EasternOrthodox
Is the Internet too good to be true?
Posted on: 11/26/2011 03:48
A lot of media companies are taking big hits from the Internet. You have probably read about the music business and the explosion of pirated music. The iTunes store partly solved the problem, but the glory days seem gone for music. Entertainers must go on tours to earn a high income now.
Perhaps of more concern are newspapers. They formerly derived much of their income from advertisments, especially "the classifieds." The classified have moved onto free web sites now. Newpapers can advertise to some extent on the web, but it is not the same as print, and the papers say it can in no way make up the difference. Home deliveries are steadily falling off.
The New York Times has introduced a pay wall. This seems to be the coming thing. The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times--catering to a more specialized audience--have had pay walls from the start. The Times of London has introduced one recently.
Often limited access is available to non-subscribers, although The Times permits nothing. The Financial Times permits limited access but gives me a warning message if I cut and paste anything! So I have to type excerpts in by hand.
Meanwhile, papers like the venerable Guardian (of the UK) are operating at a loss. The owners of the Guardian run other businesses which subsidize the newspaper. How long can they keep that up?
There have been many stories over the past few years of radical cutbacks at newspapers.
Here is a review from The New York Times of a book saying the era of the free ride for users cannot last (note: I subscribe to NYT and their comments say I may use their content for "personal, noncommercial use.")
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/free-ride-by-robert-levin...
Inconspicuous Consumption
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson declared. As the Internet is destroying the business model that has historically supported high-quality journalism, movies, music and television, the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that Johnson was wrong. “Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower,” technology activists have insisted, selectively quoting the technology thinker Stewart Brand. (In fact, Brand said in the same 1984 speech that on the other hand, “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.”) According to the worldview embodied by Google and Facebook and many of the best minds in the legal academy and public- interest community, the culture business is collapsing because the old-style media executives who run Hollywood, cable television, the record companies and newspapers have failed to adjust to the expectations of a demanding new generation of media consumers who want free movies and books and music and news wherever and whenever they’re online.
In “Free Ride,” a book that should change the debate about the future of culture, Robert Levine argues, in effect, that Samuel Johnson was right, and that it’s the self-interested Silicon Valley technology companies and their well-financed advocates who are wrong. “The real conflict online,” Levine writes, “is between the media companies that fund much of the entertainment we read, see and hear and the technology firms that want to distribute their content — legally or otherwise.” By delivering content they don’t pay for, or selling content far below the price it cost to create, Levine says, information and entertainment distributors like YouTube and The Huffington Post become “parasites” on the media companies that invest substantially in journalists, musicians and actors; the distributors drive down prices in a way that sucks the economic lifeblood out of those who create and finance the best achievements of our culture. The result is a “digital version of Wal-Mart capitalism,” in which free-riding distributors reap all the economic benefits of the Internet by cutting prices, and culture suppliers are forced to cut costs in response. This dynamic, Levine argues, destroys the economic incentive to create the kinds of movies, television, music and journalism consumers demand, and for which they are, in fact, quite willing to pay.
Levine’s story begins as a struggle over copyright. He interviews Bruce Lehman, a former Clinton official who championed the policies that led to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lehman says the 1998 law was supposed to balance the interests of tech companies with those of artists and media companies. He now expresses regret that it has had the unintended consequence of making the fortunes of tech companies while devastating artists and media companies. The law allows distributors like YouTube to profit from pirated movies and video as long as they remove the illegal content when asked by those whose rights have been violated. As a result of this arrangement, YouTube’s own employees were convinced that more than three-quarters of viewing hits in the site’s early days derived from copyrighted video, according to e-mail disclosed in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, vigorously denies wrongdoing, but in the wake of the lawsuit, YouTube now takes voluntary steps to filter out copyright- infringing content — a solution that the studios, according to Levine, view as imperfect but an improvement.
