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I would just like to thank Emily and the the Think Out Loud staff for your handling of this news and discussion.  You and OPB have imo done MUCH better than the general run of the mill NPR coverage.  NPR tends to be "quasi-official," as our press used to say about the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.  It tends to be cautious and never to allow voices that question the assumptions of U.S. policy.  It tends to echo official pronouncements or draw on think tanks closely aligned with the U.S. foreign policy establishment.  (Not to mention mostly copying its choice of stories from the NYTimes.)

Your discussion has been much freer.  The official U.S. view enters in, but is not assumed as inherently right.  Much appreciated, keep up the good work. 

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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This won't be a popular idea. but a big part of the problem is that we put too much emphasis on individual responsibility.  We don't look enough at how culture and social structures encourage, discourage, obstruct, constrain and enable individual choices. 

Take fast food advertising.  There is a commercial on t.v. for one chain now that literally is food porn -- a svelte young woman brags about how hot she is and how much she has to give up to wear the skimpy bikini, but she's not going to give up the sloppy, dripping, sexualized pound of meat hamburger she then bites into.  Or the campaign of another chain to say we need a "Fourth Meal." 

Or take work discipline.  I know of employers that encourage voluntary "wellness" walking on lunch breaks.  I know of no employer who defines it as part of the job that they pay for for employees to get up and walk 20 minutes on the clock, though the health and mental health benefits would make them more productive workers in the long run. 

There are many, many examples.  It is not just about individual incentives, it is about changing the collective behavior of corporations and governments. 

Chris Lowe

Master of Public Health graduate student, OHSU

posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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Print newspapers are a push medium with a fixed spatial size and patterned structure and design elements.  They have an order and hierarchy of information that is imposed on them by professional editors.  Some of these things are matters of convention -- in some early newspapers front pages looked like classified ad pages today. 

It is not just professional journalists but professional editing that we get, affecting both the content of the articles and the ordering of the newspaper.  The restrictions of the physical form and the forcing of choices often has benefits. 

Another aspect of the physical form is visual scale.  The Oregonian is 23.5 inches across spread out, and the print columns fit within eleven inches across on each sheet.  Print space runs just over 21 inches top to bottom.  The visual field one scans quickly is both broad and high; headlines give visual cues. Contrast that to the endlessly scrolling 5 inches wide of this comment column. 

Web based news is a "pull" or maybe better a "reach" medium.  For people already inspired to reach out, it can be superior, you can look for related stories from multiple sources & points of view, & as guests mentioned more primary or closer to primary or more detailed information may be available via the online "papers" themselves.  Readers can escape the restraints imposed by editorial judgments that may reflect prejudice or preference or mistaken professional standards of "newsworthiness". 

There is a trade-off of the scope of information available with the meta-information of ordering that professional judgments provides.  Online journalism will improve as it finds ways to reassert in less restrictive but still informative ways the information of editorial judgment about relative importance.  Re-creating in new form that value added by editors may be tied to the funding issue. 

Scrolling interacts in a bad way with attention span.  I am not sure why.  If you are in college writing a paper, two pages double spaced (500-600 words) is a short paper.  In a paper it is a short-form op-ed or short story.  On-line it is a very long text indeed.

----

On the ecology question, the production cycle for newspapers includes raw materials for paper, industrial paper making, raw materials for ink & inkmaking, raw materials for presses & fabrication of presses, raw materials and fabrication of tools needed for writing and photography, including transport for reporting, actual printing of the paper, waste in all those processes, transport of all those items including raw material & fabrication of vehicles used, plus final delivery of papers to homes or distribution/sales points, plus recycling.

However, reading news online is not costless.  The elements related to content creation probably aren't that different.  Servers stand sort of where printing presses do.  Computers (or PDAs etc.) have their own production & distribution cycles & involve quite toxic industrial materials and processes, many not easily recyclable, not to mention reliance on petroleum-based plastics for basic structure.  They also have short life-cycles and frequent replacement partly for technical but partly for marketing reasons.  Likewise with transmission wires &/or wireless broadcast equipment using low-level radiation whose possible health consequences are debated.  Re the computers, a key question is whether "people would have them anyway" so that attributing their ecological costs shouldn't be down to papers, vs. how much of demand for computers etc, and for ever-newer & faster ones, in fact relates to desire for "news" and other information searching (as opposed to personal communication or data processing).  I'd say the proportion is quite high. 

Chris Lowe
SE Portland

posted 4 years, 3 months ago
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