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The Future of Newspapers

Thought this would be a timely discussion following last Tuesday’s final print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after 146 years of ink and newsprint existence.  The PI and The Rocky Mountain News are now entirely digital, despite being the largest circulating papers in their respective regions.  Library users who are regular readers of the PI will not be completely without Seattle news in print as we have picked up a subscription to the Seattle Weekly.   With recent cutbacks at the Juneau Empire leading to a much slimmer daily print edition, many news outlets have begun exploring the possibility of a world without paper.  Check out a great discussion on Democracy Now, “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers”.   Robert McChesney takes a look at The Newspaper Revitalization Act, currently being debated in congress which suggests a new business model for American newspapers, one resembling the non-profit organization of public radio and television which would allow the essential media form of printed daily news to survive today’s economic climate.

If you’re familiar with digital editions of newspapers and enjoy online content, you should know about the Internet Public Library’s Newspaper Collection. The Internet Public Library is an index of high quality web content, regularly reviewed and organized by Library and Information Science graduate students at The University of Michigan, Drexel University and Florida State University.   The Newspaper collection features links to online English editions of papers from all 50 States and 80 countries worldwide.

Are you looking for a newspaper article that can’t be found using the online editions of a paper?  Try Newspaper Source,  a subscription database available to Juneau Public Library patrons.

Newspaper Source provides selected full text for 25 national (U.S.) and international newspapers, including USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Times (London), The Toronto Star, etc. The database also contains selected full text for more than 200 regional (U.S.) newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, The New York Daily News, The San Jose Mercury News, etc. In addition, full text television & radio news transcripts are provided from CBS News, FOX News, NPR, etc.

If you’re into Historical newspaper perspectives, check out the Alaska State Historical Library’s brainchild, Alaska Newspaper Project.  Spanning 1886-1998, this finding guide will aide researchers in navigating the wealth of history preserved on microfilm.

Where do you see printed newspapers in 10 years?  How about printed books?  There’s much pressure in the market and industry for electronic resources, e-books, e-journals, etc, which do you prefer to take to read in bed with you at night, your computer, e-book reader or a paperback?  Let’s hear from you.

A Review of a Book about Book Reviewing?

I stumbled across this article, Critical Condition by James Wolcott while navigating the Reading Room at the Internet Public Library (IPL) and found it very interesting as I have only recently began writing book reviews here on the book blog and hadn’t really thought about the art of reviewing as a profession or field as it is discussed in Pool’s book,

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.

Here’s an excerpt: “Of all the nightmares on Elm Street haunting America’s sleep, the bleak state of book reviewing would rank rather low on the worry meter, somewhere between the decline of the sitcom and the disappearance of the pay phone. The shrinkage, the consolidation, and the slow massacre of book review sections and arts coverage in the nation’s newspapers and magazines doesn’t seem like an urgent cause, not with so many other, bigger calamities piling up on the docks. In the digital age, book reviewing bears the social handicap of a dying trade, like typewriter repair or horseshoe mending.”

This article from the New Republic by James Wolcott will make you wince with his description of how a book reviewer/critic is viewed by the general public. But please don’t let this discourage you from trying out the book review format here on the Juneau Book Blog. The JBB is a place for non-professional, library user-oriented book reviews to help people in the Juneau community discover a great book. We welcome your reviews and would love to see the authorship of this resource grow so that it is a resource authored by those it serves.

Posted by: Jonas