Levine is not a pro-copyright ideologue: he acknowledges the many good reasons to reform copyright, including the fact that the copyrights’ terms are too long and the financial penalties for infringement can be too high. But the biggest problem with copyright today, he says, is that its protections have become illusory in an age when movies and music, produced by independent artists and big studios alike, are available on pirate sites even before they’re released. Because copyright laws are so difficult to enforce, media companies have little leverage when negotiating financial terms with distributors. And so, they’re virtually forced to give their stuff away. That’s what happened with the music industry, which, spooked by the proliferation of pirated file sharing on Napster, struck a bad deal with iTunes that allowed Apple to replace the sale of $15 albums with 99-cent songs. “Even if they continue to grow,” Levine writes, “those 99-cent-song sales won’t come close to making up for the corresponding decline in CD sales.” (Apple can afford to sell content so cheaply because its low-cost music helps to promote more profitable products — in this case, the iPod.) Even with the growth in online audiences, recorded music in the United States was worth $6.3 billion in sales in 2009, less than half its value a decade earlier.
The most successful culture businesses, Levine says, have resisted nostrums about how information yearns to be free and instead have insisted on the old-fashioned strategy of selling something for more than they paid for it. He notes that The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and The New York Times charge for content, and that some have found that the increased revenue of full-price subscribers more than offsets the decline in digital readership. Similarly, the best TV shows, like “Mad Men,” are produced by cable channels like AMC that hold back their content from Hulu, a network-owned platform for distributing TV over the Internet.
The Hulu model has succeeded on the premise that “if someone was going to make their product available online for nothing, it might as well be them,” as Levine says of the networks. But now Hulu is threatened by start-ups like Boxee and giants like Google TV, which allows people to bring all the free (and paid) content of the Internet — from YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix and other services — to their televisions. The networks and Hulu have blocked Google TV from gaining access to their video, fearing it could cut into the billions of dollars in annual revenue brought in by cable bills. Also in response to Google TV-like services, Time Warner and Comcast are developing a plan called TV Everywhere, which would require Internet users to prove they are cable subscribers in order to watch certain online videos, and in return would give them the convenience of watching the shows they already pay for on any device they choose. The alternative to closed platforms like Hulu and TV Every where, Levine says, is an open Internet model of free video that, by denying the networks any revenue to invest in shows like “Mad Men,” would instead produce the likes of the viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger.”
In addition to diagnosing “how digital parasites are destroying the culture business,” Levine provides a vision, as his subtitle promises, of “how the culture business can fight back.” His model is Europe, which has a long history of supporting its culture business and, by taking a more combative stand against piracy, is trying to help legal distribution ventures flourish. Instead of filing mass lawsuits against individuals who upload pirated material, Euro pean regulators have concentrated their efforts on bringing down the most flagrant violators among commercial distributors. Germany has laws forbidding the aggressive discounting of books in chain stores, which has preserved independent booksellers while making it harder for Amazon to introduce the Kindle. And France in 2009 approved a law that would deny Internet access to those who repeatedly violate copyright. Recently, France has begun to revive a business model that thrived in the 19th century: a collective or blanket license that, by adding a fee to Internet connections, would allow the convenient downloading of copyrighted music and divide the money to compensate producers and artists. Levine says the blanket license model could also apply to television and journalism, and would better align the value of content on the Internet with its price.
With this stylishly written and well-reported manifesto, Levine has become a leading voice on one side of our most hotly contested debate involving law and technology. Of course, there are strong arguments on the other side. It’s not yet clear how effective more vigorous copyright enforcement — of the kind proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy and the Obama administration’s “copyright czar,” Victoria Espinel — would be in deterring piracy. (Copyright skeptics say that if 40 million people refuse to obey a law, the law doesn’t matter; Levine counters that about 40 million speeding tickets are issued each year, and no one says traffic laws don’t matter.) And it remains to be seen how much consumers will be persuaded to pay for content as more of it goes behind pay walls. But regardless of your position in the business-of-culture wars, it’s hard to resist Levine’s conclusion that the status quo is much better for tech companies and distributors than for cultural creators and producers. That status quo may benefit consumers in the short term. But if it continues, Levine argues, the Internet will increasingly become an artistic wasteland dominated by amateurs — a world where music, TV and journalism are virtually free, and where all of us get what we pay for.
------------------------------
FREE RIDE
How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back
By Robert Levine
307 pp. Doubleday. $26.95
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Comments
InannaWhimsey
Posted on: 11/26/2011 05:47
A quick ontological guerrilla sigil!
Goody :3
Old news: Music "pirates' biggest music buyers
Why is the money draining? (note: record companies had been losing money LONG before the internet)
So what myth/Bibles are being created to force us consumers into believing/living it?
We live in other people's worlds.
