Somewhat OT: Times Co. threatens to shutter Boston Globe.

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:57:20 -0400, Richard Chonak <rac@gabrielmass.com> said:

> A Herald photo I saw on-line showed a Globe newspaper box, with the 
> front-page headline "Times Co. threatens to shut Globe; seeks $20m in 
> cuts from unions".    (story in 4/4 Globe)

I saw that Globe story in the supermarket newspaper racks.  Don't you
think it's a little bit unseemly for the Glob to play up its financial
difficulties in this way?  Did anything else important happen on
Friday?

(I still think there *could* be a future for real, printed, daily
newspapers in this world, but like many broadcasters, they seem to be
trying their mightiest to convince their audience how dispensable they
are.  I think that, more than any alleged culture of entitlement, is
what has stymied the profitability of newspaper-branded on-line news
sites.[1][2])

-GAWollman

[1] The rest are profitable merely because they can rely on cheap,
unedited wire-service copy to fill the space.  Once the newspapers
that produce and subsidize most of that copy go away, wire-service
subscriptions will cost news aggregators far more, and will cover far
less.  Many pundits are talking as if Google News is the future of
news, but that just goes to show that they don't understand the
difference between a news aggregator and actual journalism.[3]  It
can't be "aggregators all the way down": someone, ultimately, has to
pay actual people to do actual reporting, editing, photography, and so
on.

[2] I don't think the right-wing spin machine's unending bleating
about alleged "media bias" is without blame here, either: repeat a lie
often enough and most people will believe it to be true.  (There is
such a thing as bias in the media, but the people who complain most
loudly about it wouldn't know how to find it if you have them GPS
coordinates.)

[3] And I use Google News a lot, but I've yet to see the business
model that will support it long-term.  Right now, like most Google
services, it's cross-subsidized by Google's vast online advertising
business.  One shouldn't expect that to continue.