Caffeinated Gonzo!

Or is that bare all?  In any case, talk is spreading in publishing circles that Donal Rumsfeld is shopping his memoirs.  This of couse would be no surprise to any one who has ever stepped inside a bookstore, but I have  to ask… why should anyone want buy his book?  Do you really expect to learn something from it, gain state secrets… get a good laugh, maybe?

Political memoirs, 99.995% of the time are nothing if not boring. Yet, publishers keep shelling out huge advances for this pap. Come on… be honest Mr. Publisher, we all  (and you certianly should) know that Rumsfeld’s tome will end up taking up valuable space in the remainder bins in bookstores within a matter of months. 

Do your part for the environment and your bottom line… just say “no” to Mr. Rumsfeld.  Save the space in the remainder bin’s for something more valuable to the culture as a whole like the latest two or three Tom Clancy titles or last year’s Danielle Steel’s hard cover.

I agree with booksquare… stop the madness.

Do you read your news in a traditional newspaper or on-line?

If you read the paper is it just for local stories or for all the content?

The answer to these and other related questions are important to the owners, publishers, and editors of the newspaper industry.

In other words: Do you prefer your news and (just as importantly) your advertising in the form of newspaper pulp or pop-up windows?

In her latest Buffalo News Sunday Edition Opinion piece "Steel City Blues: Will the sun go down on newspapers as it did on Big Steel? Not so fast!", Margaret Sullivan, remains optimistic about the future. Despite citing evidence like this:

Philip Meyer, the renowned journalism professor and data-cruncher at the University of North Carolina, has gone so far as to put a date on the industry's demise: The last newspaper reader will toss out the last paper in April 2040. So if we haven't heard the wake-up call, maybe we're not asleep but something considerably more permanent.

Sullivan, editor of the Buffalo News that despite the current climate where "even the best print journalists are feeling a bit anachronistic these days" there is hope. Quoting Warren Buffett "everybody's grappling with it every day, trying to figure out how to adapt to the new realities."

Sullivan's commentary also notes that when Rupert Murdoch spoke in front of American Society of Newspaper Editors last year, "he was tough on editors for not changing quickly enough, but, at the same time, he was bullish on newspapers' potential strengths in the new age."

Traditional newspapers know how to gather the news and they have the contacts and the means to do it with authority. Whether newspapers continue to be published in the traditional form of ink on pulp or are delivered digitally, Sullivan believes they will continue to exist.

In my opinion, where the traditional paper does it best is in local reporting. I read my local Amherst Bee every week, not just because I have friends and acquaintances that work there, but because friends and acquaintances, and people and issues that I care about are covered in it's pages.

As for the Buffalo News, in my humble opinion, it too will survive as long as it's focus becomes more local / regional and it's content to ad ratio doesn't continue to lean further and further to the side for advertising over substance. Whether I will be able to continue to hold onto the comforting feel of recycled newsprint pages between my fingers while perusing my copy of the Sunday Edition of the Buffalo News while in bed, twenty, thirty or forty years from now remains to be seen.

In the interests of full disclosure I should report that I found Sullivan's Op Piece on-line, not in the print edition this morning.

Perhaps I, like other readers of the paper have only myself to blame if our tradition of newspaper – print-on – paper disappears. Before however, we all lament the passing of the traditional media, perhaps we should decide that if a traditional newspaper is worth saving, it is supporting with our dollars spent locally at home.

The single most pervasive reference for generations of scanner geeks is soon to be no more. Gene Hughes, editor and publisher of Police Call is retiring the publication. Sold most often at Radio Shack, this guide documented the local frequencies used by police, fire departments. EMS and many other radio intensive operations across the nation.

For many of us our scanners were our first introduction to the real day to day workings of the emergency services. I myself became more than a fan of this often geeky hobby by listening to my scanner ~ I made the leap and became a firefighter.

Of course with the Internet everywhere in our lives these days reference books such as these don't have quite the market they once did but I will miss having the opportunity of trucking over to Radio Shack once a year to pick up a fresh copy of Police Call.

Good luck to you Mr. Hughes.

Read more on WiredNews