Friday, February 17, 2006
The anti-TRE
Farhad Manjoo of Salon.com has a great story on the rise of mini-dailies. It leads with, hey presto, a 20-year-old Northwestern University student who digs RedEye and isn't much into daily news. She's a near-reverse of all four TRE writers--we like to read newspapers and are skeptical of Red.
What this student says is pretty irritating. She says that the Tribune is "repetitive," but I'm not sure what that means. Certainly a decent daily has to cover ongoing/developing stories and return frequently to certain subjects. Some repetition is justified.
The comment just seems unqualified, like when someone says that a book has no plot or that members of a band don't know how to play their instruments, even if it's not true, just so they can sound intelligent. What this sort of comment really means is that they don't like it and don't quite get it and don't quite know how to explain it. Leave it to us young people to blatantly confuse dumb for bold, just like religious fanatics and American Idol, which apparently is Red's favorite TV show.
And what about Red's frequent inanity? A fluffy entertainment cover story almost every day--that's repetitive.
The student's comments, like many in this story, are symptomatic of this terrible idea that newspapers should lure people with things people already like and know about, instead of providing them with new things to know about. If selling shit is a necessity, maybe media companies should spare their newspapers and diversify. Who wouldn't like a nice cold Tribune Lager or some Gannett Co. Processed Cheese Food?
"After spending time reading some of the new niche papers, I can only regard their impending ubiquity with something like sheer fright," Manjoo writes. Though I sympathize, I at first found this story a little too acquiescent to the "newspapers are dying and only silly crap can save us" mentality, if only because so many of Manjoo's sources subscribe to it.
But Manjoo did talk to Rob Curley (of the Naples Daily News and formerly the Lawrence Journal-World), who says, basically, that newspapers can revive circulation by doing a better job of serving their specific markets through as many popular formats as possible. It's good to hear this, because we think a commuter/youth publication like RedEye should make itself useful, not just take-it-or-leave-it hip. Red doesn't run much content on its rather dismal Web site (hint, folks--tons of black and grey make for depressing Web sludge), unless you count Metromix, which isn't really coverage and would probably be just fine without Red.
What this student says is pretty irritating. She says that the Tribune is "repetitive," but I'm not sure what that means. Certainly a decent daily has to cover ongoing/developing stories and return frequently to certain subjects. Some repetition is justified.
The comment just seems unqualified, like when someone says that a book has no plot or that members of a band don't know how to play their instruments, even if it's not true, just so they can sound intelligent. What this sort of comment really means is that they don't like it and don't quite get it and don't quite know how to explain it. Leave it to us young people to blatantly confuse dumb for bold, just like religious fanatics and American Idol, which apparently is Red's favorite TV show.
And what about Red's frequent inanity? A fluffy entertainment cover story almost every day--that's repetitive.
The student's comments, like many in this story, are symptomatic of this terrible idea that newspapers should lure people with things people already like and know about, instead of providing them with new things to know about. If selling shit is a necessity, maybe media companies should spare their newspapers and diversify. Who wouldn't like a nice cold Tribune Lager or some Gannett Co. Processed Cheese Food?
"After spending time reading some of the new niche papers, I can only regard their impending ubiquity with something like sheer fright," Manjoo writes. Though I sympathize, I at first found this story a little too acquiescent to the "newspapers are dying and only silly crap can save us" mentality, if only because so many of Manjoo's sources subscribe to it.
But Manjoo did talk to Rob Curley (of the Naples Daily News and formerly the Lawrence Journal-World), who says, basically, that newspapers can revive circulation by doing a better job of serving their specific markets through as many popular formats as possible. It's good to hear this, because we think a commuter/youth publication like RedEye should make itself useful, not just take-it-or-leave-it hip. Red doesn't run much content on its rather dismal Web site (hint, folks--tons of black and grey make for depressing Web sludge), unless you count Metromix, which isn't really coverage and would probably be just fine without Red.
