For a terrific tour d'horizon of the newspaper business's "blackened landscape," as Michael Massing calls it, have a look at his piece in The New York Review of Books. It contains a number of (pleasant) surprises about the industry in the United States. Among them:* "The MTV generation, known for its indifference to news, has given way to the Obama generation, which craves it."
* "According to one study, of all the time readers spend with a newspaper, 96 percent of it is spent on print editions and barely more than 3 percent on the Web."
* "Similarly, of the $38.5 billion spent on newspaper ads in 2008, just $3 billion was spent on the Web." (Of course, advertising overall has been in decline, but that's another part of the story.)
* Content-charging is working for many papers and gathering steam.
* He found "all kinds of excited activity" in the growing area of nonprofit funding of newspapers. Much of it was apparently incited by this Op-Ed piece in the New York Times earlier this year.
Have a look at Massing's article. Better yet go out and buy the September 24 issue of The New York Review of Books at the newsstand. How radical is that?
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