BilmBlog500

So I haven't done a post on the newspaper business in a while... Two things in Tuesday's NY Times that got me to wanting to climb on the soapbox. First, there's an actual bona fide full-color full-page ad for The Hurt Locker in the arts section. Years ago, right after the Golden Globes you could see the difference between the early edition and late edition NY Times, as all the film studios took out placeholder ads for all of their movies, and then would quickly swap in something more appropriate for the late edition to tout their winners. Same thing after Oscar nominations were announced, or after the Oscars themselves. Film ads in the Times have been steadily declining for years and years now, to the point where it's an actual surprising thing to see studios actually taking ads in size or quantity. And in fact, that rather "wow, what's that doing here" ad for The Hurt Locker today was the only film ad in the NY Times for any of the Oscar-winning movie...

I've knocked on the Kindle a bit, but I should give Amazon some praise for having made some improvements in the Kindle operating system between my original Kindle that had something like 1.15y98y98u on it and the replacement in January with 1.2 (299870016) on it.  Still the first generation Kindle, but a slightly more developed version of the OS. The first Kindle crashed just often enough that I kept thinking how nice it would be to travel with a toothpick to hit the reset button, not daily or even weekly, but at least once every month or two.  And then usually one crash would be followed closely by a second crash before it would then be good for a stretch.  So far, 3 months and counting, the replacement Kindle with the slightly updated OS hasn't needed a reset. The first Kindle, every so often you'd put on the wireless and wait and wait for the Kindle to talk to Amazon and for the newspaper to download, and sometimes I'd have to give up, turn off the wireless, and try ...

Which sign of the apocalypse is it when the 2nd best newspaper in New York City might now be The Onion? Many years ago I used to buy multiple newspapers every Friday to devour movie reviews and see what was going on in the weekend, and I'd cart around hundreds of pages of newsprint quite happily.  In the early years of JABberwocky I cut back a bit on how often I'd buy papers but would still decamp to the Sunnyside branch of the Queens library and read my Newsday, Post and Daily News.  Now I get my NY Times home delivered, and get the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post sent to my Kindle , and whatever's left in the NY tabloids I just don't much care about any more.  There's less and less news in any of them.  The San Francisco Chronicle wasn't much even several years ago when Worldcon was held in San Jose , and at this point it's probably so devoid of content that I don't know if it would be missed should Hearst kill it.   The long and short ...

There's nothing quite like reading a good newspaper the day after an election, and I was excited just anticipating the special election section that I hoped would still be part of my NY Times on Wednesday.  And there it was, or was it?  15 pages full of news.  A long article on the Obama campaign, analysis and results and pictures.  Reading galore that occupied me the entire way on an evening walk into Manhattan.  And then I could attack the Washington Post on my Kindle.  But where was the four page regional wrap-up of every single state's results?  Will those show up in tomorrow's paper when all of the results are actually in, or are they gone forever as being too yesterday's news that we've all long since found on the internet if we really really wanted to see it? But then again, there was nothing quite like having a broadband connection on election eve to follow the results in ways I never could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago.  Go to nytimes.com and there's...

At least based on the comment counts, my blog readers don't really care so much if the newspaper industry withers away to a Sunday coupon delivery vehicle and a few articles on the Dillon Panthers during the football season. But I'll keep hacking away at the topic because it's one I care about. A brief recap : newspaper advertising is under attack, as the internet gobbles up more and more of it. Newspaper circulation is under attack since more people go online for their news, and younger people especially see newspapers as less important. Even online migration to newspaper web sites helps only so much since the ads there generate less revenue than the print ads. The economy doesn't help. Recessions are bad for ads. You need fuel to drive trucks to deliver newspapers. I don't have any good solutions to this, but the newspaper industry has most often tried to cut its way to success. Fewer reporters, fewer bureaus, fewer pages of smaller size, etc. Now, the o...

I'd give the Kindle 3 slithy toads. This seems a good day to write about the Kindle. I boarded a crowded Amtrak train to head down for a Charlaine Harris signing in Newark, DE, and while I was reading my Kindle I noticed a man across the aisle reading a Sony Reader. Whatever is the world coming to? So first, why do I have a Kindle, and not a Sony Reader? Well, I am a Mac person. The Sony Reader requires you buy stuff at the Sony Store, and they haven't made it easy to sync purchases on a Mac. I tried once to see if I could go to Sony's web site and at least check out the offerings and didn't even find that very easy to do. The Kindle, you don't even need a computer since you can shop wirelessly from within the Kindle. It also offered a feature that I found very tempting, that you could email your .doc files to your Kindle and have them show up there wirelessly for a ten cent fee. Some people think it's silly to pay to send your own files to yourself, b...

Once upon a time Newsday was a great newspaper, the NY Times in tabloid garb for people on Long Island, and for several years with aspirations of becoming a 4th paper in New York. Well, not any more. Roiled by a scandal over inflated circulation and dragged down by one staff cut after another after another, the paper's become a shell of its former self, a newspaper without any news. And now another 120 people are disappearing, including 25 more editorial staff. I used to buy this paper every day. When I started JABberwocky in 1994 I switched to reading at the library to save a few bucks, but if I had to buy it on any given day, no problem. Now, it's not worth the fifty cents. Never. Sadly, this is a situation that's coming up more and more, as newspapers confront plummeting print ad revenue and the ability of the web to provide information. One reason I can afford not to buy Newsday is that I can use the Daily Comics widget on my Mac Dashboard to get my comics, and ...