Who killed the Newspaper?

"Video killed the radio star." - The Buggles

For the last few months, someone has been delivering the San Jose Mercury News to my Santa Clara home. I don't know why. I have tried emailing them and asking them to not deliver the newspaper but they insist on continuing their unwanted altruism. I wonder how they reconcile with the fact that I am not a paying. And it's not like I read the newspaper either... someone or the other picks it or drops it into the trash.

Which brings me to the premise of this post... Why has the newspaper become so unwanted these days (so much so that I won't even read it for free)? The Mercury News isn't the best thing on the newspaper stand, but in many respects their coverage of the Silicon Valley's high-tech industry is unrivalled. Newspapers try to inform their consumers about the local news, weather, sports, schools, job market... the keyword here being LOCAL. But for a 26-year old foreign high-tech worker in California, weather is never a concern given the mildness of it. Sports hardly impresses... who cares what the Stanford Cardinals/Oakland Raiders/SF Giants/49ers are upto?? Don't need a new job right now, and even if I do it looks like the headhunters are finding me faster than I need jobs. In a wired world where people are close to their computers nearly all their waking hours, all these things can be checked for free, updated real time and from many competing sources. Craigslist and Ebay stole the classifieds business from the newspapers, and Monster Jobtrak the jobs search market.

The final nail in the coffin was struck by President Bush's war on terror. If you track the most emailed stories on any of the news websites, the Iraq related headlines are never something anyone emails to anyone else. These newspapers executives should learn about Shannon's Information Theory, known to most EE or CS grads, says that the information content of any piece of information is inversely proportional to the probability of it's occurrence. Clearly "50 dead in Baghdad" is a very deplorable incident, but doesn't really add to anyone's knowledge of the world at large... Minus the few people in the White House, everyone knows that Iraq is in a civil war and given the 3000 civilian deaths in the last few years, the last resort of fools is to just contest the definition of a "civil war". Dilys voiced the same opinion recently about news as a pessimistic world view, where bad incidents make the frontpages faster than good ones.

And finally a plug for the New York Times. I love reading it online! The Times gets it... no pop-ups, no weird banners, most emailed/blogged articles, stories that contain fun information... Tonight I read the following excellent news-stories:

San Franciscans hurl their rage at the Parking Patrol

First-Baby Sweepstakes Fuels Immigration Debate

Seeking Big Payoff, Companies Pay Dearly for Tech Trade Show

Job Growth Is Strong, Surprising Economists

Sunny California : Where everyday is Earthquake season!

"The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away"

So presumably goes a line in the Bible. It refers to how someone blessed with plenty, is also hobbled with some negatives. California is no exception. The great weather, the high-tech industry, the vineyards, Hollywood, the movie-star Governator (maybe the Lord was confused on that one) all great things, but the Lord taketh away by putting plenty of faults into our Northern California backyards. My roommate reminded me of those and my own lackadaisical attitude towards them yesterday. He asked me to read this page and it literally scared the living daylights out of me. Try it yourself here.

Joel, my room-mate told me about the Loma-Prieta earthquake, and how the road we walked on in San Francisco on New Year's eve, was built after the 1989 quake. The website above reminds me to do a lot of preventive things to avoid problems during an earthquake, describes what happens during one typically. It talks about how shattered glass is all around and how you ought to sleep every night with shoes tied to the side of your bed. So as I lay in bed last night I realized that my bed was right beneath a window. I wouldn't want to be cut right through by the shattered glass and immediatly I moved my bed to the opposite wall of the room.

Still uneasy from the seismic wake-up call, I started reading the Wikipedia about the Loma-Prieta earthquake as well. It referred to a funny prediction made by a reporter about the Baseball World Series game in the City at the time. (The two big Northern California teams Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants were going head to head.) But there was another person who works for the US Geological Survey, Jim Berkland, who also got this prediction right. In fact he even wrote an article about it in the Gilroy Dispatch. Here is his site. Jim seems to be making a small busines out of the quake predictions. You can subscribe to his newsletter about quake predictions. It seems the US government has warned him not to make any more predictions to avoid mass panic (I don't know how he reconciles both the last two claims). I know what site I am going to check every week now.