Once again, the rumors are getting louder about the New York Times going (back) behind a paywall. It probably says a lot about my personal biases that I found Foster Kamer’s Gawker article the most interesting — not least because of the comments engendered by it. You don’t get nearly such a range of… creativity… in the “Letters to Ye Editors”.
I would actually be willing to pay some kind of subscription to keep a high-quality “paper of record” online, because I’ve reduced a 30-year daily newspaper addiction down to a Sunday-only over-the-counter purchase for the ad inserts and leisurely browsing when screenreading isn’t convenient. And as a comparatively old person with an established pressed-pulpwood addiction, I should be a prime target. But I bitterly resent the idea of giving so much as a thin dime to the godsdamned New York Times, because they’re the Gordon-Gekko-besotted bandits who eviscerated my dependable Boston Globe and sabotaged its various delivery services in a (vain) attempt to “convince” Bostonians of a better-than-fourth-grade reading ability to switch to the NYTimes. As it turns out, Sulzberger’s People could wean me off buying the Globe, but they couldn’t force me to buy the Times, and I can only assume I’ve got plenty of company out here in the wilds beyond the Hudson. Suggestions as to alternative options gratefully accepted.
But it gladdened my shriveled heart to read that The Moustache of Understanding is no longer sanguine about the free exchange of ideas in the global marketplace…
Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.
“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”
Friedman is now “pro some kind of pay model,” he says. “My own feeling is, we have to do anything we can to raise money,” he told me. “At some point we gotta charge for our product.”
I asked Friedman whether any of the technologists he meets during his globe-trotting had presented any groundbreaking ideas for how to save the Times and journalism. While he’s optimistic about the coming crop of tablets and e-readers, the answer is no. “We’re in a megatransition. It hasn’t ever felt like anyone has the answer,” he said. “My macro feeling is that I’m glad I had this job at this time. It was great working at the paper when it was on dead trees and could pay for itself.”
Such are the harsh judgements that must be made when a Very Serious Person’s family fortunes are cruelly reduced from a decently prosperous $3-billion-plus to a mere handful of millions. Perhaps the NYT’s last paywall-free front page can headline a five-page article chronicling the sad plight of its most illustrious pundits, reduced to scrabbling for speaking fees and book contracts with the unwashed hoi polloi from Fox News and the wingnuttier outposts of Heartland America(tm).
Keith G
Which is why I seldom read this man.
Three years ago, I paid. Would not, now.
Kiril
“Megatransition?” “Macro feeling?” What kind of dickhead talks like that to another human being? Time for the link again.
glocksman
If Friedman and MoDo are the NYT’s ‘A-list’, then they are quite simply doomed.
Snark aside, I might be willing to pay for an online subscription if they had a top flight news section and a first rate editorial department that featured good writers from all sides.
The problem is with few exceptions like Krugman, most of the Times’s columnists are fucking hacks and their news section isn’t quite what it used to be either.
The lesson from TimesSelect that they should have drawn is that you have to offer a superior product if you want to charge for what was formerly free.
LosGatosCA
So I’m reading this in a cab on my way to the Detroit airport, and I ask the cab driver if he would pay for the NY Times access.
And I’ll be damned if he isn’t an unemployed auto engineer who was previously employed at Chrysler.
He tells me his world has been flattened, his net worth pulverized, and his best prospects seem to be working in a call center for Tata Motors.
But he remains optimistic, so sure, even if he can’t land that job at Tata, he plans to use whatever cash might be left over from paying for his medical insurance mandate, to glean the important news from a great national newspaper.
No, gaiety and optimism still exist in the hearts of the downtrodden would be slumdogs of Detroit. Even the white, God fearing, middle aged ones with graduate degrees.
Funkhauser
Tom, those are more than five words. Please go away.
Fencedude
Ok, I can sorta get “Mega Transition”, its stupid, but at least almost makes some sort of sense.
But “Macro Feeling” what the fuck?
Riggsveda
Given what passes for journalism these days, few of the NY Times columnists and stories would be missed by me. With the exception of a few pundits like Krugman who bring genuine expertise to the table (as opposed to a talent for unearthing gossip), our national mental health could only improve upon the loss of such pot-stirrers. As for the reporters of stories, how often do we read stories that require skimming through the first 7-12 paragraphs before reaching the real subject of the headline? How often do we find actual investigative work, rather than press releases or buried spin, in its pages? That said, it’s still one of the finest newspapers in the country, but given the steady degradation of journalistic standards, that doesn’t mean anything like it did in 1970.
The internet allows an individual to spend their entire online time immersed only in their own politically comfortable world, and I see the evolution of newspapers gradually adapting to this model (see the Washington Post now, compared to the work it did during Watergate). Maybe the future for real reporting lies in the return of broadsheets stuffed in mailboxes and left in public byways, cried on the street by newsboys and girls. Unless news can be amputated from the influence of political and corporate power, I don’t see how else it can survive as a viable source of truth and information.
Mike Kay
Fcuk the Times. I wouldn’t pee on them if they were on fire.
dr. bloor
Goes a long way toward explaining why every column he’s written about the world economy over the past umpteen years is shit.
Shorter Preening Egos: We want our eyeballs and our cash.
2th&nayle
I might eek out a measure of regret for the demise of the NYT if it offered anything like comprehensive political journalism. It simply does not. Mores the pity.
Napoleon
Well if by paying the NY Times I might cut off MaDo and Tommy from their readership that might just be money well spent.
El Cid
When the NYT starts to pay back some of the money they cost us all (directly and indirectly) by becoming a propaganda hack organ for the Iraq War II, then I might think about it. Otherwise, they can go to hell.
Sly
In nine words: My macro feelings is that I need to have a megatransition away from reading anything in the NYT.
Dennis-SGMM
I am so much of an Old Guy that I have this antiquated notion that success in selling something first requires that it be worth buying. Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, the up-and-coming Ross Douthat? Other than Krugman, the NYT‘s op-ed pages seem to have distinguished themselves by employing people who consistently and emphatically Get it Wrong.
WereBear
Yes, the NY Times stinks and has been coasting on their rep for at least a decade, if not more, and they were up to their necks in the Iraq war-sell.
I’m not weeping for the loss of what they have become.
The new ad I saw, where you read it online like the webpage/magazine hybrid it dreams of being, could be worth some subscription money; if it was good.
They need to work on that part.
Boney Baloney
Intelligent people know what they think and believe, without continual unconditional reinforcement from their peer group or nagging sensations of insecurity.
The point of the Internet is to keep up with people who not only don’t understand simple facts, but are guilty of bad faith. And understanding where they’re coming from. Really understanding, not making up sad nicknames for people with whom you disagree. Otherwise, you’re kind of wanking, aren’t you?
Lisa K.
Nothing Tom Friedman or Maureen Dowd writes is worth paying for. I hardly ever read them for nothing.
Brian J
It’s hard to know exactly what form this partially paid, partially free model will take, but so far, it makes sense. It’s easy to be a regional paper or even a regional paper that tries to make a national splash by being a part of a conglomerate, but it’s harder to be a national and international paper and give away a lot of the product for free while not being part of bigger corporation. To continue to be anything worthwhile, they will need some sort of fresh revenue, at least for the time being. They aren’t as vital as, say, the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal are for business people, if only because there are that many high quality general news sources available, but they do have enough of a reach, I believe, that they can get a lot of people to pay.
