Daley Blames - Who Else? - The Media For Oprah-geddon
Chicago Gets Googled
Friday Flashback - Old School Oprah
Today's Transgender Day of Remembrance Honors the Dead
Review: Paramount Room
Photo by scrapplequeen
- The Sun-Times is reporting this evening that Chicago Real Estate mogul Steven Good has been found dead in a Kane County forest preserve. Not many details are known other than that the body was found shortly after 8 a.m. this morning inside a red Jaguar sports car.
- An interesting read from Politico regarding Roland Burris's prosecution of Rolando Cruz.
- Experts are predicting a bad year for condo sales in the South Loop.
- Three babies, ages 4 months, 14 months, and 16 months, were turned over to Illinois Department of Children and Family Services this weekend after officers found them living in squalor.
- That promised WiMax service is still (allegedly) coming to Chicago with the new ETA a vague "late 2009."
- For a two-hour stretch on December 20, some customers using debit cards at Macy's stores may have been charged multiple times. This kind of thing would never happen at Marshall Field's.
- If you like watching train wrecks, here's Jay Mariotti's first column at his new Fanhouse home. It's unsurprisingly atrocious, as expected. Self-aggrandizing, too.
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While the Mariotti column is completely self-involved, I think Mariotti makes some great points, namely there are many faults in the current print media system that are contributing to its demise. I don't find it remotely atrocious. He's an ego maniac, but he has a good point.
In light of the Steven Good suicide, let me comment (and sorry for sounding preachy).
If you know someone who is down, call them. If you think a friend has depression, encourage them to get help. Reach out. Take the initiative. You can really help someone. Again, sorry for preaching.
Do I know you Thunderbelly? Not only is that EXACTLY the same thing I would have wrote (In my head, it's almost word for word). I detest JM, but he made some incredibly valid points. But on top of that, your profile picture is the EXACT same picture I use on gmail. Incredible.
And hopefully I've given myself away to some of my friends in my first ever post on Chicagoist.
Re: WiMax...I thought the whole point of that was that it was going to be free...or at least not $80 a month!
I enjoy the idea that print media is dying, years past its prime and riddled with a history of ill-advised decisions - so that's why Mariotti joined with AOL. I wonder if he tried CompuServe first.
Those who enjoy the death of print media simply enjoy living in a world without media, or else they vastly overestimate the staying power of these internet tubes. Say what you want about the Sun Times or the Tribune, but what local web site produces that kind of in-depth, investigative reporting on the local level? Even our beloved Chicagoist has to crib most of its local news content from one of the print outlets.
The problem, of course, is money. As new and cool and flashy and hip and modern as the wire may be, nobody's ever figured out a way to make money off it, at least not enough to sustain a staff of good investigative reporters and give them what they need to do their job. Internet people balk at having to pay for anything online, and they balk at any type of advertising intrution. Just take a look through comments on Chicagoust's banner ads, and imagine the outcry were there enough of these ads to sustain a business.
If print media dies, we'll be left with nothing more than a bunch of free bloggers grinding personal axes in their free time and with TV news, which has turned into little more than a flat-screen version of a bum on a street corner calling "The end of the world is nigh!"
Dang, Blue, I was going to say exactly that! Seriously!
But SERIOUSLY seriously, I don't get this rush to kill off print media either. Online has yet to prove it's overall superiority to print. As an ALTERNATIVE source, maybe. Convenience has its place. But I have yet to see the kind of groundbreaking journalism that print has provided and still provides manifest it self on the web. Disclosing that, say, John Edwards banged a photographer and had a kid isn't on a par with, say, the Mirage series of articles the Sun-Times ran years ago.
The internet is the perfect example of the difference between a writer and a journalist. Oh, and a blogger and a journalist.
I don't care how my news is delivered, but I do care that paid professionals are digging for news, especially at this point in US history, and especially in Chicago. Bloggers will not fill the slack--most do not get paid, and most don't have the mentors or time to develop strong reporting and writing skills. The only people who truly celebrate the decrease in the number of news outlets are propagandists, power-mongers and others who want to rip off the public.
Matilda... good points. And add to that the fact that most bloggers do their "investigative work" sitting behind a computer Googling every few minutes.
One of the biggest mistakes news orgs have done is give away their content for free. Big fuck-up that will take a long time to fix.
I accept that most people don't really want real journalism, but prefer opinion and other assorted ass-hattery that confirms one's previously held beliefs about the world--in essence, glorified cheerleading. Most people, after all, would rather be subjects than citizens. Chicagoans prove that every day.