One more quick note on newspapers, if only to annoy those of you who are weary of my fascination with the topic. In a time when shopping locally, eating locally and drinking locally is finally in vogue, albeit a bit late, the American newspaper is a product that not only is made in the USA — indeed, made right in your own hometown — but is reinvented, redesigned and reconstructed on a daily basis, as Hal Walter notes at Hardscrabble Times.
Month: January 2009
Greg, honey, is it supposed to be this soft?
Over at Political Animal Hilzoy delivers a farewell dope-slap to the “petulant lazy frat boy” who turned the Oval Office into Omega house — President George W. Marmalard. Examining his 2000 inaugural address, she notes:
He’s a small, small man, who ought to have spent his life in some honorary position without responsibilities at a firm run by one of his father’s friends. Instead, he ruined our country, and several others besides. He wasted eight years in which we could have been shoring up our economy, laying the groundwork for energy independence, making America a fairer and better country, and truly working to help people around the world become more free. Instead, he debased words that ought to mean something: words like honor, decency, freedom, and compassion.
To this day, I do not think he has the slightest conception of the meaning of the words he took in vain.
To repeat an old gag, he’s a man of few words — he only knows a few. Joe Galloway knows a few more, and he uncorks them with a vengeance here.
Meanwhile, it was another excellent day here in Bibleburg, and I enjoyed a third consecutive day on the cyclo-cross bike. This keeps up, it’ll be almost like training, only slower. And the unseasonable weather is supposed to hold, with temps in the 50s —and even the low 60s — forecast throughout the week.
Today’s ride with Dr. Schenkenstein went north into the Air Force Academy and back, and the contrast with Friday’s ride to Fountain was amazing. South of Woodmen the trail is drier than a popcorn fart. North of there it is a gooey, icy mess, with one particularly evil sheet of damp ice curb to curb on the concrete just before the trail turns to dirt.
On the way out, we both walked it. On the way back, I joked that if Dr. Schenkenstein got high enough on the concrete banking of the drainage channel, he could probably ride it. No sooner said than done. Up the wall he went, coming down just short of clearing the ice entirely, but keeping it up nonetheless. Think about going high on the velodrome, but with the high side to your left instead of your right. Pretty friggin’ impressive for a 50-something guy with a $10,000 deductible on his health-insurance policy.
Extry, extry, don’t read all about it
Another newspaper is circling the bowl — this time, the Tucson Citizen, the smaller of the two papers in that Arizona city. Gannett says it will croak the 139-year-old paper on March 21, just past the vernal equinox, if a buyer is not found. Good luck with that. On the block with the Citizen are the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and God knows how many other venerable fish-wrappers as the decline in circulation not only continues, but accelerates.
The Boston Globe is lopping off heads in the newsroom, as are the Casper Star-Tribune and Billings Gazette. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, meanwhile, has filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition.
New York Magazine is taking a different tack, informing its core writing staff that their paychecks will be getting a little skinnier, a concept that I expect to quickly gain traction with publishers nationwide, if it hasn’t already.
Interestingly, New York is also reducing its use of free-lancers like yours truly, a trend that will not please folks like Eric Butterman, who with JournalismJobs.com teaches an online course on free-lance pitching and writing. I find this tactic slightly surprising, considering what a bargain free-lancers are, providing as we do our own hardware and software, office space, health care and retirement accounts. But then I was shocked when my buddy Hal, another free-lancer, got the hook at The Pueblo Chieftain. Good and cheap do not always reside in the same person, but they did in his case.
Still, if you have any staff left, it must be cheaper to squeeze ’em like a nearly flat tube of toothpaste than it is to hire a free-lancer, no matter how reasonably priced he or she is. If the person thus squeezed runs completely dry, well, there’s a line of the poor sonsabitches stretching down the block and around the corner. Pick one, any one, if you have any budget left. Squeeze, discard, repeat.
Hal and I have been trying to figure out what the future of newspapers might look like, and Hal has suggested that a functional model might blend a frequently updated, hard-news website with a free, once-a-week hard-copy edition, perhaps published on Thursdays, focusing on opinion, analysis and what’s happening on the weekend. It sounds something like this vision of the upmarket newspaper from Philip Meyer, published last fall in American Journalism Review.
But then you’re still dealing with all that old-media dreck, like newsprint, printing presses and circulation, plus an online audience conditioned to getting everything for free. So I remain unconvinced, despite Bryan Appleyard’s witty take: “(T)he only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.”
What’s your take on the Newspaper 2.0? Leave your thoughts in comments.
Beer gone flat?
Say it ain’t so: The Associated Press says beer sales are going south along with the rest of the economy. Forget that check to Greenpeace, hon’, we got a real problem right here at home.
Could it be that this decision is based not a shrinking paycheck but expanding horizons? ‘Cause the “beers” mentioned in this article were ghastly rat-piss concoctions from über-brewers like SABMiller PLC, Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch Inbev NV; nary a word was said about craft brewers like Deschutes Brewery or our own Bristol Brewing Co.
If people are guzzling less Coors Light and sipping more Mirror Pond Pale Ale, I’d view this development as a positive thing. In fact, I’ll drink to that.
One long-ass week
That’s what we’re looking at here — one long-ass week until Gen. George Armstrong Bush (Texas Air Farce, ret.) returns to shitting in his own nest instead of yours and mine.
I have assiduously avoided reading, listening to or watching any stories about his farewell tour, which has lasted longer than many a banana-republic dictatorship, foreign film or Russian novel. I never cared what he had to say when he was The Decider, and nobody cares what he has to say as the lamest of lame ducks in the history of lame duckdom, our ADHD national media aside. I simply want him gone, long gone, and Darth Cheney with him.
I plan to buy an expensive bottle of French wine soon and store it safely away for the day when I will be able to pull its cork, drink deeply and then piss on both their graves. Houston is too good for the sonofabitch. Let him pedal that Trek of his around the Lake of Fire for eternity, with Beelzebub just seconds back and closing fast.
That said, it will be strange not to loathe and despise the occupant of the Oval Office for the first time in — well, in quite some time. The only president I ever revered was JFK (hey, I was an Irish-American, all of 9 years old when he died, and anyway he boinked Marilyn Monroe). And the only presidential candidates I was ever truly enthusiastic about were Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern, and you will recall how their campaigns ended.
Jimmy Carter I like much better as an ex-president than I did as a president, and I hope the swine who swiped his bicycle gets a tainted rock from his crack dealer and sets his pointy skull ablaze. Bill Clinton seemed even more like a used-car salesman than Nixon did, and so I never voted for him.
In fact, I blame Bubba for the past eight years. If he could’ve just sworn off fat chicks for eight years, we might not be in this fix today, with the Republic in ruins, the economy circling the bowl and just one largely untested skinny dude from Illinois on hand to clean up the wreckage.
More power to his arm. He’ll need it.
Mad Blog Media 