As I said, at this point, the model seems smart. There aren’t that many stories from any paper that are must-reads each day. By still giving away a certain amount for free, they can probably keep up the hits to a point where any overall drop off isn’t too damaging. Bloggers can still link to a major story and have most people be able to read it, for instance.
I do think that there needs to be some investment in the paper itself. I don’t know if it’s a major of hiring a couple of reporters to simply do whatever they want or a couple of well regarded business columnists or some bloggers, but making any sort of payment a little more justified takes the sting out of forking over any amount of money.
As for the Boston Globe, I rarely read it, so I can’t speak for the change in its quality, but I now see why my idea of trying to fold the paper itself into The Times might not work. I do think, however, that the paper’s recent strategy of trying to offer more localized content outside of the Northeast as it did in Chicago and San Fransisco is smart. As the paper itself admits, it’s not a huge reason to subscribe, but if it does help drive the print edition or simply makes more people go to nytimes.com, it’ll be worth it. I just think it needs to be expanded to a lot more areas, like Los Angeles, D.C., and other major metropolitan regions. If the paper can’t afford to make that much of an investment, it can use local university journalism programs. They recently gave one of the Brooklyn blogs over to CUNY, and from what I understand, the San Fransisco office is only 10-15 people, so Berkeley will eventually produce some of the content.
Anastasius
If we spread the word I am sure we could raise enough cash to ban Friedman behind a paywall for, let’s say, 6 months. And at the end of that time we evaluate if additional 6 months are appropriate.
Brian J
@glocksman:
I don’t read any of them besides Krugman, so I can’t offer an informed opinion, but enough people seem to feel the way you feel. That’s why any plan to charge for columnists would be nuts. There are plenty of free opinions out there any way, but if they are allegedly as bad as some say, it’s weird to expect anyone to pay.
Scott
A coworker and I are both former newspaper people. Watching the near-constant errors and shortcomings of print journalism over the last few years has gotten both of us to convert from “Newspapers have intrinsic worth and I hope they can get over their silliness and succeed again” to “To hell with them, let them die.”
glocksman
@Brian J:
Friedman and MoDo *are* that bad.
LosGatosCA’s post below mine is a pitch perfect satire of the typical Friedman column.
As far as MoDo goes, her and Bonnie Erbe are neck in neck for the ‘ 2nd* most clueless woman alive’ title.
*Sarah Palin has the #1 spot locked up.
Platonicspoof
Still wrong.
Once upon a time they earned subscriber loyalty through credibility.
I never was able to figure out the disconnect between the NYT, WaPo, my local tv stations, etc., before the Iraq occupation, and the hundreds of thousands in this country, and the millions around the world, in the streets protesting pre-emptive war waged for unbelievable reasons.
If ever there was a time for the NYT to have been on the side of their subscribers and truth and America and Iraq, that was it.
That I would pay for, but they’re not much more believable to me than anyone else.
Jamey
I read the Times because it’s free. Period. There are other sites I read, some of which I voluntarily pay for. But, really, the only time I read NYT is when someone whose opinion I actually seek out links me to a Times article.
I managed for those few years when Times last ducked behind the paywall. Being deprived of David Brooks’s factually-challenged simpering wouldn’t keep me awake at work, let alone at night in bed.
El Cid
I’d pay a bit of money to read the NYT’s science section. I used to make sure and go out and buy the Tuesday edition whenever I was near vending machines. It’s always pretty good, and think of it — science as a section of a daily newspaper! With thinkin’ and pointy heads and stuff, right there in black & white!
aimai
I come from a five or six newspapers a morning type family. All through graduate school I routinely read both the local paper, whatever it was, and the times. Now I’m all grown up I don’t subscribe to either the times or the globe–I’ll read them if I’m out having coffee, but I don’t sit down and read them cover to cover anymore. The globe because the national coverage is three day old AP/Times stuff, the times because its dry and unreliable and largely corporatist in focus. They lost me under Howell Raines, with the abysmal WhiteWater coverage and the Wen Ho Lee thing. Long before the Judy Miller Iraq war fraud they went down the tubes attacking Clinton for utterly baseless stuff. And they never recovered.
aimai
aimai
Oh, “factually challenged simpering” is really, really, good.
Joey Maloney
@glocksman:
When was the Times’ news section what it used to be? Was it when James Gerth created Whitewater by credulously repeating the fantastic lies of Bill Clinton’s political enemies and a mentally-unbalanced manic depressive? Was it later when the same Gerth destroyed Wen Ho Lee’s personal and professional reputation based on never-named sources? Was it when Judy Miller was concealing her connections with the people who had the most to gain from the invasion of Iraq? Was it when Jayson Blair was inventing, well, everything?
Going further back, was it when they were completely scooped on Watergate?
I can’t recall a time in my adult life when the Times’ news operation has reached even the minimal standard of doing their job on a high-stakes story.
[Oops, should’ve read ahead. Shorter me: what aimai said, better.]
eastriver
I get the Times delivered to my door each and every day. It’s my local rag. I don’t read it for the op-ed page, although Krugman is nice Mon/Fri bonus. The dead-tree-ness of it is indeed becoming an anachronism.
But isn’t everything these days? Including blogs?
The answer to keeping full-time journalists employed isn’t HuffPo, certainly. Maybe something more along the lines of TPM. But TPM seems to be forming into a mini online newspaper. A smaller, not-as-good version of the Times. There are many, many sections of the Times. And most of the writing is usually worth reading. The political slant can be a bit slanted and shameful at times.
But isn’t everything these days? Including blogs?
Punchy
Somewhere Baby Math Jesus cried.
Emma
I pay for the Financial Times. The McClatchy feed I would pay for if they decided to “go behind a wall”. The Times? As someone upthread said, I’m going to miss the Science section. The Travel section too…
glocksman
@Joey Maloney:
The Pentagon Papers.
The NYT never was perfect, but they weren’t always the ball-washers for the political class, either.
arguingwithsignposts
As long as we’re talking the wonder that was the news section of the New York Times, we would be remiss not to mention Walter Duranty.
kansi
LosGatosCA
FTW!
also, what aimai said, too
BruceFromOhio
That’s just got to be the insult after the injury – when your bosses try to charge for your product, the customer vanishes? That’s got to sting.
@glocksman & @aimai: This. Hackery is the new standard, and isn’t worth the price, any price. You give it away, sure, I’ll read when I stumble across it. But brand loyalty went out the window a long time ago.
El Cid
@Joey Maloney: Was it when they were shoving Ray Bonner off into the business section because he had successfully uncovered the massacre of civilians at El Mozote, El Salvador, and thus offended Saint Ronaldus of Reagan and his minion of Darkness, Elliot Abrams, and the U.S. Ambassador? There too, after a while — in this case 10 years, when the actual bodies were exhumed — the NYT apologized to Bonner for basically acting as Reagan administration counter-insurgency war propaganda hacks.
d0n camillo
That was such a brilliant idea to start charging for the Times opinion pieces while leaving their news free. I mean, if there’s one thing there’s a dire shortage of on the Internet it’s opinions.
It did give consumers a chance to tell Modo and Friedman to. Suck. On. This. Let’s hope we get another chance.
Quiddity
The real question is, when will Balloon Juice start charging for access? And will there be an option to filter out General Winfield Stuck’s snarky comments?
eastriver
@Quiddity:
Generally Stuck. Yes. Agree. Ditto, and so forth.
Sly
In relation to this thread about the Texas Board of Ed. and rewriting textbooks, TPM covered it a while back and peeled some exerpts of the meeting from their live feed.
