I’m also unfamiliar with what you are talking about. I do not know what “video over the internet” is. My understanding of the Gore speech is that he’s not so much after using the internet to broadcast “live” television as much as he thinks it is important to have the much lauded and anticipated future of customizable, interactive, television free of censorship by large media conglomerates.

It seems like he wants to ensure that we can rapidly change television channels via a customizable internet connection much like we flip around with the 500 channels that comcast offer us. Something beyond what Tivo, On Demand, or downloading shows in mpeg (or whatever format it is, my computer is too crappy to handle it).
I might be misunderstanding what he’s trying to say, but I also have a hunch that Gore doesn’t exactly know what he’s talking about, and I of course trust that you know more about streaming media than he does.

Mostly I just thought his point about the decline in newspaper variety being relative to the rise of television was relavent to this recent blog posting. Newspapers aren’t the only thing in danger. Reading itself and mainstream variety are suffering. The web is still the underground.

I guess I’m pretty much there with Billg.

That’s why almost every newspaper, local or not, is predominantly wire service copy. You need some kind of copy to create the spaces for the ads. It’s cheaper to buy stories from a service than it is to pay staffers. Remember, ther continued existence of any commercial news operation depends on ad sales, not on how many of its stories are written by its own employees. Newspapers have no obligation to go into debt to bring you self-produced news you probably wouldn’t read anyway.

The web has the technological potential to replace paper as the delivery vehicle for news. But, potential is a long way from reality. Infatuation with technology should not blind us to commonsense standards for evaluating the words we read. The technology used to deliver the words is nothing compared with the words themselves.

And don’t forget that editorial judgement is still applied in the case of AP / Knight-Ridder stories. They still carefully select which stories to run, and the prominence with which to run them.

As far as columnists go, I’m much less interested in general. I think that’s an area where blogs can stand in with a similar result. Opinion pieces like that are better on the web, where they can be discussed.

To the newspaper, this is a great way to save money. It’s one less reporter you have to pay when you can just buy the story that canned and distributed factory style.

Tom, television has been around for quite a while at this point and I don’t see it as the culprit for the struggling newspaper business. The internet is the much larger cause and on two levels. Most newspapers made the majority of their revenue not from ads or subscriptions, but from the classifieds. The rise of craigslist has destroyed this revenue source very quickly. The other giant red flag for the newspaper business is that their readership is very very old. Readers like Kate are very much in the minority and once the older readership dies, existing papers will be left with too little readership to survive and I have a hard time believing younger customers are going to appear when they know how to take advantage of the glut of content on the internet.

I completely agree with Kate that the dead-tree vehicle for news is much more convenient than reading on any available electronic screen. Paper has a dramatically higher resolution, can be folded without worry and thrown across the room when I’m done with it. This is a problem that will be eventually solved though. Eventually, an iPod equivelant for print will emerge and the dead tree version will seem silly, but I do believe that’s a good decade or more off when materials research is in a much healthier place.

I saw all of this with a long history of reader the paper. I grew up in a household that made a point to get the local paper, which became extremely upgraded when we moved to nyc and the local paper became the New York Times. In the years since, I have subscribed to the NYT and made a habit of reading it end to end every single day. I was better for having done so, but in recent years have dropped the habit of doing so.

These days, I use the web almost exclusively for my info consumption, but I do occasionally take advantage of my laser printer if I want to read something on the go.

I personally favor reading my news on the internet. Searches and hyperlinks are a tremendous compliment to reading comprehension and information gathering. And I do think that blogs have their merits.

I won’t miss newspapers. (although it is nice to be able to fold them under your arm to take to the park, and in spite of being able to do anything with a computer “better” than you can with printed word I still enjoy the visceral pleasure of turning pages)

But I do not view the decline in local newspapers as a good thing. If anything I think it means that information is becoming MORE centralized through radio and television corporations.

The above ideas really aren’t my own. I’m stealing from Al Gore.
Please give this recent speech of his a read Christian. I’m interested in your opinion.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1006-28.htm

You know how much of a turd I feel Al Gore is, but that speech really made me think.