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Dvorak says ‘Newspaper publishers are idiots’

Dvorak says ‘Newspaper publishers are idiots’

if you’ve been listening in on the last week’s episode of TWiT, John C. Dvorak gave a compelling commentary on exclusivity of news with today’s media.

Dvorak’s column for PC Magazine last Friday was based on the notion that the New York Times is considering a pay to read subscription model for the news. He adds that most of the news we read is syndicated anyway — there really isn’t a lot of relevant news items happening within your thirty mile zone that’s actually published. Almost everything is syndicated!

The Internet added comparison shopping to the mix. Want a story about the baby stuck down in the well? How about 3,000 stories about the baby in the well?

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Pretty soon the public began to notice that 2,975 of those 3,000 stories about the baby in the well were the exact same story, with the other 25 being rewrites of the exact same story. Then came the revelation. “Hey, these newspapers are all doing the exact same thing! Why do we need so many of them?” [Dvorak]

The future of print isn’t with newspapers. It’s probably with books. Oh and yeah, maybe with the small community papers that prints exclusive news relevant to your little town.

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  • “Local” television news broadcasts are the same. You get about five minutes of local news, the local weather forecast, and some local sports. The rest is filler drawn from syndicated news feeds.

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