This one is probably the best of the series, in which the lead douchebag thinks that textbooks should give due praise to the white male majority for giving women and blacks civil rights.
General Winfield Stuck
@Quiddity: I will haunt your blog experience till the end of time. No Stuck filter for you – MR. smarmy person who takes shots at people not on a thread.
And eastriver — isn’t it a little early to come from under your rock.
Bellwetherman
Newspapers should adopt a policy of making pro sports franchises pay for their coverage. Why should profit-making corporations have their publicity subsidized by the news industry?
Chad N Freude
@Punchy: The first ten words are twofers, plus one bonus word.
ono
Maybe the NYT can get the Senate to mandate Americans buy their rag, like the way the insurance corporatos got the Senate to do with health care.
Chad N Freude
Krugman yes. Science yes. Health also, too. But am I the only one here who likes Frank Rich? And the thoughtful Sunday Magazine pieces (well, not every week, but often enough)?
Zach
I think Friedman is overstating the importance of this. Just yesterday I was golfing in Dubai with a Sudanese expat, while his Australian wife was simultaneously texting her mates in Sydney and reading Friedman’s column on megatrendsitions on her iPhone; Friedman’s macro feeling really isn’t borne out in the context of our flat, megamicrotwined earth.
Sam
Amen about the Globe there, Anne. What used to be one of the best papers in the country has been eviscerated by the Times management. It’s hard to know how much of that would have happened anyway, but it’s clear, as you say, that the Times was gently trying to nudge people like me to subscribe to the Times, which I wouldn’t read if it were the last newspaper on earth – ugly, full of itself, unable to apologize properly for the smallest error, and, for those of us with less sophisticated tastes, an abysmal sports section and no comics. Grrr.
GReynoldsCT00
@Chad N Freude:
I love Frank Rich!
Keith G
@General Winfield Stuck:
//giggling//
Brian J
@eastriver:
I think part of the problem is that because everyone reads The Times, its errors are found more easily and more magnified than if it were a less high profile paper. None of this excuses any mistakes in judgment or anything like that, but it does help to put what happens in perspective.
burnspbesq
Okay, freeriders: explain to me (in tiny words cuz I ar stoopid) how critically important stuff like this article by Scott Horton gets researched, reported, and distributed after every viable business model for gathering and distributing news has been destroyed.
Those activities have costs associated with them, and there is no Freebie Fairy that can magically make those costs disappear. Someone has to pay. If you can come up with a reason why the person who has to pay shouldn’t be the consumer, I am all ears.
Or maybe you are happy to live in a world where access to information is a luxury good.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Well, right there it is clear to me that he doesn’t get the new realities at all.
Why assume that NYT and journalism are in the same box of things that might be saved? To me, big corporate outlets, be they print or electronic, are to journalism what WalMart is to retail: The death of the entrepreneurial spirit, the end of individualism, the end of local focus and the conversion of journalism into crass pursuits, and marketing values.
I’m guessing that the survival of journalism depends on the end of NYT and Gannett and the other media conglomerates, and the creation of something else, the exact nature of which is not yet known. I was an early adopter of NYT online, I rejected their first pay per view model, and I will reject the next one. I have a populist view of what the intertubes are supposed to be, and a monetized and privileged venue that makes life enjoyable for the Friedmans and Dowds of the world has nothing whatever to do with the “survival of journalism” as far as I am concerned.
Chad N Freude
@Zach: This is a forgery. There is only one brand name. The golf course is not named, the hotel where he was staying is not named, and the brand of golf clubs was not named. Clearly not written by the real Friedman.
Ash Can
Emma touches on a good point above. Think about it — when was the last time we were bitching about, or singing the praises of, a Financial Times pundit? The FT doesn’t bother with that crap. The NYT could pull itself out of its doldrums overnight by ditching their entire Op-Ed section and redirecting that cash to boots-on-the-ground news reporting. I mean, let’s face it. Everyone is his/her own political pundit. What do the paid pundits, good or bad, contribute to the national discourse anyway? If there’s really a market for them, let them go on line or join think tanks. Even those pundits who I tend to like, like Krugman and E. Klein — they make us glad that there’s someone out there with horse sense, and they give us talking points to rally around, but they could be doing that from a 538 or a TPM. Maybe it’s just time for the papers, even the biggest ones, to get back to the basics of reporting, and cut the pundits — all of them — loose to sink or swim on their own.
GReynoldsCT00
@burnspbesq:
Part of the problem, for me, is the quality of the information. Right now I can think of an online paper I’d pay for. As someone commented above, a variety of good reporters, all sides, etc. would be appealing. Understood that running it isn’t free but they could do a better job IMO.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Punchy:
He cried, and then realized that the Five Words are “I used to read you.”
What Friedman gets wrong is the notion that they will stop reading him when they put up the wall. They will stop reading him because his medium got replaced with something else. The wall is just a spasm along that road.
The fact that Friedman can’t figure this out actually pleases me considerably. That tells me that the eventual resolution might actually be something cool, or good.
Zach
On the open-thread front, here’s National Review showing they can be anti-business when its in their personal interest: Maggie Gallagher’s a diabetic, so biologic drugs should not have extended patent protection.
A few posts later, Mark Rubio (recipient of NR starbursts before Scott Brown) boldly defends his opposition to the bank tax: “This is life in Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s America, where not only is free enterprise attacked, but so too is anyone who dares to defend it.”
The economic impact of the decision on drug patents is much bigger than the $117B/10 years we’d raise off the bank tax … $50B/year in biologic sales and rising fast.
Chad N Freude
@burnspbesq: I would quite happily pay a subscription fee for an aggregation of newspapers and magazines from which I could choose the ones I wanted to read while ignoring the others.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
No, but there is the Advertising Fairy that supported free television all those years, and supports things like NewTimes newspapers for free in some American cities.
NewTimes built readership by offering entertaining and hard hitting content, and giving away their papers. Advertisers lined up to show their wares in the those papers. Meanwhile Gannett bought the formerly prosperous local paper and has reduced its readership by roughly 50% if my half-assed research is correct.
jwb
@Chad N Freude: I’m glad somebody else mentioned Rich.
Ash Can
@Sly: I wonder how many people realize what a serious and genuine threat this lead douchebag, and all his allies on that Texas State Trainwreck of Education, are to the future of the USA. If they succeed in making the nation’s textbooks all but worthless, then stick a fork in Lady Liberty; she’s done.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
The manufacturers of the info products cannot sink the USA, only the consumers can do that. Just as McDonalds can’t ruin your health, you have to go there and eat the food in order to have your health ruined.
The consumer of information has all the power, not the producers. That’s the basis of actual liberty, and that’s why Lady Liberty will eventually be okay. Once consumers and citizens figure out what their true interests are, they will choose in accordance with their true interests. There may be ugliness along the road but that’s just part of the process. The American Revolution was not exactly a hugfest.
Brian J
@Ash Can:
They will probably be moving in that direction, if not in print then online. Its City Room blog will be getting bigger and have more New York-centric content, although that is probably based in part on The Wall Street Journal’s new New York edition.
As for columnists, it’d be a good idea to hire people because of their expertise more than anything else. I think they are starting to do that, too. William Cohan started writing an online column a few weeks ago.
Legalize
I guess I might miss the Times if it was presenting a credible product for me to pay for. It isn’t. That Freedman and MoDo are the heavy-weights over there indicates to me that the Times doesn’t get the problem. It’s not the internet, and it’s not “journalism” per se. It’s that the Times doesn’t do good journalism any more.
