At Big Think, the writers as a good question: Are newspapers civic institutions? If so what are the implications? Or are they just algorithms? Dominic Basulto raises good questions in his post, with plenty of links to other studies and writers.

More than 200 newspapers have folded or suspended their print editions since 2007, Basulto writes. “ As a result, the typical argument calls for supporting newspapers historically have been based on the idea of newspapers as a sort of civic institution that we, as a society, must preserve in the name of ideals (always capitalized) like Truth. But what if, instead, we begin to think of newspapers in perhaps a more mundane manner—as algorithms for solving problems?”

Are tablet applications making it easier for newspapers to pay for content? Are consumers becoming accustomed to paying for applications? “If you think about this for a second, this is a profound change that the appification of media makes possible. Online or in the physical world, your product is worth zero. Add a mobile layer to it, and it’s suddenly worth something,” writes Basulto. Is it true? If so, is it enough to preserve journalism as we’ve known it?

This piece from CBS Sunday Morning sounds familiar to me. Over the years, I’ve worked at some of the same type of niche magazines highlighted here. Magazines are indeed alive and well. I think my favorite magazine highlighted here by Conor Knighton is Manure Manager, which, as Conor says, “is quite literally full of crap.”

Malcolm Jones at the Book Beast highlights 12 books that will be published in the coming months. It’s a great list that includes a few of my favorites such as Jonah Lehrer and John Irving. I’m really looking forward to Robert Caro’s latest installment of his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. A book that I am really excited about is Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Social Conquest of the Earth, which offers up the theory that group selection, not kin selection, is the prime driver of human evolution. Here is the summary from Barnes and Noble:

“Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? In a generational work of clarity and passion, one of our greatest living scientists directly addresses these three fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science while “overturning the famous theory that evolution naturally encourages creatures to put family first” (Discover magazine). Refashioning the story of human evolution in a work that is certain to generate headlines, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to show that group selection, not kin selection, is the primary driving force of human evolution. He proves that history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology. Demonstrating that the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature, Wilson presents us with the clearest explanation ever produced as to the origin of the human condition and why it resulted in our domination of the Earth’s biosphere.”

"An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one,” writes Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, in the Wall Street Journal. “The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”

Carr’s own experience with editing an e-book that has already been published allowed him to speculate on the future of publishing and what it might mean for the idea of “the book.” Text is forever maleable. “Beyond giving writers a spur to eloquence, what the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls “typographical fixity” served as a cultural preservative,” he writes. “It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg’s invention.”

How authors conceive of book topics and their approach to subject both may change in profound ways once the idea of writing for the digital page becomes fully formed. What happens to prose when it doesn’t have to be your final word? Carr writes, “Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.”

Robert Boyton remains bullish on journalism. In 2005 he published The New New Journalism, which argued that the American long-form journalism was thriving. Pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, pre-Recession. Was his argument premature? No. There is still room for thriving nonfiction. Part of his optimism is based on the belief that people in industrial societies “still expect better things in their lives,” which includes all forms of journalism. Boyton also believes that the current economic conditions merely force journalists to add different forms of writing and reporting to the repertoire rather than abandon what has been done before.

"Every fall, when I greet the new group of NYU students, the first thing I do is welcome them to the house of journalism. It is a big house, I explain, with many differently shaped and designed rooms. The rooms have names like “blog post,” “feature,” “essay,” “foreign report” and “book,” and seems to add a room or two every year. In order to have a long and enjoyable career, I continue, they must find one room they truly love, and decorate and design it so that it reflects their very best attributes. In addition, they need to find a few other rooms where they feel comfortable, since one can’t live in a single room forever. Each of the rooms has a different function, and must be maintained in a way that makes sense for it.”

Expanding on the metaphor a bit, Boyton believes that publishers and newspapers themselves, not just journalists, must adapt to this new climate. “I’d compare the current thinking about business models for journalism to the real estate developer who builds nothing but malls. What we need, the thinking goes, is as many large, easily designed, open spaces as possible, the better to lead masses of people through. Contemporary journalism has broken down the walls, and wants everyone to sit in the same room (usually the busiest, loudest room in the house). A collection of idiosyncratic houses, each containing different sized rooms is too confusing and cluttered, the thinking goes. No, the trick is to “go big” and throw enormous parties to which everyone is invited. How else can a website attract millions of “hits”?”

Do you believe him? His argument is obviously more complicated and nuanced than what I have summarized here. I’d encourage you to read his entire article.

George Whitman, founder of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, died last week at age 98. Critics say it likely wasn’t the best bookshop in the world, or even Paris for that matter, but Shakespeare and Company was one of the most famous. Two tributes to Mr. Whitman were recently published: one at The Book Bench blog and the other at The Telegraph. This is what Tim Martin wrote in The Telegraph:

“But if you’re one of the innumerable tourists who flock to Shakespeare and Co each year, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re not going exclusively for the books. You visit for the history: for the chance to poke round the famous upstairs library and reading room where Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell and Allen Ginsberg sipped tea, and for a glimpse into the world’s most famous literary dosshouse, a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookshop” over which Whitman presided with irascible charm between 1951 and 2003. (If you’re visiting in search of the Modernist hangout that hosted Beckett, Joyce, Hemingway, Stein and Eliot, look elsewhere: that shop closed after the Second World War, but Whitman adopted the name in the Sixties as a tribute to its founder Sylvia Beach.)”

