Paper Newspapers Committed Suicide Long Ago

All this business about how newspapers need a bailout and revenues being down and how are they going to survive is about a multi-billion dollars short and a decade late. I’m no business man. I don’t have an MBA, got an F in economics, and can barely balance the checkbook I no longer use. But even I could see the writing on the wall. We’ll just give our paper away for free online and charge for the paper version! This is the business plan the papers went with. The result is, of course, obvious: why pay for what you can get for free? This was a question I would ask myself time and time again as I read all the free newspapers I could get my laptop on from around the world. 

The Sunday New York Times is now six dollars. It’s thinner than Angelina Jolie with less ink and more typos. And it’s probably the best of the bunch. It’s all over. Even my 70 year old father reads the newspaper online. He doesn’t like it, but he does it. 

So spare me all the shock and hand wringing. This was all by design. Any fool could see it. Or could they? Could it be that those at the very top were in such deep denial that they refused to look at what was right under their face the whole time? The newspapers had their chance to charge money for online content, but didn’t. Instead they let you register for free. Then they tried to charge for “premium content.” But by then it was already too late. There’s no going back once you give something away. 

Now the papers are floundering. And, if they want to see why, all they have to do is look at themselves in the mirror.

Hard Liners Take Hard Line In Iran

Maybe it was what we witnessed in the United States, where we elected, for the first time in our history, an African-American to the office of President. Maybe that’s why we got so enthused by the election in Iran. What happened in the election in Iran? Apparently, the same thing that goes on in every election there. The difference: the perception. Iran has been, for thirty years now, run by a theocracy of fundamentalist hard-liners. And that hasn’t changed. What has changed is the people who want reform have cellphones and twitter accounts. An isolationist government running smack day into the 21st century gizmo-gasm culture. We see images of countless thousands of marchers openly protesting a sham election. The difference: the images. In the old days you could jail the journalists and smash their cameras and nobody in the outside world could see for themselves the bones and brains that were also smashed. No more. Everyone has a camera. Two or three images – in two or three seconds – can cause a shift in global consciousness. Holy crap! The Iranian government is mean! 

But it changes nothing. Iran is still run by maniacs. Iran still hates the west. Iran still blames everything on The Great Satan, even if The Great Satan stands mute. The bearded holocaust denier will still be President, and still serve as a beacon for those who seek the destruction of the west. Same old same old. The Iranians might have had a march of mourning. But this time, the rest of the world got to join in.