Chad N Freude
@Zach: Gallagher’s position is completely consistent with with conservative philosophy: Anything I need should be priced through government control, anything I don’t need should be priced by an oligarchic free market.
BruceFromOhio
@burnspbesq:
I will happily pay for things that do not suck – Consumer Reports and “Invention & Technology” subscriptions are good examples. The little bi-weekly local paper is another one.
If you can come up with a reason why I should pay for things that suck like an F4 twister in a Kansas cornfield, I’ll consider it.
ETA: And there are degrees of suckiness – is it worth paying for Krugman and Rich if I have to dig through Friedman, Dowd and Douthat? That’s what we get to test.
jwb
@Ash Can: They’d have to become completely subscription to go to all-news, and I don’t think they could be successful doing general news because there are too many other sources. The thing about opinion is that it is relatively cheap and predictable both in production costs and in drawing eyeballs.
handy
@burnspbesq:
It’s not about the idea of paying for journalistic works. It’s about the idea of paying for the NYT.
eastriver
@BruceFromOhio: @BruceFromOhio:
Then don’t read it. No one is going to supply a reason for you to do something you don’t want to do. Duh. Rinse. Repeat.
Mark S.
David Brooks:
This is why NYT columnists are worth every penny. Most columnists wouldn’t dare to compare China and Haiti and draw any conclusions between two countries that are about as different as an elephant and a mosquito, but that’s why Brooks makes millions.
eastriver
@Keith G:
/like a little girl.
Chad N Freude
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: Individual consumers do not choose the textbooks their children will use on an individual basis. (The image of a classroom using thirty different textbooks is kind of amusing.)
I think a lot of consumers and citizens don’t really know what their true interests are, e.g., Medicare recipients who don’t want Government controlling their medical insurance, low-salaried workers who oppose an estate tax, etc., etc., etc., and I don’t have a lot of confidence that they’re going to figure it out any time soon, like maybe never.
jwb
@Chad N Freude: This strikes me as a more viable model—where you’d pay something on the order of what we pay now for a deadtree subscription to a newspaper for access to a large array of news sources. But that’s still going to reduce greatly the revenues of the papers, so I’m sure they’ll think they can do better by doing it themselves.
Chad N Freude
@BruceFromOhio:
Dude, you don’t have to dig through anything. Just click a link. Unless, of course, looking at a list of names is digging,
Zach
@Chad N Freude: It’s actually not all that inconsistent (axing drug protections and not taxing are, I guess, both based on free market principles). For a better example of hypocrisy, NR opposes drug reimportation on account of our broken market being good for drug innovation… pure protectionism. I wonder where Gallagher comes down on this personally; drug reimportation would lower the price of insulin, too!
Cat Lady
The Times and the WaPo both missed the biggest stories of the decade – the Iraq lies and the financial bubble – and could barely muster a “mistakes were made” in either instance. They pantsed themselves, they haven’t acknowledged it, and it’s too late for them to do anything about it.
OT, but jeebus on a toast point kay is holding out as the last samurai on that Greenwald post from yesterday morning. kay’s my hero, or something.
inkadu
@Boney Baloney: I have some guilt about never reading the paper anymore.
I used to only read the New York Times. Their reporting on the Iraq War was such a disgrace, I stopped reading and turned to blogs.
Looking back, I see that I read newspapers because it was entertainment for someone who was interested in the news. The moment I actually became interested in the news, it became infuriating and not entertaining.
I justify blogging instead of reading the newspapers partly because it is politically biased. Do I really want to read twelve articles a day that struggle to maintain a faux balance between sides? It’s a waste of time. To suss out what’s what, I’d much rather have someone I know and trust, and a community of like-minded people to kick it around and knock the corners off.
As nice as it is to have a like-minded group, there’s no danger, among reasonable folks, that we’d get sucked into groupthink. How many people here are refugees from FDL or GOS?
We’re in a time when politics is everything. When Republicans have interesting health care reform proposals that they are willing to put forward and vote on, then I’ll start seeking out analysis of how health care could best be put together. But since the public debate is about death panels, I think a daily dose of “Republicans are assholes today because…” is perfectly appropriate.
Senatus delenda est.
jwb
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: Live by the ad-man, die by the ad-man. You want to ensure a corporate slant to your news, ad-supported media is the way.
Chad N Freude
@Mark S.: You miss Brooks’s point. If we hadn’t been supporting Haiti with foreign aid, they would have put their 1,325,639,982 citizens to work building an industrial economy, just like China did.
Zach
@inkadu:
You could substitute almost any major American daily for the NYT there. I lived in Illinois and read the Trib every day; same thing (generally a conservative paper, but generally rational as well). Reading how rock-solid the evidence of Saddam’s WMD was every day in every paper and seeing folks take it as gospel on TV and get shouted down as modern day Jane Fonda’s if they failed to presuppose millions of pounds of antrax was insane.
The difference is that the Times, at the time, was exceedingly influential (I guess because famously liberal voices were calling for war, and the whole Miller thing).
Chad N Freude
@Zach: I know. I was kind of hoping the not-really-equivalence would slip by unnoticed. I still think it’s an example of self-interested hypocrisy.
El Cid
Maybe Brooks thinks Haiti should have, like China, had a peasant-based authoritarian Communist revolution and a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist dictatorship open to Western investment but only under the conditions of its own approval.
(Not, of course, to mention that China still has 700 million peasants, which isn’t the crowd that jet-setters like Brooks, Friedman et al go see when they fly into the skyscraper cities of the new industrial and Eastern banking excess.)
inkadu
@Zach: Win.
Mark S.
@Chad N Freude:
I hadn’t thought of that. Geopolitics also played a role: the Russo-Haitian split in the early 60’s and “Only Nixon could go to Haiti.”
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Chad N Freude:
They do choose. They choose their school boards. They can choose funding for public school alternatives. They can choose private school. They can home school.
Morons took over school boards at first because voter turnout at school board elections was poor. Voters can organize and turn out the morons. I’ve seen turnout surveys in the ten percent range for school board elections. The morons are outnumbered, but they are outnumbered at the polls only if the non morons show up.
Democracy works pretty well, as long as people actually employ it to serve their interests. It takes a lot of work but anything that is worth doing is going to take work.
ericblair
@d0n camillo: That was such a brilliant idea to start charging for the Times opinion pieces while leaving their news free. I mean, if there’s one thing there’s a dire shortage of on the Internet it’s opinions.
This is what got me. Actual reporting they can afford to give away, but access to these pearls of wisdom is something that the masses must get the credit card out for. The Village has a wee bit of an inflated sense of self-worth, methinks.
The difference between assholes and opinions is that some people will pay good money for access to other people’s assholes.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@jwb:
No, I don’t agree with that. Advertising is the foundation of media monetization. Advertisers go where the eyeballs and the ears are. Period. If sandwich boards on elephants had the eyeballs, that’s where the advertisers would be.
And my take on advertising is that it wants to be content neutral to the greatest possible extent. Advertisers don’t want to exert control on content unless they feel that they have to for some reason. They’d avert their eyes at donkey sex if their customers put up with it. They’re whores.
Which is good, in this context.
