Day: June 11, 2002

This claim by Dave Winer is just silly,

I was interviewed today by a Japanese wire service. They asked if weblogs spelled the end of newspapers. I said they didn’t have to, if the professional news organizations adopted the technology.

Weblogs don’t have a chance of spelling the end of newspapers. Winer makes a big deal out of this story where a person posted photos of illegal dumping on his web site and the story subsequently was picked up by a local newspaper.

Does Winer think that reporters go out on patrol like Batman looking for stories to report on? No, they get their leads and story ideas from people like this guy. In my spare time I’m always pushing for the local newspaper or the student newspaper to run stories about things that I care about that I’m certain the editors there no nothing about (and I succeed most of the time — which is a lot of fun when the student paper ends up scooping the local Newhouse rag).

What I would like to see, however, is something else that Winer recommended recently — transcripts. I’d love it if the local paper or even the student paper would include a link to transcripts of city council meetings alongside their story about the meeting. Some federal agencies are now posting transcripts of their press conferences on the web (which has embarassed more than one reporter whose summary of a press conference was questionable), and I think we need a lot more of that.

Finally, Winer includes this odd article by Edward Champion which makes the incorrect claim that “people are starting to reject newspapers.” But the article that Champion cites doesn’t warrant that conclusion.

A Pew Research Center poll found the number of people who said they read a newspaper on the previous day had fallen to 41 percent in 2002 from 47 percent in 2000. I’m not sure how helpful a metric this is, however. There are a number of polls that ask people whether they read a newspaper at least five days a week, and those numbers have tended to be pretty stable in the high 40s for several years now. Certainly newspapers are getting killed by problems generating sufficient ad revenue (and, until recently, high newsprint prices), but the readership is still there.

If anything, I suspect weblogging increases the market for newspapers. Five years ago I used to surf the web to supplement my newspaper habit. Now I buy a newspaper to serve as an offline news source for those times when I’m not near my computer (or during Windows NT’s interminable reboot periods).

Television news, on the other hand, has become a wasteland. Only 32 percent of Americans told Pew that they regularly watch one of the nightly network news shows and that’s with the 9/11 attacks. I suspect that without 9/11 that figure would have been significantly lower. Regardless, at those levels of viewership, it is questionable how long all three network broadcasts will last. At some point the temptation for network affiliates to substitute syndicated programs for the network news broadcasts will be too great.

As much as I detest Noam Chomsky, I don’t agree at all with Glenn Reynolds’ claim that Chomsky’s linguistic theories are failing. Reynolds claims,

IT’S NOT JUST NOAM CHOMSKY’S POLITICS THAT ARE DISCREDITED: His linguistic opinions aren’t faring so well either.

But that assessment is based entirely on this story about the role of “uh” and “um.” Chomsky argues that those are not words and are not properly part of language at all. A couple of researchers at Stanford and the University of California at Santa Cruz disagree, arguing that “uh” and “um” tend to be used in ways that send consistent cues to listeners and are therefore part of language.

Frankly, their logic isn’t all that convincing to this non-linguist, but even if theyre are correct, that doesn’t seem to detract from the central point of Chomsky’s linguistic theory that the capacity for language is innate rather than an artifact of culture.

There is a lot of debate over the specifics, and a lot of animosity toward Chomsky within linguistics and he has a habit of saying things about how this capacity for language evolved (i.e., he’s come close to denying that it evolved at all), but he’s certainly right on the big picture.

Now if we could just get him to stop using language to make ridiculous claims like: we should take Osama bin Laden at his word or that tens of thousands of people died from the U.S. attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant or that efforts to hold public schools accountable is a right wing corporate plot against America’s children.