Instead Of Wringing Hands Over Bezos Liquidating The Wa Po, Listen To These Now Free, Formerly Cabloid Journalists On The Emerging New Media

ONE OF THE EARLY THINGS that became apparent to me when I first went online was that the ink on paper media, certainly the big papers, were going to disappear because the overhead of producing their product and distributing it would make it very unlikely for it to continue.   I'd come off of the experience of two excellent newspapers I read,  The Boston Globe and the York County Coast Star (which was recognized as one of the best small weekly papers in the country) being bought and gutted by the New York Times.   I had watched other newspapers I read disappear for my entire lifetime, national, regional and local ones as news reading diminished.  

I have a full copy of one of those local papers from the 1950s, one from a random day that someone put in a drawer for some reason and which didn't come my way till the chest of drawers was junked and obtained by me.   It is a broadsheet of the kind you hardly ever see anymore, with full sections most of which are actual news full of local ads.  And it was hardly the best newspaper of my experience.  But today's Boston Globe,  hell, the one that the NYT put out before they dumped it  couldn't compare with it. 

I have heard that some of the small local papers, especially those to a targeted, often ethnic audience are still doing all right, though I certainly haven't seen that to be the case in person.  I will point out not long ago hearing the editor of such a paper derisively dismissing the New York Times as a gaming company that had something of a news operation on the side.  which makes me smile every time I hear of what the Sulzberger jerk who runs it is doing.  Probably the worst thing that could happen to a newspaper is that a billionaire like Bezos or Soon-Shiong or the scion of a multi-millionaire owner family like "putsch" Sulzberger gets control of it.   Bad as the NYT could be under previous members of his family,  the post-boomer (born 1980) A.G. has brought it to lows I don't remember even at its previous worst of my lifetime.  I mean, look at the shit like Whorey Beiss who were hired under him.  I can't but help thinking his education at the atheist prep, "Ethical Culture" school had something to do with his moral  degeneracy, 

The idea that the big papers would continue as before only online, without the cost of newsprint and distribution "IF ONLY THEY COULD FIGURE OUT THE RIGHT BUSINESS MODEL" seems to have been mostly a fantasy.    

I don't figure that any corporation is worth mourning when it has died a natural death,  nor even as it was murdered like the WaPo has been.   I say move on with history and historical inevitability driven in no small part by changes in technology.   Ink on paper newspapers are, themselves, the product of technological developments as were the consolidations that created the big corporations that ran them into the ground.  If we're going to have a democracy supporting news media it's not likely to be ink on paper or with a big corporate overhead and overlord class.  

Here are Joy Reid, Mehdi Hassen and Jim Acosta talking about such things and taking audience questions in one of the best such discussions on this I've heard. 

OH, AND EVERYONE SHOULD BE BOYCOTTING AMAZON AND THE OTHER BEZOS COMPANIES.    Hey, Duncan, are you still on the Amazon teat?   Maybe you should be boycotted, too.