Zach
@Chad N Freude: I posted it in the first place because it seemed hypocritical and agree; just found a better example. I like to try and figure out how the arguments made at National Review can be synthesized into a consistent philosophy (primary example: explaining how the underpants bomber is nothing like the shoe bomber). It’s fun because it makes me feel like Ptolemy.
burnspbesq
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
The Advertising Fairy that supported daily newspapers isn’t the same Advertising Fairy that supports television. Newspaper advertising has historically been a combination of classifieds and display ads mostly from local car dealers, department stores, and real estate brokers. The classified ad is dead; it was killed by a combination of job-hunting websites, eBay, and craigslist. In most markets, M&A activity has resulted in there being only one department store chain, plus Nordstrom in certain parts of the country. Whether car-dealer and real-estate display ads will return to their former volume when the economy starts to recover is anyone’s guess.
Subscription revenue was never a huge part of the daily newspaper business model. If it has to support the entire business, that’s highly problematic. Although, as Martin and others have noted, a fully online newspaper that doesn’t have to buy paper and ink and own and operate presses has a very different cost structure. That might arguably be viable, with an emphasis on “might.” Nobody knows, which is why the ongoing experiment in Seattle is so worth watching.
inkadu
@Zach: My come-to-blogs moment was a New York TImes front page article about a scientist who knew where the weapons of mass destruction has been stored. It went something like this: “The military pointed him out, a thirtyish man wearing jeans and a t-shirt on an air field surrounding by American soldiers. I was not allowed to approach the man or interview him.” Front page news. You want evidence? There’s a baggage handler. Right there. Weapons of mass destruction.
The thing about Iraq was you didn’t even need to be reading the blogs to know that it didn’t make any sense. I became angry with the New York Times just by reading the New York Times. The New York Times reported enough hard facts to see that they were a propaganda mill. It’s like even they didn’t read their own paper. Why should I?
I used to read the Boston Globe, too; but, reality here: most people are looking for information on drive-by shootings and child molestation. I could see the editorial slant was towards sensationalism and it really turned me off.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@inkadu:
But, it isn’t. The public noise machine was fascinated with death panels for a few weeks. But the general public is not concerned about death panels.
Which is not to say that they shouldn’t be. One of the first effects of the (limited) availability of kidney dialysis was the invention of actual death panels who decided who got the treatment and who didn’t. We have death panels now in the organ transplant business. They decide who gets the transplants and who dies.
The question about death panels is not whether we will need to have them … we will. The question is about who runs them, and how. And how easily the privileged can circumvent them. Those are the real questions, but there is no general public debate about them.
burnspbesq
@jwb:
Let’s assume for purposes of discussion that you’re right about that. What else you got? What’s your alternative?
Zach
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
As someone who grew up in Kansas, this is so true. Rational Kansans (the vast majority) let our guard down on three major occasions in the past decade We allowed the right to vote creationists onto the school board in 1999, they removed education from the curriculum, and we voted them out. We allowed an anti-abortion zealot to be voted Attorney General in 2002 who was an utter embarrassment. And we let our guard down, forgot history, and let idiots control the school board again in 2004, which led to the tragic/comic mock trial pitting evolution against intelligent design.
Zach
@inkadu:
Ironically, this was when I began to read Andrew Sullivan… some sort of masochism I guess.
jwb
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: Yes, you see such new organizations go after their advertisers all the time.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@burnspbesq:
.
Uh, you might want to check in with your local ad agencies. It’s the same fairy, and the same advertising agencies, buying the inches, and the minutes. The same agencies preparing the same campaigns that are adaptable to various media … radio, internet, tv, print, billboard, you name it.
Your local newspaper’s revenue stream is based on display ads, not classified ads. If I read the googlies correctly, classified advertising is floating at around 10% of total ad revenue, and has never been even half of ad revenue even in the salad days. Display ad revenue has collapsed because readership has collapsed.
inkadu
@burnspbesq: Do you really think magazines that have excellent content are going to go under en masse? I don’t see it. And there is solid political reporting in non-explicitly political magazines, like Rolling Stones and Playboy (go figure).
But if investigative reporting does go under, it will be because nobody gives a shit. Next time you’re at the supermarket, check out the magazine section. Look at all the crap that’s out there. There’s a market for knitting patterns, pie recipes, weight loss, weight gain, cars, motocross, horror movies, pc games, xbox games, playstation games… And its getting hard to find good “news/political” magazines; it can’t be because the internet is making everything free.
On a related note: Nothing sucks worse than eating an eight-dollar sandwich on a lunch break with nothing but Time magazine.
Chad N Freude
@Zach:
Good god, man, can’t you see the profound difference between underpants and shoes?
master c
I for one, use it for much more than op-ed…..
that part died when I got internet.
I do love it’s art and fashion, and it works as a national paper and I don’t have a replacement. I think when the online subscription kicks in, I will jettison the sunday- only edition I get for 32. a month. I will miss it.
jwb
@burnspbesq: No, I don’t have an answer, and I doubt very much that we’ll be able to get away from an ad-supported media, even if it is eventually supplemented by subscription income as well. It’s just that there are severe consequences to having the costs of our news gathering paid for only by advertisers. Because so long as they are paid only by their advertisers you and I are their primary product, not their customers; we are being served up, not served.
El Cid
If I could buy one publication which concentrated together the actual good investigative reporting without it being bundled together with a bunch of establishmentarian propaganda, I’d buy it.
SGEW
OT
Scott Horton drops the bombshell he’s been sitting on:
The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle
Read the whole thing. They tortured three men to death, then covered it up. And the current Justice Dept. continues to cover it up. Period.
inkadu
@burnspbesq: Whatever will be will be. We’re not writing the rules. There are changes coming that we might predict, but certainly can’t control. The future will probably be a hybrid of a lot of different media funded in different ways. Kinda like now.
The Raven
Are we talking about a penny a day, or 50 cents a day, I wonder.
Zach
@El Cid: People always bring up the Christian Science Monitor when someone makes that sort of request. I have no clue if this is reasonable.
scudbucket
@burnspbesq: there is no Freebie Fairy that can magically make those costs disappear. Someone has to pay.
Maybe the NY Times could go the way of college bowl games and sell naming rights to its columnists: The ‘Thomas Friedman, brought to you by Citi’ column, The Tostitos MoDo Moment, The Applebees Buffet by David Brooks…
inkadu
@Zach: Never tuned into Sully regularly… was he an Iraq supporter? There were many bloggy dissapointments on the Iraq war. I think Matt Yglesias was one. Kevin Drum was another. But at least we could yell at them and they could get defensive. It’s way more fun that way.
Chad N Freude
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: As Texas goes, so go the textbook publishers. It’s hard to imagine a lot of California parents pulling their kids out of public schools because all the available textbooks are politically and religiously biased. Of course, CA is probably a bad example, since the budget mess now prevents new textbooks for several years.
I don’t have a lot of confidence in changing the textbook selection committees because of their choices. Even when they do
ellaesther
Well, I was planning on dropping off the following holiday gift at Balloon Juice today, and honestly, you couldn’t have provided me with a more perfect thread.
I’ll just put it here:
“[The] prevalent tendency toward softmindedness is found in man’s unbelievable gullibility… seen in the tendency of many readers to accept the printed word of the press as final truth. Few people realize that even our authentic channels of information — the press, the platform, and in many instances the pulpit — do not give us objective and unbiased truth. Few people have the toughness of mind to judge critically and to discern the true from the false, the fact from the fiction. Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and false facts. One of the great needs of mankind is to be lifted above the morass of false propaganda.” [emphasis mine]
This quote? From Strength to Love, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The book was published in 1963, but if I understand its chronology correctly, the sermon from which that passage is taken was written in about 1955.
There is nothing new under the sun, and Dr. King had us pegged more ways than we even know anymore.
