Stephen Walt wonders, "where have all the political songs gone?" With some notable exceptions, there have been no pop songs about politics or the War in Iraq. He speculates that the lack of a draft explains why there are no political tunes.
Tim Burke has a lengthy and interesting post on the problems with print journalism and its relationship with new media. Liked this idea:
I think with some kind of philanthropic or foundation funding–what we
maybe need is an umbrella organization that produces pool reportage
with heavy foundation support, an independent endowment, etc., from
which daily news outlets buy their content, which provides a revenue
stream back to the organization that produces the reportage. Rather
than an editorial staff who prunes the reportage produced to a single
voice or standard, the goal would be to support multiple reporters
working on the same issues whose filed stories could be
mixed-and-matched by a news portal or end publication–so we might get a
front page of a daily newspaper that would have three bylines on the
Obama stimulus package, each the product of a different reporter’s
investigative work, if the stories were interesting or well-developed
enough.
The problem with Republicans in Washington is that they are stuck back in the Reagan years, says David Brook.
Apt. 11d 
A friend who owns no t.v. by choice pointed out that all news is entertainment. I didn’t want to accept that viewpoint, but I think he may be right. I think newspapers are suffering from self-importance. Also, too many suffer from a lack of competition in their home territories. The internet exposes them to that competition, and the results aren’t pretty. In addition, many papers have taken on too much debt. Acquisitions fueled by debt aren’t a good idea today.
I think the way forward is to look to the pricing models of the past. Open internet newsstands. Each daily issue is available, for say, 25 cents. If you want to subscribe, you get a discount off the equivalent daily rate. As the papers don’t need to pay for all the costs of a paper edition online, that seems fair, and I think people would pay for that. Archived editions also available, for 25 cents. You could also fiddle with the ads. Offer an advertisement-free edition for 75 cents.
The elephant in the room is the declining interest in serious reading in the population as a whole. The younger a citizen is, the less likely she is to get her news from a newspaper.
The thought behind “philanthropic” funding of the news is a reflection of a deep distaste for aligning supply with demand. There is not enough foundation money in the world to prop up news which no one wants to read. You would, at best, arrive at a situation analogous to opera: a past cultural practice enshrined at great expense for the enjoyment of a few.
LikeLike