I quit picking up my free copy of The Nashville Scene outside of stores about three years ago. Their continued snide dismissal of bloggers was enough for me to pass them by, and Tracy Moore and Kay West’s pouting around town about what I wrote about them went beyond ridiculous. Just because you write for The Scene doesn’t mean that everyone thinks you are an untouchable local icon. (Remind me to tell you about the time I threw barbecue sauce on Roger Abramson.)
Now, today, I was over at their blog (heh. think about that for a moment. The one part of the paper that’s doing well is the blog) and I see that due to economic cutbacks they are dropping their Books section.
It really makes me wish that I still patronised them only so I could openly reject them for dropping coverage of books.
I have seen a lot of friends in the newspaper industry dealing with the shock of the changing paradigm. In many ways I feel like the buddy of buggy-whip makers in 1915. The world no longer finds their product relevant or useful.
In a blog entry in today’s Pith one of the writers says that we are in a depression. This dovetails with my studied opinion that while the economy is bad it is not as despairingly bad as many news reporters make it out to be. Reagan said that “a recession is when your neighbour loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.” By that measure I understand why many journalists and other newspaper employees mistakenly think we are in a depression.
I get mad when people of this generation pull the cloak of extreme drama over their experiences. This started getting really bad after 9/11 when fools blathered about the “largest number of deaths on American Soil EVAR”, forgetting the Civil War where three hundred times that number of Americans died on our soil.
I’m also tired of seeing reporters talk about how this is just like the Great Depression. Please understand, my friends, that having to cancel your HBO subscription is not the same as having to live in a Hooverville and sell apples. I know the economy is not great. I also know it’s not as awful as you think it is. Twenty five percent of people were unemployed during the Great Depression. That’s one-quarter of EVERYONE. By comparison the current unemployment rate is 6.7%. It’s high, but it’s still 25% of the unemployement rate during the Great Depression.
Yes, that’s bad enough. But the sky is not falling. The world is not ending. Unless you were a devoted fan of the books section of the Nashville Scene, that is.
Oh yeah. I need to add something. I’ve got great respect for the reporters and editors who saw their jobs in jeopardy years ago and decided to embrace the internet instead of dismissing it snidely (a la The Scene.) I’m talking about people like Newscoma, Jack Lail, Brittney Gilbert, James Lileks and a bunch of other people I’m forgetting.
They all saw their world ending and didn’t know what to do about it. But they’ve all made the best of a bad situation by making the Internet their own. That’s far cooler than many newsprint folks did.
If I hadn’t been hearing about the Great New Depression incessantly for the past three months, I’d have never known there were any economic storms brewing. Our lives haven’t changed a bit, and aside from our tank being a lot cheaper to fill now than it was a year ago, financially we haven’t noticed a difference.
Weird about all the chicken-littles running around.
I really think a lot of the Down talk is because journalism is on of the professions–like auto manufacturing and construction–which is hardest hit. Most papers are drastically hemmorhaging readers and advertisers, due largely to their outdated income generation and distribution models. I was in the travel industry right as it started losing ground to the I ternet. A few years later I worked for a photo album manufacturer right as digital cameras became all the rage. Both times the economy was objectively pretty good but inside our workaday world it DID feel like the sky was falling. Everyone we knew was closing up shop. I think that’s a large part of the reason that the few newspapers left are bandying around the D word.
Well, Jasony, I congratulate you, and I hope your situation stays as good as it is now. Not everyone is in that same boat, though. Lots of not everyones. In fact, enough of us that as a society we’ve, you know, stopped buying so much stuff. That doesn’t happen because real people aren’t feeling a real, big pinch, even if you’re personally lucky enough not to be one of them.
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You threw BBQ sauce at Abramson.
Groovy. I don’t know Abramson but this sounds fun.
Thanks for the kind words and support. Seriously, it means more than I can express in a comment.