RE: Disappearing Music Magazines
2009/02/28 21:38:10
(permalink)
Here in Seattle the Post Intelligencer is going under -- again.
The alternative press is not immune. Any Northwesterners remember The Rocket, or the Seattle Sun?
We still have Seattle Weekly and The Stranger. (The latter calls itself "Seattle's Only Newspaper", a bit of sarcasm aimed at our remaining newspaper, the Seattle Times. Of course The Stranger is still waiting for its first Pulitzer, but arrogance is the price of being hip.)
The decline of print media is usually blamed on the plethora of alternate information sources, but I say B.S. to that theory. What alternate sources are they referring to? Television? Certainly not radio. Maybe the internet? Gimme a break.
My theory is it's because of a general decline in literacy across the board.
Last year, one of the many election-year polls revealed that nearly 70% of voters got the bulk of their information from TV, and 80% of them considered themselves better informed than the average Joe. Subsequent questions in the same poll indicated that in reality the people who got their information from television were overwhelmingly BELOW average when it came to knowing the answers to topical questions.
[Edited: removed inflammatory paragraph regarding certain wacky religious beliefs. Forbidden under forum rules, and anyway you never know when one of those nutjobs will show up on your doorstep...]
All else is in doubt, so this is the truth I cling to.
My Stuff