Coffee and Newspapers.
Norway leads the world in per capita consumption of newspapers and, they tell me, coffee. I'm willing to believe both these things. Now I gotta wonder why.
Not about coffee. There are two seasons in Norway: the dark season and the light season. In the light season, it's daylight for eighteen to twenty hours, and you never get enough sleep, so you want to keep strong coffee at hand. In the dark season, it's correspondingly dark, and cold, and you want to keep strong coffee at hand.
But what about newspapers? Norway can't possibly be a world leader in the production of NEWS, and the newspapers sort of show that. There just isn't enough politics or crime, most days, to fill a good newspaper, and there aren't enough celebrities or spectacles either.
But there are plenty of READERS. It's a nation of tireless readers--cf comments on the dark season--and the newspapers are rather literate by world standards. Hallin and Mancini, in their book Comparing Media Systems, note that there is a very clear correlation between levels of newspaper readership today and levels of literacy at the end of the nineteenth century. An interesting fact.
There's also plenty of MONEY. That's because of the general wealth of the country and because of the way the social compact distributes it. One of the ways it distributes wealth is in the form of subsidies to newspapers.
But my colleague at Bergen Martin Eide remarks that it's also the invention in the past thirty years of a hybrid journalism that combines tabloid forms with sophisticated cultural and political commentary. Similar formal innovations seem to me also to be the reason for the vibrancy of news media in the younger democracies of southen Europe, like Italy and Spain, which still have far lower levels of readership.
Now this formula is exportable. Are media in the US paying attention? I think not, and I think the reason is their far greater dependence on advertising income. For them, more readers doesn't necessarily mean more money or more stability.
Instead, US newspapers innovate in this direction by spinning off free youth papers, like the Chicago Tribune's ineffable RedEye. This ain't innovation as much as it's line extension.
Norway leads the world in per capita consumption of newspapers and, they tell me, coffee. I'm willing to believe both these things. Now I gotta wonder why.
Not about coffee. There are two seasons in Norway: the dark season and the light season. In the light season, it's daylight for eighteen to twenty hours, and you never get enough sleep, so you want to keep strong coffee at hand. In the dark season, it's correspondingly dark, and cold, and you want to keep strong coffee at hand.
But what about newspapers? Norway can't possibly be a world leader in the production of NEWS, and the newspapers sort of show that. There just isn't enough politics or crime, most days, to fill a good newspaper, and there aren't enough celebrities or spectacles either.
But there are plenty of READERS. It's a nation of tireless readers--cf comments on the dark season--and the newspapers are rather literate by world standards. Hallin and Mancini, in their book Comparing Media Systems, note that there is a very clear correlation between levels of newspaper readership today and levels of literacy at the end of the nineteenth century. An interesting fact.
There's also plenty of MONEY. That's because of the general wealth of the country and because of the way the social compact distributes it. One of the ways it distributes wealth is in the form of subsidies to newspapers.
But my colleague at Bergen Martin Eide remarks that it's also the invention in the past thirty years of a hybrid journalism that combines tabloid forms with sophisticated cultural and political commentary. Similar formal innovations seem to me also to be the reason for the vibrancy of news media in the younger democracies of southen Europe, like Italy and Spain, which still have far lower levels of readership.
Now this formula is exportable. Are media in the US paying attention? I think not, and I think the reason is their far greater dependence on advertising income. For them, more readers doesn't necessarily mean more money or more stability.
Instead, US newspapers innovate in this direction by spinning off free youth papers, like the Chicago Tribune's ineffable RedEye. This ain't innovation as much as it's line extension.
posted by jnerone at 5:41 AM
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