Can't be True
A Florida movie critic has suggested that journalists file a class action suit against Google for ruining their business, just days after a professor of journalism appealed to the software giant to support the education of reporters, according to Tech Dirt. I suspect most newspapermen are smarter than to say things this and secretly cringe at these stupid statements. But maybe James Lileks disagrees. He remarks "That’ll do it. I can see the headline: Newspapers win $1.6 billion verdict against Google, use the money to start a youth-oriented tabloid giveaway paper that competes with YouTube. If you flip the corners of the pages really fast, the pictures appear to move!"
posted by wretchardthecat at 5/31/2007 09:04:00 PM
5 Comments:
Heh. I suspect you'll see more like this as time goes on and the newspaper industry continues to implode. Mere technological obsolenscence by itself would not have done this to them, as witness the fact that they did continue in the TV era, nor would the rise in the cost of paper alone have done this to them (Although both together were nails within their coffin! ^_^;), but by playing away from their strengths, making the journalism profession a closed shop for leftists, letting the likes of Hunter Thompson take them from objective journalism to advocacy journalism in the 1970s and then openly becoming first the propagandists for the Democrat party in the 1990s and ending by being the deranged pompom girls for the jihadis and Baathists, they ultimately put a noose upon their ceiling and their neck into the noose. :p
Which is a shame when you think of it because there was both role and market for journalists who actually would be journalists if only they had chosen that instead. @_@
*shrug*
If enough of them get their heads outside their own rumps and go back into being reporters rather than wardheelers and PR Flacks for their pet cause of the week they may yet be able to save their profession. The nature of institutional decline is such that it can be reversed at just about any stage by the simple act of those within the institution realizing what they are doing to themselves and then getting their act together! ^_~
After denying that they'd ever sell, the WSJ controlling family met with Rupert Murdoch. They likely will sell.
Funny. Even the WSJ has problems with leftism infecting it's news and editorial policies.
What this is really is a broad indicator of how removed elites are from the ordinary person:
Newspapers mostly don't make money but lose them; the San Francisco Chronicle will lay of 25% of reporters.
Movies mostly don't make money, except for a few blockbusters, and even those are cooling off.
TV nets are eroding viewers and profitability as viewers are fractured and sliced up into specialized niches.
Basically, de-massification of culture. Only the NFL stands as a mass culture media.
Hmmmm,
I think Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, et al had better watch out for the class action lawsuit from blacksmiths.
The beginning of journalism's decline was when it was made into a collage curriculum, that excluded the working class (who had been the vast majority of reporters up until then) and made it an "elite" occupation.
Now days you can find a better quality of reporting, analysis, and opinion on the Internet, for free, than you can buy from a newspaper. The blatant propaganda from CBS, the AP, Reuters, and the NYT accelerates the downfall. And they can't even own up to their mistakes, which only makes it worse.
The beginning of journalism's decline...
For me, the final nail in the coffin was Mary Mapes. I can understand some bias due to shared values or some agenda driven desire to change the world. Its wrong but I can sympathize a bit and forgive.
Then along comes Mapes. Considered "brilliant" by her peers. How did someone like her rise to the top of an information broker like CBS? She's not an outlier, she's the norm.
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