<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-1962" title="newspapers1" src="http://manjr.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/newspapers1.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" />You know what? Fuck newspapers. They suck. They’re dying and no one cares and no one should. Journos don’t speak in the right voice to be relevant anymore. They love to hate on bloggy types because bloggy types don’t have the same polish, objectivity and integrity as J-school grads. Well screw that. Blogs are better. Not in all cases, yea. I’m sure there are some amazing investigatory journalists doing a super great job making sure our society stays free and open and educated. But a lot these journos who get paid to report on simple things like sports just aren’t relevant anymore.

Let’s take a look at two newspapers covering football over the last two days.

First, we go to Sam Farmer of the LA Times (who I’m sure is a real standup guy and a highly respectable journo). His article “Teams aren't waiting to change signals at quarterback” contains two striking examples of why newspapers are useless. Take it away Sam:
<blockquote>Teams aren't waiting to change signals at quarterback

The season is only two weeks old, and already more than one-fourth of the league's 32 teams have made, or are seriously considering, a personnel switch at the position.

Even though their one sack ranks them at the bottom of NFL teams, the Carolina Panthers sure know how to rush the passer.

Their own passer, that is.</blockquote>
Just two weeks into the season, the Panthers already are rushing starting quarterback Matt Moore off stage and replacing him with rookie Jimmy Clausen in hopes of jump-starting their offense.

Hey-O! Their <em>own</em> passer. Get it? Why say Jimmy Clausen’s the new starter when you can give it that extra-clever journo touch? Why spend a sentence or a bullet point to pass along information when you can stretch it out into three lines of amazing copy like that.

But wait, there’s more. Lock and load, Sam:
<blockquote>In Buffalo, the hurry-up offense used to be a strategy. Now, it's a plea: "Hurry <em>up</em>, offense!"</blockquote>
BOOM! It’s funny cause it’s italicized! Did you see what he did there? You know he gets paid for this stuff, right? I sure hope he doesn’t make more than a dental assistant.

Our society as a whole has developed epic ADD. We just don’t have time for useless, turn-of-phrase journo-speak like that anymore.  We’re too busy working on 20 things at once, jumping from website to website, stopping to update our Facebook while we scan through texts and tweets on our genius-phones. We consume more information today, useful or not, at a pace that the world has never seen. Longwinded wordplays and grimace-worthy, journo-content is no longer needed.

You can blame technology, a broken education system, indifference, bad parenting, obesity, constant increases in the pace of day-to-day life, but none of this really matters. When content consumption changes, content has to change with it.

So what happens when the journos try to change their game? What happens when out-of-touch content creators try to put their Internet-ready twist on their tired old wordplays? You get shit like this:

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1964" title="vicktopdog" src="http://manjr.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/vicktopdog.jpg" alt="" width="310" height="336" />

Nice. Top Dog. How fantastically tasteless and unnecessary. In a shocking turnabout, The Philadelphia Daily News underscores just how worthless newspapers have become.

Look, I know we’re only talking about sports here, but the death of the newspaper has bigger implications.

The democratization of media has pissed off a lot of people. Music execs, movie studios and Rupert Murdoch don’t want a world full of citizen-creative-types who report what they see and collage the hell out of anything they can get their hands on.

When the rabble can communicate ideas at the same volume as trusted, established media tastemakers, a few things happen. First, there’s more garbage, there’s more noise. Give everyone a megaphone and you’re going to get a lot of sound pollution. But good content –quality, useful, well-packaged information – finds a way to rise to the top. Info that’s convenient to consume, that’s timely and relevant will always win out. Just look at ProFootballTalk.com.

The death of newspapers shouldn’t be seen as a setback. It’s progress. Old-school journos need to get up to speed and realize that we don’t have time to consume wasted words. Sensationalism isn’t the answer either. Attention spans have shrunk to record lows, and the need for good content has never been greater. If you want good content, you find it online. It's that simple.