I think Sven Birkerts has it about right: “Writing can’t be planned for or predicted, and when it happens, when the surge begins, it brings a satisfaction like nothing else. There are finer sensualities, sure, and basic emotions that give joy or connection when released, but as far as giving me a sustained sense that this is who I am, this is what I do, a full-fathom immersion in writing is the ultimate verification. Alone at my attic desk, catching the flow of words, when the flow is there to be caught — or generating it when it is there to be generated — I break with my more tentative self, claim some more necessary seeming “I.” The change has everything to do with finding words and their sequence. The joy prolongs itself for a short time after I stop — a resonance, a psychic afterglow — then it tapers away, the other life resumes. But I am already thinking toward the next occasion.

“The memory of the best of the best writing moments haunts, most grievously when the desire is there but the impulse is absent, or when the impulse flickers and sputters but doesn’t catch, when the words — which I believe are right there, as if on the other side of the sheerest membrane — will not come. The good runs are not a fortifying memory but a reproach. My younger self — it is always, necessarily, the younger self — mocks me. It’s not just writing at stake, but everything. The worth I felt when I worked, when I was young — even if that was only yesterday — is gone. This is now and henceforth the way of things; this is the new reality.”

Read his entire essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Many media analysts say newspapers are dead or dying. To anyone who follows the media, those claims aren’t new. But now the Newspaper Association of America hopes to reverse the trend, by emphasizing that newspapers in all their online, mobile app and print incarnations make us smarter. And smart is sexy.

The New York Times’ Tanzina Vega recently wrote about the new advertising campaign: ““Smart is the new sexy” reads the tagline for the campaign, which was created by the Martin Agency, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. “Be able to find Iran on a map,” says one ad that shows an illustration of a woman reading a print newspaper at a table. “Know what the city council is up to behind closed doors,” it continues. “There’s no question that newspapers are undergoing a significant transformation, and we wanted to underline some of that,” said Caroline Little, chief executive of the N.A.A. “It’s a campaign for what newspapers represent, whether they are in print, online or mobile.”

“What they represent, Ms. Little said, are the ideals of an informed citizenry and democracy. The campaign also comes at a time when newspaper newsrooms have faced devastating financial and staff cuts. A weak print advertising market and smaller profit on digital advertising have exacerbated the trend. Some newspapers, like The New York Times, are experimenting with pay models while others are finding alternative revenue streams through things like daily deal Web sites.”

Since 1985, the Pew Research Center has tracked the public opinion about the national news media. Its most recent data is quite alarming: Opinions now equal or surpass all-time highs on nine of 12 core measures. A bright spot: As bad as it is for news organizations, they are still more trusted than other many other organizations including the government and business. So I gotta ask: Are news organizations that bad, or do we just hate what the news is reporting? You can find a summary of the recent report here. the New York Times recently reported on the Pew report as well.

Some interesting paragraphs from the report summary:

* “The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has been tracking views of press performance since 1985, and the overall ratings remain quite negative. Fully 66% say news stories often are inaccurate, 77% think that news organizations tend to favor one side, and 80% say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.

The widely-shared belief that news stories are inaccurate cuts to the press’s core mission: Just 25% say that in general news organizations get the facts straight while 66% say stories are often inaccurate. As recently as four years ago, 39% said news organizations mostly get the facts straight and 53% said stories are often inaccurate.”

* “Despite the growth of Internet news, it is clear that television news outlets, specifically cable news outlets, are central to people’s impressions of the news media. When asked what first comes to mind when they think of news organizations, 63% volunteer the name of a cable news outlet, with CNN and Fox News by far the most prevalent in people’s minds. Only about a third (36%) name one of the broadcast networks. Fewer than one-in-five mention local news outlets and only 5% mention a national newspaper such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or USA Today. Just 3% name a website – either web-only or linked to a traditional news organization – when asked what comes to mind when they think of news organizations.”

* “For the first time in a Pew Research Center survey, as many say that news organizations hurt democracy (42%) as protect democracy (42%). In the mid-1980s, about twice as many said that news organizations protect democracy rather than hurt democracy.

“Yet majorities have consistently expressed the view that criticism of political leaders by news organizations keeps them from doing things that should not be done. Today, 58% say this, while just 25% say that the news media’s criticism keeps political leaders from doing their jobs. Even as attitudes toward the press have grown more negative, support for the press’s watchdog role has remained stable.”

Download the full report, Views of the News Media: 1985-2011: Press Widely Criticized, But Trusted More than Other Information Sources.

The opening paragraph from Elizabeth Minkel’s article in The New Yorker certainly caught my attention. Could it be true that the decline of reading may be on the reverse? Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, reports that more Americans are reading books than in previous years. The increase was small, nonetheless it was there. As Minkel writes, reading has been on the decline in our country for some time. “The steady drop since the nineteen-fifties correlates directly with the rise of television and visual media, but much of the damage has been done in the past two decades, well after TV had solidified its place in Americans’ lives ... But despite the small gains, a solid half of the country still rarely, if ever, picks up a book for pleasure. In the same press release, the N.E.A. said that “The U.S. population now breaks into two almost equally sized groups—readers and non-readers.””

I recommend Minkel’s story. She cites other published stories that look at both sides of the issue. Is reading really on the decline? Or is the reverse really true--is it on the rise again? What difference does it make? Can it be true, as Gioia states in the NEA report, that “cultural decline” hangs in the balance? Many commenters on the subject actually address different questions, as Minkel points out nicely in her final paragraph: “Le Guin is talking about Americans’ lack of interest in pleasure reading; Poe is searching for innovative ways of teaching people who will never find reading enjoyable; and Crain is warning us against the dangers of thinking that reading is something that we can move past. Book sales might be dropping, but for now, those of us who read are not about to abandon the pastime. The question is how hard we should be working to convert the half of Americans who do not.”