Keith G
@inkadu: Sully was a cheerleader on poppers. Drum was more Hamlet-like, but still an eventual supporter, never a cheerleader.
Chad N Freude
@inkadu: Vanity Fair. First-rate political journalism. I would subscribe if they cured their Anna Wintour syndrome.
Mark S.
@inkadu:
Oh yes.
Xenos
@Keith G:
Amyl Nitrate poppers or Karl Poppers?
I suppose either or both may be true, but doing them simultaneously seems really quite reckless.
Egypt Steve
One way for the Times to save money would be to pay jerk-offs like Friedman $35K a year. With every other major paper in the world destroyed, where else are they gonna go?
Keith G
@Chad N Freude: The fucking weird thing about Texas is the irrational level of political power given to rural areas. I say this as a former teacher and occasional political operative.
We see this in the US Senate where a senator representing less than 2% of the population can hold up or significantly change important legislation.
The state board of education in Texas therefore has members from districts where armadillos out number people (slight exaggeration). Meanwhile more liberal/moderate urban populations in Houston and Austin are held hostage by these rubes.
The curriculum wars are dominated by loudmouth nuts whose power is not representative of the complexity of the general population.
inkadu
Ya know the Iraq war debacle happened about 8 years ago? Why does it feel like it was yesterday? Must be important, I guess. The whole war thing. Probably a good idea to get things like that right if you’re a newspaper.
So far the response to “Was Andrew Sullivan a war supporter?” has only been matched by the response to an equally ignorant question, “The Pet Shop Boys are gay?”
I’m making bacon. I don’t want to eat it. But I think it would be good for the skillet.
Michael
You hit an important point. Gannett really screwed up newsgathering across middle America by purchasing newspapers and then slashing newsgathering budgets to the bone.
As a result, you wound up with uniformity of national coverage, as news operations from across the country no longer had an independent Washington office. Less investigation, less journalism, more opinion was the result.
It is, after all, cheaper to pay some asshole to give his opinion than it is to have reporters digging up facts. And why alienate powerful pols and businessmen when you can instead act as a stenographer for templated press releases?
In the end, your shareholders get a lot more money and they’re happy, but in the process, you destroy the market for your product.
Nice going there, Captains of Capital. As usual, you destroyed your own business in your quest to wring every last dollar out of the entities you bought.
Personally, I’d like to go shit on Ronald Reagan’s grave.
Chad N Freude
@inkadu:
Which leads to the questions “Did the Pet Shop Boys support the war and is Andrew Sullivan gay?”
The Republic of Stupidity
Isn’t Friedman the one who wrote w/ such cavalier flair about others losing their jobs to globalization and how maybe this was a good thing?
Welcome to your world, Tom…
You’ll have to understand if some of us aren’t exactly crying for you, huh?
Now, if the very same ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace that made it neigh near impossible for the NYT to charge for content on-line treats Lord Murdoch the same way…
We can only hope.
Chad N Freude
@Michael: Wasn’t there once a story about killing geese or something? Think how happy the shareholders will be when there are no newspapers to generate any revenue at all.
Chad N Freude
@Keith G:
How do you tell the difference? This will be a challenge for the Census.
jwb
@Michael: But you missed the best part where they blame the Internet rather than their own idiocy for destroying their market.
Cervantes
@glocksman:
When the NYT published the Pentagon Papers, it was not acting against “the political class” — rather, it was (a) enabling one part of the political class to speak out loud against another part; and (b) making money. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
inkadu
@Chad N Freude: Oh, please! Even I know Sullivan’s gay.
But your question forces me to ask other questions: If the Pet Shop Boys ran a blog in 2002, would I have been reading it? And would it have been better than the New York TImes?
jwb
@The Republic of Stupidity: the tragedy is that moustache will be just fine no matter what happens to the Times. That’s one of the perks of being a Very Serious Person ™. VSPs never have to suffer anything worse than serving time at a think tank or (horror) a university post.
The Republic of Stupidity
@ellaesther:
Hmmm… after a couple of recent discussions here concerning the man’s work, I went out and found a copy of Hunter Thompson’s excellent Hell’s Angels book.
Strangely enough, the real point of that work was/is almost EXACTLY what King said in that quote. I kid you not.
The book wasn’t so much about what rotten human beings the Angels were (they were) but more about how the American press latched onto the phenomenon of the ‘motorcycle outlaw’ and built it into an hysterical fantasy that never actually existed the way it was depicted.
Boogeymen on motorbikes…
And here we are today… w/ Fox News… Glenn Beck… El Rushbo… PT Barnum was right. He’d be SOOOOO successful if he came back…
Chad N Freude
No one has mentioned the LA Times, which is still practicing excellent journalism in spite of a series of horrendous management changes (forced by Sam Zell of Tribune incompetence fame) that eviscerated the staff. They have managed to retain some very good investigative journalists and excellent columnists.
Although they carry Jonah G’s column. I guess perfection is unachievable.
scav
@jwb: ok, that’s done it. Simply beginning to visualize The Moustache of Poetry has driven me from the toobz for the day. The deities of productivity thank you.
Hiram Taine
@Chad N Freude:
The armadillos don’t knock on your door and
quotemisquote Scripture at you?Chad N Freude
@inkadu: Dude, EVERYBODY knows that he’s gay. Your joke detector needs recalibration.
Keith G
Speaking of Kevin Drum, his view of how Republicans are winning back the public (such as they are) is pretty good.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/01/losing-thread#comments
inkadu
@Chad N Freude: My rejoinder was more about general ignorance on these matters… Sullivan is so gay, that even I know it.
Meh.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Chad N Freude:
Well, the point is, there are things they can do, and they do not have to sit back and let the morons rule.
The morons took over the school boards by taking advantage of the fact that turnout was low. They saw a political opportunity and took it. And leveraged it. The bad news is, the morons devised a good game plan and outplayed the smart people.
The good news is, the game has no clock. The game is replayed continuously. The smart people outnumber the morons. If they organize and play well, they will win, and take back the school boards and the county boards of supervisors and the city councils and the state legislatures and the congress and the White House. Well, we already did the last two, and already the smart people are quaking in fear of the revenge of the morons.
Take heart. We still outnumber them. That is our ace in the hole.
The Republic of Stupidity
@jwb:
After so many Pulitzers and best sellers?
Sadly true… but at least we get to tweak the jerk’s nose…
Chad N Freude
@Keith G: His analysis doesn’t acknowledge that Democratic bloviators have not so far drawn anywhere an audience anywhere near size of the lockstep audience of the right. And the “independents” who pay attention to Drudge/Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck are unreachable anyway.
Chad N Freude
I have to leave for a couple of hours. Could you all stop posting until I get back?
Thank you.
BruceFromOhio
@eastriver: Duh. Rinse. Repeat. Got it, thanks. I’d be lost without you.
Elie
As much as I am not a regular reader of the Times anymore, on-line or otherwise, I do see this as another sign of the massive transformation that is happening in the United States.
The Times is not just a huge capitalist ‘propaganda’ institution along with many others that are failing, but a major employer — and not just of the Modo’s and Friedman’s. Its failure and the general failure of the print media and other outlets puts a lot of people out of work and seeking alternative employment. Right now, the alternatives in journalism are bleak and much creativity will be needed to re-invigorate whatever sector will be the source/s of future information exchange and journalism. The blogs have captured some of the revenue, but not really all that much (though I have no statistics on this).
