Saturday, January 18, 2014

Little Did They Know

My son alerted me to this video from 1981. After watching it, be sure to read Rosie DiManno's observations about workplace leave-taking, the second part of which deals specifically with the newspaper industry.

6 comments:

  1. I have been reading newspapers online for over a decade now. The writers or journalist are from all over North America. One maybe from Nova Scotia and another one from California. Huffpost is a good example. How you organize these folks in a union or have a farewell party? Not possible. Online is the future of Newspaper industry. Personal interaction minimum to none.

    For young people computer is their social circle. The friends they will never meet. One young person, that I was interacting with, called computer his family.

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    1. Online resources such as newspapers have been a tremendous benefit to many, including those of us who write blogs, LD. The problem comes from the fact, as attested to by my son, that people of his generation get all of their news online, something that is making it increasingly difficult for newspapers to make any money, and hence the ongoing downsizing.

      Which begs the question of where the online aggregators such as Google News, the Huffington Post, etc. will get their news if newspapers cease to exist.

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    2. Lorne, it looks all newspaper will end up on online. Even Star is available online. All references on Huffington Post are from online news. I don't think they even read printed paper. That looks like the future.

      New eyeglasses have a little computer and you can read news that way. You don't even need a big lap-top or desk-top. I don't know it is good or bad but that is the trend. It is a bad news for print newspapers.

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    3. I find my Blackberry Playbook invaluable at time, LD. Although we subscribe to the print edition of the Toronto Star, since my wife and I both get up at about the same time, on alternate days I read the online version so that she can have the front section, which is of prime interest to us both.

      Even though many newspapers now have paywalls, they do not seem to be providing much revenue for the papers. As well, our library has digital access, via the Internet, to many replica versions of papers, including the Globe and Mail.

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  2. I was working in television at CBC, Lorne, when we shifted from 16mm film to what we called ENG - 'electronic news gathering.' Oooh, high tech! It did make a huge difference. You didn't have to worry about tight film budgets. You didn't have to get your film back to the developing lab by mid-afternoon. You could actually transmit video by satellite back to the station so it could be edited there or you could even edit it in the van on the way back. When it was all done it was transferred onto the commercial version of Sony Betamax. Remember that name?

    Do you remember the early predecessor of the modern fax machine? It was huge and could transmit text and low-quality graphics and it was the size of a suitcase. You turned it on, loaded your pages into it and then put the phone handset into a cradle. Christ, it took forever!

    Ahr, matey, to return to those days when ships were made of oak and men were made of iron!!!

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    1. We often take for granted the technology we have today, don't we Mound? I was just saying to my cousin yesterday that when we were kids, the kind of things we have now would have seemed like magic to us. Printing machines? Printing machines that can be operated without wires? Telephones that you carry around with you? The world's knowledge literally at your fingertips? Surely the dark arts must be involved!

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