Arkansas Blog

Ok the issue is how news is delivered. Print is dying is old news. Very old.

Now when will Ms Twitter get around to finding some news? She can only stay alive
by using two giants of the print world for controversy for a very limited time.

Time to put up or shut up Ms Twitter.

.

I don't know that print media are "dying" so much as evolving.

Certainly, the model for daily newspapers is dying. Literally. Chicago Tribune, anybody?

Dailies have become pointless, really, except as a medium for conveying advertisements and shopping coupons to consumers, wrapped in day-old (or longer) "news."

It's impossible for daily newspapers to keep up with or compete with 24 / 7 breaking headline stories (such as those on TV news channels like CNN or FOX or MSNBC, or on the internet).

Daily newspapers still deliver one niche that's fulfilled nowhere else, really: local news for worthy but essentially small-town / rural consumers. 4-H Club achievers. Fund-raisers for expanding the local library. High school scholastic and athletic honorees. Tax issues. Local politics.

Yet production costs in such tiny markets are killing off even those print "dailies" and turning them into weeklies.

At the current transitional juncture, weekly print / online media like the Arkansas Times deliver what neither daily newspapers nor TV news deliver: a hybrid of up-to-the-minute 24 / 7 interactive online coverage coupled with print editions (increasingly free, as in the case of the Arkansas Times).

The whopping difference? Long-form coverage found nowhere else. Not on TV (except the occasional long-form "specials" like CNN's Christiane Amanpour's brilliant three-part "God's Warriors" series,) and certainly not in daily papers like the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette or even the NYT or WSJ.

Neither of those latter two national "dailies," for instance, are likely to have published Mara Leveritt's (as usual) brilliant in-depth Arkansas-Times cover story, "From 'Octoroon' to 'Other.' "

Why? Because the story, its history, insights, interviews and reportage are really only relevant to locales the size of Little Rock or smaller. Particularly in the still-racist South (note Leveritt's Civil War references).

In American metropolises like New York and Los Angeles, the great diversity of humanity is taken for granted among MOST of the classes (lower, middle and upper) and never comes up in the workaday world where one is surrounded by people of all stripes. (Thanks, Mara, for also mentioning classism in America, which is rarely addressed.)

(Of COURSE there is racism and homophobia and violence in big cities as in small towns. I'm not comparing metropolises to hamlets nor saying one way of life is "better." Just different.)

Leveritt's article is simply irrelevant old news to those in much larger cites who've already grown past preoccupations with topics like "interracial marriage" and the "one drop rule."

But it's HIGHLY relevant and important here. And it could ONLY find an outlet in the Arkansas-Times print and online edition. Where else? There IS no other outlet for this sort of broadly public journalism in Arkansas.

Apropos of Leveritt's article, I'm reminded of election night, Nov. 4th, and Obama's nationally televised acceptance speech. (One example of what TV still does best.) The party I attended here in Little Rock was virtually 50-50 black and white. Democrats, of course.

Moved and enraptured, several of us were gathered in front of one of the many big-screen TVs. Beside me? A black jazz musican who's a dear friend. He began shaking his head and quietly said, "I never thought I'd live to see this day."

"Neither did the world, I think. But we've done it," I said.

And then his younger (and black) girlfriend chimed in with, "But he's not really black."

"WHAT?!" I turned to her, next to me, in mock shock. I've had black friends all my life. I'm fully aware of this color-prejudice among blacks against "lighter" blacks -- which Leveritt addresses -- and said, in my usual low-key convivial fashion: "Are you fucking KIDDING me? You're going back to the old 'one-drop-rule'? " -- which she'd never heard of.

Yeppers. Blood bigotry in reverse. Unconscious, unconsciously assimilated. Obama's got some white blood in him so he's not "really" black.

Thankfully, Mara Leveritt's terrific article illustrates the shallow provincialism of all that crap.

You'd never hear that remark at the same party in New York or Los Angeles. The mentality of big-city diversity has moved on so far past all that.

But you hear it HERE.

And that's why the Arkansas-Times, which is way ahead of the D-G in understanding and bridging the gap between the old daily print newspapers and the "new" weekly / daily, print / interactive online news media -- for FREE, incidentally -- will triumph in the end.

The A-T is not only locally relevant -- it links to informative national and global stories. Immediately, with a click. Its advertisers reach Arkansas' most informed and targeted consumers, giving the best bang for advertising bucks.

And finally, Razorbacks, the A-T continues to grow an ever-larger COMMUNITY of loyal readers of all political stripes who enjoy the to-and-fro mud-wrestling on the Blog, where they can be heard and published instantly.

You're not gonna see an immediate joyous post-delivery pic of Kat and Hunter in the D-G.

Alongside an article as important and well-written as Mara Leveritt's "From 'Octoroon' to 'Other.' "

It'll only happen in the Arkansas Times.

MEMO TO WALTER HUSSMAN:

There are still plots in Mount Holly Cemetary near David O. Dodd, but act fast while real estate's cheap!