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Sentimentality is in the air on Litopia After Dark this week as we try to create a tear-jerking, heart-wrenching, sickly sweet best-seller (pass the sick bucket!).  However, it all gets a bit over-emotional and we move on to more serious topics…

Last week we took a look at the sex-and-blackmail scandal that propelled etiquette doyenne Emily Post to start peddling good manners as a commodity, nearly 100 years ago. This week, Emily Yoffe writes in SLATE about the lack of manners (as if we really expected them) in the US election campaign.   Could it be an element of the social malaise exemplified by an alarming new trend in violent crime: “low flash-point killings”.  We ask - are we giving (and taking) more offense as a society?

Also, the American Journalism Review carries a think piece by Philip Meyer, professor emeritus in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, in which he tries to predict where that industry is headed.  Meyer offers a future vision of the newspaper in which those that manage to survive will do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web.  The panel discuss whether we’re optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the newspaper - and what message does it send to the book publishing business?

In an article in this month’s Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of The New Republic, explains why he still blogs.  He believe that despite all the intense gloom surrounding the newspaper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The bloggosphere, he says, has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane. So why do we blog, should author’s blog and how do we see the future for the bloggosphere?

Of course, all this would be nothing without the mayhem of Pitch the Nasty Agent, the frustration of Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette and this week’s particularly heart-rendering Cry for Help.  To chew over the hot topics and provide witty banter for your listening pleasure this week are the usual suspects of Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman, Richard Howse and Eve Harvey.  The Ustream Chatroom (8pm GMT) was an emotional roller-coaster, join us next week and bring a box of tissues!

Links mentioned in the show…

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Emily Yoffe in Slate Magazine…

Why humans are so quick to take offense, and what that means for the presidential campaign…

Rarely has it been thought that the way to show you deserve to be the most powerful person on earth is to demonstrate you’re also the touchiest. This presidential campaign has been an offense fest. From the indignation over a fashion writer’s observation about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, to the outraged response to the infamous Obama New Yorker cover, to the histrionics over “lipstick on a pig,” taking offense has been a political leitmotif. Slate’s John Dickerson observed that umbrage is this year’s hottest campaign tactic. And we can assume it will reach an operatic crescendo in these final weeks before Election Day.

It’s often the pettiest-seeming things that drive people mad. Or worse. Jostling our way through the world can have violent consequences. A significant percentage of murders occur between acquaintances with the flash point being a trivial insult. Sometimes it seems we live in a culture devoted to retribution on behalf of the thin-skinned—just think of university speech codes. Comedian Larry David even celebrates his skill at giving and taking offense on his television show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The American Journalism Review, Philip Meyer…

A smaller, less frequently published version packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product…

The endgame for newspapers is in sight. How their owners and managers choose to apply their dwindling resources will make all the difference in the nature of the ultimate product, its service to democracy and, of course, its survival.

In an article in the December 1995 issue of AJR called “Learning to Love Lower Profits” I predicted the financial turbulence that we are seeing today. The piece urged stakeholders in newspaper companies to accept the inevitability of lower returns and to apply their resources to maintaining their community influence.

A decade later, I marshaled the evidence for that strategy in a book titled “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.” The argument was quantitative and complex. Judging by the Google alerts the book’s title has accumulated since then, readers took away the wrong message.

This reference from The Economist is typical: “In his book ‘The Vanishing Newspaper,’ Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.”

That’s a clever image, and it is true that extrapolating the recent linear decline in everyday readership would show a zero point in April 2043. But newspaper publishers are not so relentlessly stubborn that we can expect them to continue churning out papers until there is only one reader left. The industry would lose critical mass and collapse long before then.

Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic…

The word blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log. It contains in its four letters a concise and accurate self-description: it is a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on the World Wide Web. In the monosyllabic vernacular of the Internet, Web log soon became the word blog…

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

A ship’s log owes its name to a small wooden board, often weighted with lead, that was for centuries attached to a line and thrown over the stern. The weight of the log would keep it in the same place in the water, like a provisional anchor, while the ship moved away. By measuring the length of line used up in a set period of time, mariners could calculate the speed of their journey (the rope itself was marked by equidistant “knots” for easy measurement). As a ship’s voyage progressed, the course came to be marked down in a book that was called a log.

Tags: author, blogs, journalist, publishing, writing