Max Frankel's last column in the NY Times Magazine Section appeared yesterday (Sunday, July 9), with the tile "The Nirvana News". The subject is the future of newspapers. A couple of quotes are:
"If you think a newspaper must always involve an imprint of inks on costly pulp that is processed from Canadian trees, trucked into urban factories and trucked out again to ever more widely dispersed readers, then its prospects are dim indeed. There is no feature of that paper product that will not soon be replicated and improved by digital technologies. . . . So when will you get The Nirvana News? Alas, not until the Web worshipers quit their rhapsodizing about "free" digital news and figure out a way to pay for its production. The Web has so far supplanted only the newspaper's trucks. It has not produced very good reporter robots or electronic editors. Nor has it figured out how to pay the costly humans needed to gather, interpret, write and package information in the coming world." (Anyone can read the whole column - free - at NYT.com. You have to register, or sign in if you are already registered, and then find your way to the Extended Search and use the phrase "The Nirvana News"." That should take you to a list of search results with the item you are seeking at the top of the list.) Frankel wrote about newspapers, but most of his column is equally applicable for scholarly publications. Like Frankel's column, the meeting last week at the NY Academy of Medicine was divided between the wonderful advantages of digital publishing and the economic questions. There was no dissension at the meeting about the advantages (which doesn't mean that everyone is in favor of it), but the real dispute (polite on the first day, less so on the second) comes down to "who will pay". Most newspapers pay their writers, scholarly journals don't. Both have costs beyond paying (or not paying) for manuscripts. There are already some scientific journals that are free to the reader - advertisers pay for them, the content of the journals reflects that, and the quality is markedly different from the journals we need to buy. Similarly, there are advertiser supported newspapers (usually weeklies) with second- or third-rate news coverage. Keeping in mind "he who pays the piper calls the tune", we need some realistic discussion on who will pay for free-to-the-reader scholarly publication. I didn't hear it at the meeting, and I haven't seen much on this forum. Marvin Margoshes
