Wednesday, September 1, 2010

They Blew Up the Chicken Man in Philly Last Night

Congratulations once again to my beautiful wife for correctly naming "Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise" by the Avett Brothers as the Tuesday Song of the Day.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend an Astros game with an old friend. We talked about baseball, we talked about memories, and we talked about work. My friend works in the journalism industry, and I felt compelled to ask where he thinks the print media field is going to be in 10-15 years. He said that he thought things were going to continue to move towards digital format but that if newspapers, especially local newspapers, were going to survive, they would have to offer top-notch local content that readers couldn't get from national sources such as USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

I offered my (admittedly) amateur point of view that if newspapers and magazines want to survive, they don't need to try to be the internet. They need to do what they do best, which is do top-notch, in-depth long form writing. Before you stop me and say that internet journalists can do top-notch, in-depth long form writing, I'll agree with you, but when I want to sit down and devote 15-30 minutes to reading a longer article, I want to have that article in my hands. I want to feel the paper in my hands and be able to turn the pages. Call me old-fashioned, but flicking the scroll button on a mouse is just not the same as turning a page.

Even if you know just a little bit about me, you know that I love books, but if I had to choose my favorite form of journalism, I think it would be the magazine/newspaper feature article that generally runs in the neighborhood of 7-15 pages. There's something about reading an article that feels like a short story that truly has the ability to take me inside of a subject and give me insight into a topic that I might have previously known nothing about.

Within the past year, my favorite feature article was Michael Hastings' piece on General McChrystal that appeared in Rolling Stone, but my favorite feature article ever is John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", which appeared in the October 22, 1960 edition of The New Yorker.

Oh, and before you say anything, I do realize the irony of linking to electronic copies of those articles when I've spent a few hundred words extolling the virtues of print media. I would have mailed all of you copies, but have you seen the price of stamps these days?

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6 Comments:

At 3:48 PM, Blogger Tim Henderson said...

Jon is not that old!

 
At 4:01 PM, Blogger Justin said...

Tim,

If Jon's old, I guess that means I am, too.

 
At 9:48 PM, Blogger Jeremy Masten said...

Something else they need to do: Quit citing every dadgum sentence. An article in the Baltimore Sun might be 7 or 8 inches long, but 6 of those inches are "according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi."

The writing in the Sun paper is so lackluster that I've taken to reading only the headlines unless something really stands out. (They do have an interesting police editor, but that's a different story.)

 
At 1:58 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Atlantic City - Bruce Springsteen

Your wife

 
At 3:58 AM, Blogger Justin Schneider said...

I'm thinking about getting your blog in book form. I just saw an add for that.

 
At 4:05 AM, Blogger Justin Schneider said...

I've been adding way too many letters lately. Ad.

 

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