GeoFee
Posted on: 11/26/2011 19:55
Its my cow. I own it. The numbered tag on the left ear marks it. The numerical mark corresponds to the same numerical mark in a registry. That registry is transparent to corporate/state algorithms.
Diverse spiritual ways and traditions speak of possession as a primary blockage in the pursuit of peace. I am listening to the Moody Blues as I key these characters for your consideration - "With, without, and who'll deny its what the fightings all about."
Where money follows ethics much good is accomplished in the land. Where money follows "the restless striving of power affter power which ceases only in death" all good in the land is undone; the land itself is imperiled.
We are immersed, are we not, in a harlotry of sorts? Each of us and all of us giving ourselves for the use of others in the service of money. Folks do not go down into the mines by choice. They are economically constrained, either going down into the mine or having no living wage. Much more like the girls on Fanning Street than we might prefer to acknowledge.
What do we do with the whispered memory: "and none of those gathered in the name of the expected one held anything as his or her own, having abandoned the economies of greed to pursue the economies of compassion.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 11/26/2011 20:50
I am sorry I cannot listen to the video, my sound is broken.
Still, I think it should concern us about the fate of newspapers. I don't really care about rock stars, but I do care about the news.
InannaWhimsey
Posted on: 11/28/2011 17:46
Still, I think it should concern us about the fate of newspapers. I don't really care about rock stars, but I do care about the news.
Turn the cc option on; some youtube videos have CC :3
It'll be interesting how newspapers (and the music industry & book publishing) will have to adapt as they continue their blessed service to humanity.
GeoFee
Posted on: 11/28/2011 22:46
Hi EO,
(the video collage had Tom Waits singing Fanning Street. Fanning Street has a reputation for life gone wrong on the seedy side of things. It presents a metaphor for the hell of failed hope and dissapointed dream. The song and singer seemed to offer a tone for the problems associated with money as both the primary incentive for work and the primary indicator of worth in a capitalist society.)
I have been wondering how we might converse for some time. Reading your post leads me to suspect that you are concerned and ready to be engaged, as we long for a remedy to the ill we have let lose; each of us and all of us.
I have been thinking of phrases by which I may convey my own sense concerning the place of newspapers in the emergent, developed and now decadent stages of capitalism. Very simply - the printed broadsheet has served well to engineer the social structures of possessive individualism.
Curiosity concerning the press, particularily the possibility of a free press, was sparked by a course on media in a Sociology curriculum. I researched the perspectives of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson as they debated the matter of a free press; a press uncensored by vested interest.
Hamilton came down on the against side. He took it that the working class was unable to understand the complex matters attending the rise of a great industrial enterprise (world domination as imagined by Bacon and expressed by Descartes). The elite were duty bound, for the sake of progress (putting nature squarely under our thumb), to take charge of the social economy by taking charge of the means of production. In this view print media offered means for the production of consent.
Jefferson resisted Hamilton for the anti-democratic bias his position conveyed implicitly if not explicitly. He proposed the understanding of plain persons be taken as a corrective to any trajectory by which private interest might displace common good. With this end in view the press was to serve as a resource for insight and information by which critcal consciousness would be established and flourish in the serivice of the common good.
At the time of my study, late eighties, a small and diminishing number of corporate brands dominated the print media, as they do the assorted electronic and digital media. Without going into the details I will suggest that the small percentage of persons directing media, all by due process, has shaped and continues to shape the consumptive appetite now drawing us deep into the distress of disease, the threat of environmental degradation, the proliferation of death machinery, and the increasingly bloody disputes over market share.
The internet offers opportunity. As with the case of Alexander Hamiliton, there are those who want anything but a free communication web linking persons of the planet in conversation. They want ownership by which management of resources (including human lives) will become globally possible through the total rationalization of every human interaction. These suggest that culture depends on special talents, which are accorded special merit and special remuneration. The social construction of consumption depends on paid talent willing to be marked for sale by contract.
The future does not derive from singular personalities which have achieved status as superior to others in any particualar discipline or practice. The celebrated chief executive officer who contributes his part in the project of us all gets paid more than any ninety-nine of us combined. A gross imbalance justified by deeply prejudiced logic.
