Comment on Trevor Stokes article on TD Forums

Mr. Robert Palmer, Editor
Times Daily
Florence, Alabama
March 24, 2008

Subject: Times Daily forum (article by Trevor Stokes 3/24/08); my suggested commentary

Trevor Stokes article about forums gets him an ‘E” for effort in trying to explain the forum phenomenon (as he said, it started a 1000 years ago in Rome) and he gets an “L” for loyally sticking up for the hand that feeds him but only a “C” in conclusions from his analysis.

One of the great failings of newspapers today, not just of the Times Daily, is their seeming inability to bring depth of reasoning, analyzing the subject matter and drawing conclusions based on them to the fore. At one time, that process was a pillar of practically every newspaper. And I think I know some of the reasons why it is missing today.

Since the 1980s when the Genie called the computer came out of the sand-bottle making the whole world interactive, the desire to talk, to be seen and heard through the Internet has exploded. And so has advertising in newspapers conversely imploded. Seen as the common enemy as did radio when TV moved ears and eyes to a small black and white screen, there was much ballyhooing about the death of radio, and the same death knell of newspapers is now at hand because of the computer.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum – radio has never been larger and I think, in time, newspapers or some facsimile of them will again flourish, as will books and the written record of thousands of years. What if societies could not maintain the proper balance between zero’s and one’s and digitally speaking, they disappeared? There would not be a single trace left of the digital age except a few disintegrating pieces of hardware that itself would disappear in less than a thousand years.

So newspapers must figure out how to stay in the game and continue profitability. Computer ads, though less profitable, do produce revenues to help the media keep pace.

There will have to be a lot more work to make computer advertising pay off. Content-driven sites will attract the viewers who, like Americans in general, are very eclectic. Newspapers, because they play to diverse audiences, must place more emphasis on readability content to get their attention there in the first place.

While just about every business has a Web presence and mentions it in all of their advertising, I do not think the computer side of a newspaper ever will displace it. Like television was to the radio, they both captured increasing audiences.

The headline of Stokes’ article, which implied that forums might be dangerous to democracy, is not substantiated in the story, in fact; I believe the opposite to be true. While there is much, much misinformation on the Internet, its value to democracies all over the world is inestimable.

When a curiosity seeker, or researcher, or a student doing homework, has at their fingertips literally more than the great library of Alexandria with more and more information coming online every day, one cannot help but be in awe of the greatest wonder of the world, the Internet.

So Mr. Stokes’ article really could have no ending because there is not one smart enough (or stupid enough) to predict the final outcome. Today, there are forums for people to use pretty much as they like (how’s the fishing?) and tidbits about the community.

However, the tenor of some of the “discussions” on the Times Daily forum lead me to believe that some are not aware of the universality of the Internet and that what they say never will go away – until all zero’s and one’s are gone.

Ernest Norsworthy
Visalia, California

emnorsworthy@earthlink.net and http://norsworthyopinion.com