Slate's Jack Shafer on Digital Editions

Jack Shafer of Slate.com has a solid analysis of the digital editions produced by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and other American newspapers. His conclusion is that “these electronic editions [are] as comfortable as a fat man trapped in an iron suit designed by a boa constrictor.” I’ve long lamented (here’s a recent example) how printed newspapers must convert from broadsheet to tabloid format and how their digital editions must lose unnecessary bulk. Shafer nicely encapsulates how these problems result in lousy circulation for even the best newspapers’ digital editons:

… more people attend home games of the [Salisbury, Maryland] Class A Delmarva Shorebirds (3,460) than subscribe to

e-editions (daily, 3,331; Sunday, 2,780).”

Digital editions show great promise, but not the way that newspaper publishers are using them today.

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Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

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