Of course, much of our corporate sector, most recently health care as well, will be downsizing and that downsizing means lost jobs on a very practical and downhome level. Lost jobs mean political and social turmoil even as we know this has to happen and is in line with where we need to be globally. It is just going to be painful and ugly as hell…
morzer
I have a micro-memory that the Moustache’s macro-economic situation is that he married a mega-wealthy chromosomally-advantaged person, and so a temporary economic micro-employment-transition would hardly hurt the macro-finances of Friedman T. at all.
Michael
My take is that this all originated with the temper tantrum wingers had about the revelations of Watergate. I remember the discussions my folks and the other wingers had – they didn’t want to know about it and were resentful that anybody told about it.
White people in the South have always tended to roll that way – don’t bring any bad news (defined as “news that conflicts with the global worldview of White Southern Christians), and if it arrives, kill the messenger.
Thus, in their mindset, Watergate was all about liberal reporting, and was therefore evil. Corporate America started buying up newspapers, and rather than be stuck with the “you’re liberal media owners, you fuckers”, instead overreacted in the opposite direction.
inkadu
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: The morons have their own political party now, and that captures the vote of semi-morons as well. The kerfluffle in Texas is partly due to political appointees.
53% to 46%. After eight years of devastating failure. With a world-class candidate squared off against a senile crank with a Goebeels-in-a-skirt sidekick.
I’m not so sure we outnumber the total population of morons if you include semi-morons — aka “moderates and independents”.
Bad Horse's Filly
It’s 12:57 est/ 10:57 mst. Does anyone know if our intrepid host made it through the night?
The Republic of Stupidity
@inkadu:
Siiiiiiiiiiiigh… in my heart-of-hearts, I’ve allus feared the rest of us were FAAAAAAAAAAR outnumbered by the Deliverance Demographic™…
***sound of lone banjo in the distance…***
fraught
I cancelled my dead tree, home-delivered subscription a few months ago becauseit was costing me $600.00 a year just for the warm cozy feeling I got from getting my hands and clothes dirty from ink and filling up my apartment with piles of Times high enough to make me a soul mate of the Collier Brothers. $600 was just an immoral amount of money to spend on a 50+ yo habit when I should have been sending it to Haiti or anti-Prop 8 work. It took some withdrawal anxiety but I did it and I was feeling free until this wall started to come up again.
This will doom the Times. Watch it happen.
morzer
Well, so long as it’s Ralph Stanley playing, it can’t be all bad.
Martin
They have to lose the actual paper part. Seriously, that’s killing them and it’s half their costs.
They need to adopt an electronic model that is as drop-dead simple to plunk down $.99 to read the sunday edition as it is for 3 billion aps to get sold for iPhones. On the web, on devices, whatever.
They should have gotten started on that a decade ago, but old fucks running the show were convinced that 3 million dollar four-color printing presses could compete with a couple of guys using $1000 iMacs who not only could add color, but full motion video as well.
Great management, guys.
GReynoldsCT00
@Bad Horse’s Filly:
I’ve been wondering where he is…too quiet
valdivia
I stopped reading The Times 3 years ago. I only bought one copy when Obama got elected and another when he was inaugurated. And I rarely click on it except for updates (like in Hiati this week). The fact that MoDo gets paid to write her drivel tells me all I need to know about the paper.
MikeJ
@Martin: Why on earth would I want full motion video in my newspaper? To make it dumber and slower to skim?
mr. whipple
This. I don’t read anything in the local newspaper except sports coverage. I’ve always loved editorials, which is what makes blogs and blog commentors so great. You’re getting the thoughts of thousands of pundits.
Now, why should Friedman or Dowd get paid what they do when I can get equally bad crap for free on the internets?
burnspbesq
@Chad N Freude:
This. The recent series on lax regulation of nurses was investigative reporting at its fines.
Now if they would only get rid of T.J. Simers …
Mike in NC
I heard raised voices coming from the TV in another room a little while ago. Another Serious Moustache — Big John Stossel — was on “The View”, no doubt pushing his Glibertarian bullshit. Nobody was watching so I shut it off.
Mark S.
@fraught:
$600 a year? I haven’t subscribed to a paper in years, but wow, no wonder subscriptions are way down.
Sentient Puddle
Being that I’m a fairly recent Texan transplant, can someone brief me on the process of making sure Don McLeroy and other asshats like him stay way the fuck away from the education board? I’d like it if it was as simple as voting against a Republican on election day 2010, but it’s beginning to sound to me like it’s a bit more complicated than that.
SGEW
@Bad Horse’s Filly:
I think he tried to read through the Greenwald thread, then immediately set his computer on fire. Can’t say I blame him.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@inkadu:
Don’t agree. The morons are part of a coalition. I take them to be about half the coalition in number. More or less.
The coalition only works when it holds together. If you want a good example, observe how quickly and easily the Dem coalition is turning on itself instead of working together, and what the results might be. But that’s another story.
Half of the GOP votes are not moron votes. They are interest votes. Many of the 47% you talk about are independents who don’t really follow politics, they just react to events. I don’t consider them semi-morons. They might just be wrong on some issues, and democracy can’t work if it can’t hold together despite being wrong at times. If everything has to be right all the time, then you have fundamentalism, and we know how well that works.
Bottom line, though, is that our difference is in outlook. You talk as if you think the American experiment is on the verge of failing. I don’t agree with that. I think it is on the verge of succeeding. I refuse to be a Fearnik in the spirit of the Balloon-Juice ‘we are doomed’ themes, just as I refuse to be a Fearnik over terrorism. I am not afraid of terrorism, and I am not afraid of the morons. For the same reasons that I am not afraid of earthquakes, or asteroids. Dangers are to be faced and dealt with, not run away from.
jwb
@Martin: I read somewhere that the Times could pay for a Kindle for every one of their subscribers and come out ahead if they stopped deadtree publication.
licensed to kill time
@SGEW: Jeez, that thread is over 800 comments and still going strong.
Keith G
@Chad N Freude: You are right, he does not.
Maybe because that state of play is at this point such a given. It would be like taking time out to assert that the sun rises in the east.
The Republic of Stupidity
@morzer:
Aaaaaaah yesssss… and that’s ‘Dr’ Ralph Stanley, if I’m not mistaken…
The man sings like he’s a 1,000 years old… and that’s a GOOD thing… beginning to look it too… but it just goes w/ THAT voice, huh?
jwb
@Sentient Puddle: I’ve been here a decade and I still don’t understand how it works. They also changed it the last time we went through the revision process in order to try to reduce the crazy influence, which obviously didn’t work out too well.
Basically, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re screwed until the demographics change enough that Dems can get elected to state-wide office so the Goopers have an incentive to nominate non-crazies.
Michael D.
@jwb: I read that somewhere as well.
And did everyone at BJ central quit today or something?
asiangrrlMN
@Bad Horse’s Filly: I am a bit nervous, too. Cole? You out there?
@LosGatosCA: This is my favorite comment on the thread. It so perfectly sums up Friedman and his ilk.
@burnspbesq: I would pay for an article like that. I would not pay for Dowd and Friedman. I like Hebert, Blow, Krugman, and Rich at NYT, but not enough to pay for them. I will pay for quality any time.
arguingwithsignposts
@licensed to kill time:
Well, it’s going. I don’t think “strong” is the right word, though.
ETA: it’s over 800. is that the record? what’s the longest comment thread that’s ever happened at Balloon Juice?
arguingwithsignposts
@Michael D.: And right on schedule, DougJ posts something.
Martin
@MikeJ: There are places where video is the best medium. The key is getting the balance right. Something as simple as a 10 second arial sweep, unnarrated, of Haiti damage would add a lot to a first front page piece on the disaster.
