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Subscribe!My Favorite Review Ever, and Other Thoughts on Newspapers
Monday, January 25, 2010
What a great weekend -- the new book got a wonderfully enthusiastic review from the Los Angeles Times, which called it "a stunning work of fiction that is intense, deeply satisfying and always uniquely American." And they compared it to one of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon, in the opening paragraph -- not bad at all.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers also got another strong review from the Associated Press. One of the only upsides to the shrinking of newspapers' Book sections across the country is that if you get a good review from AP, a number of newspapers will borrow the story (or at least link to it from their web sites), so that one review has already appeared in papers (or their sites) from San Luis Obispo to Corpus Christi to Stamford, CT.
And in related newspaper news, count me in favor of the New York Times' recent announcement that they will begin to charge people for frequently visiting their Web site. With newspapers dying even as more and more people are reading them online, someone had to make this bold move. I'm sure there are naysayers, and I risk sounding like a Luddite or sounding oh-so-20th-Century, but the fact is, we need to pay for the service that newspapers provide if we want to continue to have them. Those people cannot work for free. All the brave new Internet models (Web advertising, etc) have failed to bring in enough dollars. The emperor has no profit. Newspapers shouldn't be afraid to ask people to pay a little something if they want to make use of their services, just like we have to pay for everything else in the world. Otherwise more newspapers will shrink or simply disappear.
As a native Rhode Islander, I'm a huge Sox and Pats fan. I've lived south of the Mason-Dixon line since 2000, so I read the Boston Globe's indispensible Sports section every day online. And I haven't paid a cent for it over these ten years, nor has anyone else. As a result, the Globe has downsized and downsized, and now some of my favorite sports writers have been fired or let go, and the formerly best-in-the-country Globe Sports section isn't what it used to be. I would have gladly paid for the right to read their Sox and Pats coverage over the past decade, and I'm sure other people would have as well. Some people wouldn't have, of course, and they would have wandered over to the free www.espn.com, but I can't help but wonder if enough of us would have kept paying, therefore helping to Globe hang on to some of those writers.
Time will tell if the New York Times' move gets repeated across the media landscape or if they get slammed as being old-school, but count me as strongly in favor.
link to this | File:
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers also got another strong review from the Associated Press. One of the only upsides to the shrinking of newspapers' Book sections across the country is that if you get a good review from AP, a number of newspapers will borrow the story (or at least link to it from their web sites), so that one review has already appeared in papers (or their sites) from San Luis Obispo to Corpus Christi to Stamford, CT.
And in related newspaper news, count me in favor of the New York Times' recent announcement that they will begin to charge people for frequently visiting their Web site. With newspapers dying even as more and more people are reading them online, someone had to make this bold move. I'm sure there are naysayers, and I risk sounding like a Luddite or sounding oh-so-20th-Century, but the fact is, we need to pay for the service that newspapers provide if we want to continue to have them. Those people cannot work for free. All the brave new Internet models (Web advertising, etc) have failed to bring in enough dollars. The emperor has no profit. Newspapers shouldn't be afraid to ask people to pay a little something if they want to make use of their services, just like we have to pay for everything else in the world. Otherwise more newspapers will shrink or simply disappear.
As a native Rhode Islander, I'm a huge Sox and Pats fan. I've lived south of the Mason-Dixon line since 2000, so I read the Boston Globe's indispensible Sports section every day online. And I haven't paid a cent for it over these ten years, nor has anyone else. As a result, the Globe has downsized and downsized, and now some of my favorite sports writers have been fired or let go, and the formerly best-in-the-country Globe Sports section isn't what it used to be. I would have gladly paid for the right to read their Sox and Pats coverage over the past decade, and I'm sure other people would have as well. Some people wouldn't have, of course, and they would have wandered over to the free www.espn.com, but I can't help but wonder if enough of us would have kept paying, therefore helping to Globe hang on to some of those writers.
Time will tell if the New York Times' move gets repeated across the media landscape or if they get slammed as being old-school, but count me as strongly in favor.
link to this | File: