NY Times: Industry retrench painful. Why? Let's get excited about change. What if the newspaper became a new, exciting product. Peter Van

N.Y. Times to Reduce Page Size, Slash Jobs

07.18.2006, 07:05 AM

The New York Times plans to cut 250 jobs and shrink the size of its pages in 2008, making them one-and-a-half inches narrower, the newspaper reported in Tuesday's edition.
The newspaper's plans include closing a printing plant in Edison, N.J. The plant's workload will shift to another in New York City, the article said, estimating the moves would save the company $42 million per year. The job cuts account for about one-third of the Times' total production work force of 800, the newspaper said.
The reduction in the size of its pages would mean a loss of 11 percent of the space devoted to news, but the newspaper plans to add pages to make up for about half of that loss.
"That's a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably," Executive Editor Bill Keller was quoted as saying. "The smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form."
The article, noting that USA Today and The Washington Post have cut their size, pointed to rising newsprint costs and the loss of readers and ad dollars to the Internet.
"It's painful to watch an industry retrench," Keller said. "But this is a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff or closing foreign bureaus or retrenching our investigative reporting or diluting the Washington bureau."

The "database of intentions" means the personal newspaper will not only tell you what you want to know but what you will want to know in the future. By cross-referencing your interests with others of similar interests and recording their search subjects, stories you will be interested in (the future) are revealed. Check it out. Peter Van

"The Internet Knows What You'll Do Next"
By David Leonhardt
New York Times, p. C1 Wednesday, July 5, 2006

A few years back, a technology writer named John Battelle -- http://battellemedia.com -- began talking about how the Internet had made it possible to predict the future. When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions. . .
A few weeks ago, Google took a big step toward . . . making the database of intentions visible to the world . . . by creating a product called Google Trends. It allows you to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple of years and to see the cities where the term is most popular.

Newspapers have traded for hundreds of years on the human need to identify with a group. The perfect marriage now -- in this era of personal choice -- is individuated news with group news. Personal pages combined with traditional pages. Peter Van

"How Soccer Explains The World" by Franklin Foer (Harper Perrenial, 2005), p. 198

. . . Throughout the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from the philosopher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity's evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we would finally get past nasty ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans -- shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws.
It's a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic. And it turns its back on a strain of liberalism that begins with John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and continues through Isaiah Berlin. This tradition understands that humans crave identifying with a group. It is an unavoidable, immemorial, hardwired instinct. Since modern life has knocked the family and tribe from their central positions, the nation has become the only viable vessel for this impulse. . .