Category: Alleged Journalism, Politics || By

Lots of people in the newspaper business are worried about ... um ... the future of the newspaper business.

One of the nation's savviest businessmen, Warren Buffett, owns the Buffalo News and a large portion of the Washington Post, and he says that if cable TV and the Internet had been invented before newspapers, newspapers would never have existed at all.

"Fundamentals are definitely eroding in the newspaper industry," Buffett wrote this year to shareholders of his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, arguing that newspaper executives "were either blind or indifferent to what was going on under their noses," and that they are "constantly losing ground in the battle for eyeballs."

Meanwhile, newspaper industry analyst John Morton argues in this month's issue of American Journalism Review that newspapers are right now fumbling the transition to the Internet.

And over at the Poynter Institute's Web site, journalism professor Roy Peter Clark is arguing that we have a moral obligation to buy a newspaper every day. (Tube City hard-hat tip: Dave Copeland.)

"I have no proof, but a strong feeling, that even journalists, especially young ones working at newspapers, don't read the paper. That feels wrong to me -- and self-defeating," Clark says. "So join me, even you young whipper-snappers. Read the paper. Hold it in your hand. Take it to the john. Just read it."

. . .

That's right, you young whipper-snappers! Buy a newspaper!

"But" --- I hear you say --- "what am I missing in our two local metropolitan newspapers?"

Why, I'm glad you asked, hypothetical straw-man I made up for the sake of my argument!

I do my part by buying at least one newspaper every day. Let's look at two articles I read over the weekend, hmm?

. . .

On Saturday, One of America's Greats featured an op-ed by former reporter Gene Jannuzi, who wrote about this new phenomenon on the Intarwebs called "spam":

Now it's time to reveal how SPAM became spam. Wikipedia tells us. Blame it on a skit by Monty Python's Flying Circus about 20 years ago.

The skit is set in a cafe where every item on the menu includes SPAM Luncheon Meat. The server calls out the SPAM-packed items, while patrons sing a song that goes, "SPAM SPAM SPAM, wonderful SPAM," to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean." Soon after that skit SPAM morphed into spam, which became the name of unwanted e-mail.

. . .

Where to begin ... first, junk email has been flooding in-boxes since at least 1994, when I and millions of other Usenet readers saw our first piece of crap from Canter & Siegel. The definition of "spam" as "junk email" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary way back in 1998.

Running a column about spam now is about 10 years too late.

Second, Monty Python broke up more than 20 years ago. In fact, according to Jannuzi's source (Wikipedia) the "Spam" sketch was first broadcast in 1970. That's closer to 40 years ago than "about 20." And, um, the song in the sketch doesn't sound anything like "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."

Other than that --- hey, great piece! That was worth 50 cents.

. . .

How are things across the river? Let's check Sunday's column by Tribune-Review editorial page editor Colin McNickle, who wrote about the Nobel "Fraud" Prize:

For his "work" on global warming, former Vice President Al Gore on Friday was named the 2007 co-winner of the now thoroughly discredited prize along with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It might as well have been the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (bad fiction at that, filled with historical inaccuracies) or the Wurlitzer Prize for Organic Circular Illogic given the dung both have been peddling as seasoned cordwood ...

Never mind that the work of Gore and the U.N. panel are rife with errors so significant that they are a mockery of the scientific method and disgrace the word "education."

. . .

"Never mind that the Trib," you'll recall, unsuccessfully argued for years that Vincent Foster's death was part of a vast conspiracy led by Hillary Clinton, that Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham murdered her husband, and, more recently, that Russ Grimm was the new head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

It seems to me --- a failed newspaper reporter who "couldn't hack it," according to some people at the Trib --- that newspapers with those kinds of track records should be careful before accusing others of being "rife with errors" and "filled with historical inaccuracies."

I'm not even going to address the meat of the argument. Sure, the United Nations is wrong about climate change.

So are the World Health Organization, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, and the governments of the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France and Norway.

They're all wrong on global climate change, and the Tribune-Review is right.

And I have a bridge in Versailles to sell you.

. . .

Why are newspapers failing? Let's blame reporters, the Internet, cable TV, the education system, the economy, sunspots, Al Gore, and climate change.

But don't blame the fact that many major newspapers (or at least their editors) are hopelessly out of touch.

So --- hey! Go buy a newspaper! I hear "Marmaduke" is hysterical today.