Many of the print publications have other news assets and they need to leverage that.
But your attitude is why newspapers are as fucked up as they are. The customers have this romantic 19th century attitude toward preserving it precisely in the dead-tree version. The customers are so stubborn on this point that they’re willing to kill newspapers outright rather than adjust to the cost realities of the market.
Demo Woman
@SGEW: Is it possible that John’s surgery is scheduled for today? He did say that it would be this week sometime.
John’s post was on Glenn’s sloppy reporting was quite clear that transparency was fine but the Armstrong criticism was over the line. All the trolls that appeared haven’t even read the original post.
The Republic of Stupidity
I was over at Think Progress a couple of years ago when they got over 5,000 comments on one thread in 12 hrs, but it was an invasion from Drudge by his goon squad.
Unreadable…
licensed to kill time
@arguingwithsignposts:
It’s the Energizer thread. I think it’s gotta be a record of some kind, I’ve seen 600+ threads but ….maybe someone knows for sure.
arguingwithsignposts
The Jane Hamshers of the left thread only has 612 comments. But it’s interesting that these really long pissing matches seem to revolve around Jane Hamsher somehow.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Demo Woman:
Prolly just there to flick boogers and eat the paste…
Standard troll MO…
arguingwithsignposts
@licensed to kill time: Well, it definitely needs to go into the lexicon as … something.
scudbucket
@SGEW: That thread was something, a giant fireball of rage. I was reading it live early, then went back and skimmed the remainder. It was fascinating to watch people become more and more entrenched and inflexible in their views – and lash out at strawmen of their own creation. I think your early comment about the scope of the word ‘scandal’ really should have ended the debate, at least for thinking people. But the accusations of a message-driven collusion b/w GG and FDL, the assertions of GG’s double-standard on disclosure, as well as the general implication that GG is nothing more than an anti-Obama ‘kill the bill’ hack, were shocking. I thought he defended himself quite well early on, clearly and pointedly answering specific questions about his funding sources. But the persistence of accusations even after he answered direct questions showed how emotionally charged – and sometimes irrational – folks can get about criticizing/defending Obama. I just checked that thread – they’re still at it.
jwb
@arguingwithsignposts: I think some of the late-night music threads were in this territory, but this is by far the most I’ve seen for a political post.
Keith G
@Sentient Puddle: It is
It would be hard. There are 15 members to Texas State Board of Education who are elected from single member district throughout the state. The elections are low turn out if not paired with a general election and a lot o peeps just vote party ticket.
McLeroy was elected from the district representing a dominatantl rural area between the NW suburbs of Houston to, and including the areas around Texas A & M Univ.
At the last election, he got 60% of the vote. I guess one could carpet bomb.
maus
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: “They do choose. They choose their school boards. They can choose funding for public school alternatives. They can choose private school. They can home school.”
The centralized School Book industry is located in Texas. There’s not much of an option that local school boards have, unless they all as a country work to oust all the conservatives that run Texas school boards. Homeschooling is a ridiculous alternative.
Elie
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
Well said, well said….
Chad N Freude
@maus:
I wouldn’t call it ridiculous, but I believe it’s a threat to critical thinking, science education, and an accurate understanding of history.
Wait! Wait! That’s the Texas textbook commission. I yield on the ridiculousness assertion. Never mind.
Brachiator
@d0n camillo:
Good point. Many op-ed columnists are syndicated or get extra money for speeches, etc. But the changes newspapers are going through devalues the op-ed pieces of anyone who is not a rank propagandist with a loyal following.
Ironically, this helps Fox News and conservative newspapers, but does nothing for the NY Times.
As an aside, I was reading that many newspapers are steadily dumping editorial cartoonists. Maybe syndicated and most op-ed columnists are next.
The other fun thing is that a lot of people have a gripe with the NY Times about something. But free a la carte news is going to get you the AP and TV as your sole news source. Reporters and editors don’t work for free, and online stuff like HuffPo and company could not exist if they couldn’t poach from the few remaining newspapers and TV.
bemused
Sad Friedman is singing,
Bring back that macro feeling,
Whoa, that macro feeling…
Mike G
One way for the Times to save money would be to pay jerk-offs like Friedman $35K a year.
A taxi driver in Bangalore told me he has a team of howler monkeys with Linux laptops ready to produce Friedmanesque columns at a fraction of the cost. “My macro feeling”, really? That’s something I’d expect to see on a t-shirt in Shinjuku — http://www.engrish.com/
Time for that wonderful global marketplace invisible hand to give you the finger, Tommy.
Of course, when you’re married to a (former) billionaire, ‘working for a living’ is just a lark, something to fill the time between tennis matches and cocktails in East Hampton. The little people’s disappearing jobs, careers and lives ruined, it’s all just fascinating entertainment when you have millions in the bank.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@maus:
There are alternatives. Apparently there are a few people here who think that Texas and a small schoolbook industry now own education in this country, and we are Doomed(tm).
I can’t even express how stupid and toxic that idea seems to me. I’ll just leave it at this: There are always choices, and the American idea is all about the possibilities in choices and about making change. Get off your butts and make change.
I sat down with a guy here, Jason Williams, a candidate for State Superintendant of Public Instruction, and in one hour he sold me on a different vision, convinced me to give money to his campaign, and signed me up as a campaign worker for later in the year when there are signs to put up and doors to be knocked on.
(We met him at a Drinking Liberally session about a month ago).
There are things you can do besides sit on a blog and bitch like the American Experiment is over and there is nothing you can do.
Do something.
Keith G
@eastriver: You have no idea, girl.
For me that’s a compliment…..dufus.
Why do you hate your gender so much that you think referring to me as a girl would be offensive?
Please leave comedy, or insults, to the pros.
J. A. Baker
Maybe if the Times ended that “Libtards need not apply” policy on op-ed hires that gave us Ross Douthat, us “libtards” might be more inclined to deign to throw some of our hard-earned scratch their way…
Or maybe they just need to report the damn news instead of the daily GOP blast fax.
Brian J
@fraught:
Why would charging a little for content for the heaviest users doom the paper? If it really starts to hurt them, they can easily reverse course.
I subscribe to The Wall Street Journal both online and in print, but only because the print edition would have cost me 79 cents per week extra, and I figured, “What the hell?” But I don’t read it that often. I usually only pick up print newspapers to check out the layout and ads in them, and that’s only if I am in a Starbucks or 7-11.
Anyway, perhaps an alternative strategy would be to see if they can start giving the paper edition away for free. With localized content for different regions, perhaps the advertising, plus some sort of small charge for online content, could sustain a massive operation.
maus
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
Of course we’re not dooooomed, but where the hell do I start? I have enough friends who are paid and volunteer environmental activists, but when it comes to matters of more soft-science it’s tough as anything to figure out what I’d be best suited for, where I could do the most good, and the sort of work I *could* do remotely.
And yes, admittedly, sometimes it *is* more fun to sit back and bitch when looking at the immensity of the problem.
Little Dreamer
Here in Phoenix, I recently picked up a paper route in the mornings (I decided to go back into the business).
I have ONE NYT customer out of an active customer list of 250+ (subscriptions are currently way down on all of the papers I carry. My route used to support 400+ customers).
Little Dreamer
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
I agree with all you said, but, we met him about two months ago.
;)
Desert Rat
If a birdcage liner that was once a great newspaper that nobody reads anymore goes behind a firewall, will anybody even notice that it’s gone?