Black and white and brain dead all over.

• Eric Alterman in The Nation on the accelerating deterioration of American newspapers:

The dearth of decent ideas designed to save newspapers--or reinvent them
for the digital age in ways that preserve their crucial democratic
functions--is curious and depressing....

Take the example of the Tribune Company's new owner, Sam Zell..... To advise him on long-term strategy, he has appointed as "chief
innovation officer" Lee Abrams, a man who was apparently surprised to
learn that reports datelined "Baghdad" are actually produced by
reporters in Baghdad. His suggestion: "photos of the reporter with Iraqi
kids" to advertise this fact.

Writing on his blog, Abrams mused that newspapers were "TOO NPR," (caps
in original), which he found "a bit elitist." He would rather have
newspapers "study the feel of a well honed All News Radio station,"
which he defines as "being INTELLIGENT... not intellectual."

The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry,
the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper--the
primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating
instrument of American democracy--is going to have to come from
somewhere else

• Scott McLemee (and book/daddy in the comments section) on the loss of book review pages -- in part because of the abandonment by newspaper management of their public service commitments:

People at newspapers - not a majority by any means, but a significant core - once held respect, verging on reverence, for the
printed word as such. A sort of continuum existed between the world of
newspapers and that of books. The examples of H.L. Mencken, Carl
Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Walter Lippmann seemed to prove it.
Each had been a journalist and gone on to write things of a more
durable nature; and knowledge of this possibility left its mark on
others. . . .

Over the years, book-review sections have existed because somebody in charge had a commitment to them - an old editor, perhaps, with an
unfinished novel in the drawer, stored beneath the shot glasses. The
oft-repeated claim that shrinking or abandoning book coverage is
economically justified because publishers have stopped buying enough
ads is nonsense. They never did; and anyway, no sports page depends on
business from the teams it covers. The willingness to keep book
sections alive was never rational in the narrowest sense. It manifested
a sense of participation in print culture; it tried to pay a debt of
honor.

Somewhere along the way, however, the book ceased to function as a reference point - an ideal model, a standard of seriousness, the outer
limit of one's sense of possible aspiration. Television took over that
role. (But only, it turns out, as a wedge: TV was only the first of the
screens that would define the way we live now.)