Eccentric Flower talk:201012/At A Loss

Shmuel:

(Hi!)

Regarding "I keep reading the Phoenix every week because it is the only game in town." I take it the Weekly Dig is entirely beneath your notice?

-- 17:58, 10 December 2010 (GMT)

Mel:

As it happens, I read the Economist on my new Kindle yesterday while I was testing things out. It does not meet your criteria of looking exactly like the magazine, but it was quite readable just the same. I'm not sure if I'm going to subscribe on the Kindle or not, but I probably will at least read it occasionally.

-- 20:44, 10 December 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

What I mean is, I will pay for the virtual Economist when it looks and reads exactly like the real Economist - I want to load it up and see the cover and open it and get exactly the same page layout as the print version, start to finish. When that happens, you will hear no more from me about the virtues of print publications.

The day the Economist does what US News and World Report has done -- and it will -- is going to cause you actual physical pain, won't it?

I thought that the Phoenix was another Creative Loafing paper, but it turns out to be something entirely different. The Reader, alas, sold out and became a Creative Loafing site. You'd love one of the recent articles, in which one of the few reporters remaining at the Reader boggled at the fact that current editorial is quite open about forcing reporters to tailor their content to make the advertisers happy. But I digress. I think. (Happy fun note: Chicago has two major corporate and one major "independent" newspapers. All three are in some stage of bankruptcy. Ah, fun times.)

-- 20:56, 10 December 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Mel: The Economist is one of the better ones. They mostly Get It. I'm waiting for everyone else to catch up with them.

Iain: I don't traffic with USNWR. You know how someone once said that Jayne Mansfield was a poor man's Marilyn Monroe, and Mamie van Doren was a poor man's Jayne Mansfield? Well, in my worldview, Newsweek is a poor man's Time, and U.S. News is a poor man's Newsweek. (And Time is a poor man's Economist.) That said, I'm curious: What exactly did they do (that would pain me to see)?

Shmuel: I hadn't looked at Weekly Dig in a while, so at lunch today I made a point of getting one and having another look. Nothing much has changed. It's poorly written, poorly edited, and lacks genuine content; most of the articles don't seem to have a thesis (and as someone who has written essays bluffing my way around a lack of a thesis more times than I care to admit, I am very good at recognizing the symptoms). In this issue the only reasonably entertaining piece (as tends to be typical) was the media-commentary column, which did contain some entertaining lines critiquing the Christmas-shopping articles in Stuff and The Improper Bostonian - however, the column was barely more lucid than the works it was critiquing, and in particular seemed to have not actually read the shopping-local-businesses article in Stuff it was making fun of. I know because I also brought that issue of Stuff to lunch with me. Furthermore, the entire critique was undermined by the fact that, as soon as you turned the page, the entire remainder of the Dig was composed of buy-this-buy-that features. Seriously. All the rest was shopping stuff - and it was not nearly as well or as tightly written as the shopping material in Stuff, and Stuff is more honest about it.

I did like this quote picking on The Improper Bostonian (a periodical about which I have nothing good to say whatsoever):

If they'd write more like that I might read them more often. Sometimes I think what I really crave is a weekly that does nothing but pick on everyone else's excesses and hypocrisies, 24/7 - which may be the real reason I get annoyed when the Phoenix drops cartoons which habitually point out how fucked-up the world is, but keep the cartoon which consists of Karl Stevens repeatedly pointing out how fucked-up he is.

I'd start The Weekly Cynic, but I suspect I'd be bankrupt within a month.

-- 21:33, 10 December 2010 (GMT)

Mel:

U.S. News recently announced that they're going to an online-only format - I think that's what Iain was referring to.

-- 21:43, 10 December 2010 (GMT)

Bunny42:

Email is probably not timely since I check it about once a week...

Ah. I was going to ask you to comment on Howard Goodall's Big Bangs, (unless you've written about it before my time, in which case you'd direct me to that), and now I see why you haven't mentioned it.

-- 01:55, 11 December 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Bunny, sorry! I did get both your email AND the message you left on LJ. Your signal to ME is working fine. But apparently I still can't send email to YOU (I did try, but it sounds like you didn't get my reply).

At any rate, I know nothing about Big Bangs and I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, so I have nothing to say! Once I get a chance to follow up on the recommendation, I'll let you know what I think.

-- 16:01, 11 December 2010 (GMT)

Bunny42:

Just out of curiosity, did you try replying through the LJ network, as well? I recall that we had encountered problems with good ole AT&T, but I wondered if the LJ network also bounced. Someone else had similar problems reaching me back then, but it seemed to resolve itself. Apparently, not for you. Sean says email is broken and will never get any better. I hate to think he's correct, but things like this make me shake my head.

-- 07:37, 12 December 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

I didn't reply via LJ because I didn't have anything to say in reply! Then, later, when I saw your email, I thought, "I had better send her a reply so she knows I got the messages," and that bounced.

Sean is right. Email is essentially dead. We have a whole generation of students at my workplace who use it only under duress.

-- 01:08, 13 December 2010 (GMT)

Bunny42:

What do they use instead? IM? Or text?

-- 01:07, 14 December 2010 (GMT)

Shmuel:

Facebook.

(Also text.)

-- 14:18, 14 December 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

E-mail is alive and well in business. Even letters now are pdf'd and sent by e-mail. Facebook isn't a realistic option for business communications, nor is text messaging or IM (which combines the worst of e-mail and phone -- it takes longer to express, and it has to be dealt with instantly.

-- 16:14, 14 December 2010 (GMT)