The future derives from the experience of plain persons in plain places who have determined to give all available energy to being free, responsibile, creative and couragious. These are stepping out of their conformity to take a journey of transformation. They have entertained a new imagination, whipered and shouted by voices not authorized by the mass media, voices subversive of empire in all of its forms and disguises.
Your icon brings memories of south eastern Manitoba, where my family lives. Small Ukrainian chapels seem part of the landscape, just as the friends and neighbours seemed closer to the ground.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 11/28/2011 23:27
Inna: With a song, CC probably wouldn't be the same!
Geofee: I agree that the Internet has been a huge gain for the individual, and a loss for corporate news sources. Certainly, in the pre-internet days, a small number of corporations had out-sized influence, due to the cost of say, running a TV station or printing a newspaper.
But a typical newspaper does two things: it has a news gathering side and an editorial side. The editorial side has declined much in power with the proliferation of voices on the internet.
Nor is news-gathering necessarily the domain only of only profession reporters. During one of the New Zealand earthquakes, while I was visiting my sister, the news flashed across CNN, but there were no details. On Google I discovered a Twitter feed, where people on location were sending "tweets", even uploading pictures to the internet. Eventually the professional news outfits realized something was up!
But there is still a place for profession reporters in certain areas. For example:
- expensive, time-consuming investigative reporting. I suppose individuals could do this too, but generally people need to work to support themselves, and it does not leave them with much spare time.
- foreign news, especially from non-English speaking countries, and especially from war-wracked areas, where only people with a lot of nerve are prepared to go (and sometimes they lose their lives). Reporting is quite hazardous in some places.
I know of one "public supported" foreign reporter--Michael Totten (google him if you are interested). He requests small donations and travels about eastern Europe and the middle east, a posts stories and pictures to a blog. I think he might have been a journalist at one time. He is wary about going into war zones, though. After a number of years, he has just published his first book (which I bought).
With regard to Hamilton and Jefferson, they were from a very different time, with wide-spread illiteracy. Things are very different now.
I support the papers I read, with on-lines subscriptions to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (London), the Financial Times (London) and a dead-tree subscription to The Economist. I don't necessarily agree with all their editorial viewpoints, but there is a great deal of reporting there.
I follow the financial news carefully, not because I have investments (I don't), but because so much of what happens to us is controlled by the state of the economy (witness, the Occupy movement).
I also buy lots of books. Many regret the fading away of bookshops, but I have bought far more books since Amazon came along. So I am supporting those authors too.
These are my luxuries in life. I buy few clothes--my sister makes them for me. I hate shopping.
I post a lot of stories here on WC. I just got home from work, quickly read from a free source (Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine that has a free English sub-site where they just translate their German articles), and logged onto WC to check to see what was happening.
I feel that from all my reading of these various sources, plus reading the comments of WC posters, that I have a feel for what the Occupy people are feeling: the decline in good-paying jobs, the increase in house prices, the increasing costs of education...generally it harder for young kids these days. Back in the 1970's, you didn't even need a high school degree to get a decent-paying union job at the Post Office, for example. That's all gone now.
Yes there are serious environmental issues too. Global warming. LBMuskoka started a thread, Global Defrost, under Global Issues on this. I add any news I come across.
However, not all newspapers take the "corporate" stance. As I mention above, a newspaper like The Guardian is a case in point. It takes a very liberal stance, but it is currently running at a loss. It has been around since some time in nineteenth century (once called The Manchester Guardian) but who knows what the future holds.
In fact, even The New York Times is more liberal that you might think, being generally sympathetic to the Occupy movement.
GeoFee
Posted on: 12/01/2011 13:46
What about advertising? Does this third function of the newspaper not appear to qualify the integrity of both news and editorial functions?
SG
Posted on: 12/01/2011 14:14
Newspapers are a business and are about making money. They do not make money on subscriptions, maybe they never have. It is ALL about advertising.
How big is this week's edition?
It has to be ___ pages for advertising.
But,we have ___pages already + __ pages more of NEWS
Cut it down.
Conversely-
We only have ___ pages of news
Go online and get filler, fluff....c anned articles, just fill it in.
To hell with news. The bottom line matters.
In this day and age, a weekly won't hold the presses for a breaking story - they will for last minute ad.
Do I sound like a disgruntled person with newspaper ties? I should.
