) was killed by the internet.”
No, newspapers failed to adapt to the digital world of web sites and social media. Canadian publishers had the option of working together to create a national digital platform to serve their readers. It could easily have included regional and city-based subsections to cater to local needs as well.
Instead, they allowed US tech giants to enter the Canadian market and scoop up the majority of online advertising dollars. As we all know, most of our local media have gone out business in the last 15 years. It’s all because of hubris and the belief that people will pay for news. Turns out, the product just wasn’t worth the price of admission for most people.
On occasion, nostalgia is a comfortable place to dwell. But living in the past doesn’t bode well for the future.
I so enjoyed the reviews of the nonfiction book critic Becca Rothfeld. Such a shame.
Bezos deserves a lot more blame than you give him. The Post lost online circulation to the Times when Bezos dictated the ideology of op-eds. More readers fled when he killed the paper's 2024 presidential election endorsement and the bleeding continued when he stood with the other centibillionaires at Trump's inauguration. Trumpists didn't subscribe to pick up the slack. The NYTimes turns a profit because it remembers who its readers are. Bezos has the money to make the Post an international paper of record. He wouldn't do it, even though it was the only route to profitability. Bezos chooses to ignore the Post's subscriber base, and the paper pays for it, just as the Citizen does in Ottawa by being a paper in a one-industry town with contempt for that industry. You might not agree with the paper's op-ed pages' lean to the centre and centre-left or its proposed endorsement of Harris. At the same time, just as in book publishing, ya dance with them that brung ya. Bezos couldn't stop thinking like a monopolist whose Amazon is the only real option for many North Americans, even customers who hate him. So this is on Bezos.
Really enjoyed this piece, thank you Kenneth. A great piece on what journalism means and hopefully this obituary will be followed by the birth of new reporting.
This is one of the best things I've read on the Post situation, and probably the only piece that made me laugh. Cultural obituaries are almost always premature, and the impulse says more about the declarer's nostalgia than the thing itself.
But I want to resist any consolation, or at least complicate it, because some deaths really are deaths. Like you said, a team of editors and reporters at an institution with resources, standards, and a mandate to cover the world is different thing than a gifted individual writing from their kitchen.
That's not coming back in a new shape. It's a loss. The meritocratic framing of the new landscape is true but also it's a story we tell ourselves to avoid grieving what we've actually lost.
I loved this piece. I just don't want to let us off the hook.