I was browsing through the CNN.com website the other day when I stumbled across one of Jack Cafferty’s “Cafferty Files” blog posts. It revolved around the state of the newspaper industry in America these days, and the question he posed to his readership was how important they felt it to be to “save America’s newspapers.” First of all, I didn’t know there was a Sierra Club-type movement afoot to make a protected species out of what appears to be a creaky and outmoded way of doing business, which is actual newsprint, ink and the occasional half-off sale ad at one of those big-box electronics chain stores. I mean, look…if you’ve managed to make yourself sit patiently up to this point, you know what I mean, as you’re reading something mainly composed of electrons and some sort of binary code. Along with a few half-baked thoughts dredged up from the parts of my brain I thought I’d lost forever after that unfortunate incident at a Stone Temple Pilots concert back in the early 90s, but that’s another story.
Anyway, most of Big Jack’s responders went into paroxysms of fright at the thought of newspapers someday going the way of the Dodo Bird. Maybe they should put some effort into getting those same thoughts onto the Op-Ed pages of their local paper, and then going out and buying those papers,hmmmmm? Reading further, I saw more than a few pleas for government assistance to help preserve this “vital to democracy” form of expression. Uh, excuse me? What are we, chopped liver? I could use a bailout or two (I mean, “stimulus”) myself, but giving money we don’t have to enterprises which totally failed to see thecyber-train barreling down the tracks is a betrayal of every ideal of free-market capitalism we supposedly hold dear. It seems to me the markets have spoken, and a new way of delivering news content is what’s being demanded. Not an old way propped up by government subsidies.
Who do I feel sorry for? Why, those operating the presses and delivering the papers, of course. They didn’t make the god-awful business decisions someone like New York Times owner Arthur “Pinch”Sulzberger has made since he took over the family business some years back, yet they’re going to bear the brunt of the firestorm sure to come when some of these papers finally give up the ghost. You want to talk about a guy (Sulzberger) totally unable to understand what “binary code” even means, let alone how to harness a digital medium to his advantage? He’s the single best example: Today, NYT stock is worth about the same amount as used birdcage liner goes for on the black market.
As far as actual “content producers” go (people like, ahem, yours truly), well…you-all are sitting out there, reading what I’ve got to say on this subject, so I’d say most of us have an ability to adapt to the realities of the new digital reality a bit better than the paper delivery truck driver over in the Bronx or themail room worker in Detroit, Michigan, for example. Sure, we may actually have to work a full 8-hour day on occasion (something which I try to avoid like the plague, natch), now, but it’s better than being the newsprintbundler who’s about to get a pink slip, courtesy of one Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger.
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