Do I think it is the end of the world? No, not at all. Why? People do not "flip through" the internet. Retailers are realizing this. If newspapers are online, people read the article they are specifically looking for. One can only find what one is looking for. When a paper comes up they do not "click thorugh" each page. They just go to where what they are interested in is. They do not 'browse" the paper and see each page and the advertisements. Nobody wants to pay to be on the page 7 when everyone is reading ONLY page 4. When newspapers cannot lure advertisers online...
People still hear radio, watch TV and glance at ads in print. Vinyl makes a return because people want tangible music. The feel of an eReader will never suffice for those who adore books.
I still dream the dream of words and concern and news and people over profits...
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/02/2011 10:58
Well, for you corporation haters, you will then be happy to know about this news, of them losing money.
GeoFee, much of their advertising $ came from the classifieds, hardly a source of political thought.
And everyone reading a news source should evaluate the editorial part very carefully. That goes for the internet too.
SG: so you propose that newspapers should just go out of business? Run along the lines of a charity?
GeoFee
Posted on: 12/02/2011 14:51
Not sure just why you introduce the word hate as we have just begun our conversation. Does disagreeing with status quo make me hateful? Is there some indication, in all my history of posting here or elsewhere, that I am a hateful person?
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/02/2011 15:25
SG & EO — A newspaper traditionally has THREE "sides": editorial and news are one department that includes editors, subeditors, photographers and reporters....
It has as its second department: an advertising department that includes classifieds and display advertising… sales, design and placement in the publication.
The third department is circulation. Circulation affects advertising rates and income affects editorial staffing resources. Rupert Murdoch elevated the importannce of circulation, NOT advertising. He realised that big advertisers would follow the mob. It was very successful and, instead of spending needlessly on newsrooms, he put the money into more acquisitions, regional monopolies and defence lawyers to fend off the libel and defamation suits). He actually stripped newsrooms down to the bare bones, realising that you didn't need facts and accuracy to sell fish & chip wrappers to the undereducated hoi polloi. Hell, he just wanted all the money.
And it's not even about the money per se. It's about the leverage that big cash flows generate. Big newspaper chains produce enormous cash flows.I worked for a big newspaper group that was making more money off overnight currency trading in the various time zones than it was from all of its news operations. It'd buy overnight, sell during the day... all around the world, market by market, 24 hours a day.
You can pretty much forget journalism.
This opened the door for niche market publications (which I found the most satisfying and liberated) and also... when it duly arrived.. for the blog. Responsible newswork has consequently been stripped of its credibility, ethics and even its viability.
GeoFee
Posted on: 12/02/2011 15:47
Pretty much in agreement, with one question: What part does advertising play in the expansion of circulation?
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/02/2011 16:32
Geo: adverising? Advertising's often used as a way of undercutting the competition: a regional paper will offer advertising just a little cheaper than, say, two or three small local papers and provide a bigger market. They can sustain small losses doing this if they're part of a group... and they whittle away the the little guys' incomes with promotions etc, often hand-in-hand with nationwide promotions by the big supermarkets, malls and "big box" stores. Then they buy out the little papers or simply let them fail. Without competition, the ad rates can gradually rise again and it becomes a part of the unsustainability of downtowns as the local guys can't afford to keep up wth superstores because they don't have the sales or cash flows... so everyone has to drive out of town to get groceries; the local butcher who'd deliver is gone, the local cheese factory has gone, the local baker is no more, the local shoe repairer, the bookshop, anything that won't fit into a corner stor or gas station... the local tea/coffee shop is now a Timmy's... bye-bye... and we call it "progress", "efficiency" and "rationalisation" (though predation, pillage and parasitism are more direct ways to discuss the effect — I've known two suicides as a result of the process. But there's bound to be more.).
It's not JUST about nostalgia... with local business vanishes local local relationship, local employment, local control, local economy. So we see urban drift, rural school closures, the growth of commuter culture, the withdrawal of local services (like banking, policing, car servicing and mail, etc.) I know... who uses snail mail these days? Well, in PEI the local postmistress was a tireless driver of local community activity and engagement... all the stuff she wasn't paid to do but did was more important that the stuff she was paid for.
What happens as a part of all this is the picking off of little independent radio stations and local television stations... does ANYONE remember privately owned and operated, locally involved little radio stations? They're a rarity today and never make money because they're not welcome where the power lies. It's all networks and affiliates... and it's NOT about editorial control, it's about hegemony, cash flow and higher impact marketing. It's about draining away the resources of the powerless.
As a journalist, I became alienated then disgusted. The days of being able to feel you were doing something worthwhile faded into demands for so many column inches to fill the space your laid-off co-worker used to fill; the difference was that he or she would have been producing accurate, significant, worthwhile stories while you'd be cutting and pasting press releases and interviewing airheads and imbeciles to hang in there enough to get one half-decent story away maybe once a week instead of once a day... and because you cared you'd have to work unpaid overtime to do it. And then it wouldn't necessarily get used. It all had to be entertaining or controversial or titillating or provocative. I felt I had to get our of it because I couldn't change it and I need a life that lets me act ethically. Stupid, really — now I'm poor, no pension, no job but I write and I am free and that is FINE with me.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/02/2011 16:50
Not sure just why you introduce the word hate as we have just begun our conversation. Does disagreeing with status quo make me hateful? Is there some indication, in all my history of posting here or elsewhere, that I am a hateful person?
No I may have misunderstood.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/02/2011 16:52
As a journalist, I became alienated then disgusted. The days of being able to feel you were doing something worthwhile faded into demands for so many column inches to fill the space your laid-off co-worker used to fill; the difference was that he or she would have been producing accurate, significant, worthwhile stories while you'd be cutting and pasting press releases and interviewing airheads and imbeciles to hang in there enough to get one half-decent story away maybe once a week instead of once a day... and because you cared you'd have to work unpaid overtime to do it. And then it wouldn't necessarily get used. It all had to be entertaining or controversial or titillating or provocative. I felt I had to get our of it because I couldn't change it and I need a life that lets me act ethically. Stupid, really — now I'm poor, no pension, no job but I write and I am free and that is FINE with me.
I am all in favour of the Internet for the new alternative voices it is providing, just a bit worried about the loss of professionals....really only relevent as I say, in specialized areas like reporting from war areas.
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/02/2011 17:23
The internet gives us what the sources want us to get and what we can be bothered picking up. It's generally superficial and unreliable. We have very few reliably sources of news anymore abut at least we don't believe what we're fed, do we? I rather doubt, EO, that there's much taste for news professionals any more, "quality" media don't get much of an audience: our culture has shifted from content to image; and — I hate to say this but it's been my experience — too few graduates leave school or university with particularly good thinking skills, numeracy and literacy skills or historical awareness. The context of news has changed — thanks very much to what I've described (the shift from community to society — and that has some very good aspects and some very bad ones (ethical drift being one)... it's just different. More dangerous, maybe, but more materially rich (in the West, for the meanwhile).
(War reporting, by the way, has always been bloody hopeless — valiant sometimes, propaganda-driven often, mis-read usually and invariably badly used — bloody hopeless in fact.)
P.S. sorry to be so bleak about this.
SG
Posted on: 12/02/2011 17:51
MikePaterson,
I am familiar with the three sides.
My experience is with "local" weekly papers. Many of them are not reliant on subscriptions. Circulation isoften to every mailbox or driveway. That volume means they are the place to go for advertising. It also means the sides do not form an equilateral triangle. it means the big side is advertising because of circulation. To hell with journalism and graphic artists and the like... $$$$$
We too have found that special publications are the only way we can be true to ourselves. Even with "news"being where or heart and head is and journalism running in our veins
Grrrrr......
EasternOrthodox,
I am confused how you read what I wrote and get something tthat makes you ask, "SG: so you propose that newspapers should just go out of business? Run along the lines of a charity?"
The answer is NO!!!!! I love reporting, editorials,journalism... I have newspaper in my blood and so does my spouse.
The answer to runaway greed is not poverty and charity and not making a living.
Where once many local papers existed, they are now all owned by one or two players. Enough money to pay payroll, live well, have a great business... works for small business owners. It does not work for "investors" and boards and people just wanting more money with less output and less effort.... It means outsource this, cut back that, double or triple the workload for the same pay.... it means who cares what is happening in the area. It means have the "local" "reporting" and "editorial" done overseas. It means instead of a qualified and seasoned editorial columnt you get someone who just fills the space between ads and that is good enough.
The newspaper becomes a flyer or the vessel the flyers are held in.
I would hope that those in medicine care about people not just making money. One would also hope people care about news and journalism.... if they are in the newspaper business.