Gladys: "Of COURSE I do."
Tyrone "Then you know what I'm here after!"
An old joke that you might remember from "Laugh-In." Glad to say Arte Johnson (as the old man) and Ruth Buzzi (as the aging spinster) are still with us.
Not so, with the corporeal edition of THE FORWARD. It's now, at best, an Internet Ghost.
The Jewish newspaper managed to hold on a bit longer than The Christian Science Monitor. That one went digital years ago.
It's God's will. Or rather, Google's will.
Same thing?
The real POWER in the world is GOOGLE, as far as the media goes. Its search engine dictates who does or doesn't get placement.
GOOGLE has stubbornly insisted it's perfectly OK to quote not a paragraph...but entire pages if not chapters from any copyrighted book.
You know this? Type in some random phrase or names. How about: "Dickie Goodman" and "DICK CLARK." Look what happens:
GOOGLE very nicely tells you that those guys match up in a book you can buy. Only, they also give you a link where you can see it, so you don't have to buy it. Thank you GOOGLE BOOKS:
Yes, to be fair, if you DO want to buy the whole book after seeing what you were after, GOOGLE will take a cut of the eBook sale (since they provided that link to it) and, well, like the Nazi catch phrase goes, "we have ways...." of making money off what we give for free.
They'd like ME to join the fun and "monetize" this free blog they allow me to have. I haven't done that.
I don't want every other word lighting up, or have you accidentally disappear off my blog because you accidentally touched a KEY WORD with your mouse.
Fact is, I don't trust GOOGLE to even give me monetization money, because they pull the rug under their uploaders all the time.
GOOGLE owns YouTube where THEY get ad money and uploaders DO NOT. People who have 10,000 subscribers and a million "hits" every month do NOT get a penny from GOOGLE. "What happened to my monetization? What rule did I break? How come I invested all my time and energy and get NOTHING back?" You can ask, but to who? GOOGLE does not have a working phone number. They have website templates and all you get is a form reply telling you that you should try again. And again. These people send form letters to the Better Business Bureau!
GOOGLE owns GMAIL and they own Blogger/Blogspot where they make a fortune off ads on blogs that do nothing but brag of having 50,000 working links for downloading music illegally. GOOGLE won't even shut down these blogs, and taunt the RIAA, IFPI, GEMA, BREIN and other music organizations with their shrug of "We ONLY have to obey DMCA laws. So send a DMCA for EVERY link, and spend 10 minutes typing it into our form, and add the URL for every particular blog page, and we'll remove those particular items with a quick zap that takes us 5 seconds. But no, we won't remove a whole blog that's obviously in violation OR see to it that the blogger doesn't come right back with a new FREE BLOG and FREE GMAIL address."
Remember when owners of movie studios and TV networks and NEWSPAPERS had the power? Now it's the faceless goons of GOOGLE, and Internet wizards like Jeff Bezos and Marc Zuckerberg. Those two have faces, but you wouldn't want to look like them, would you?
Back to the Forward.
As the NY POST says, a few paragraphs down: “They’ve been losing money for years but lately the losses have been more than $5 million a year.”
Oy oy oy oy oy.
There are a few newspapers who don't lose money, but few. One big reason is THE INTERNET. Why buy a newspaper when outfits like NEWSER re-write the major stories and give 'em away while demanding you take off adblock and look at their banner ads and bullshit?
Why buy a newspaper when so many people work at home (ON THE INTERNET) or are within walking distance (due to lousy mass transit) and don't need to read a newspaper on the train or bus?
Why buy a newspaper when the news is always lousy, or all about Kardashians?
Why buy a newspaper when you can carry around a cellphone and fuck around on Twitter and Facebook, and glance at a few headlines and a weather report?
GOD...if the Christian Science Monitor and The Forward can't make it, and they are spiraling down Dante's rings into publishing hell, it's no surprise that the heathens have had problems, too. Or do you see a newsstand edition of Penthouse Forum anywhere? Once there were two dozen men's magazines around. Now there's porn versions of YouTube, and dirty pictures are a Google click away if "safe search" is off.
And is "going digital" the answer for saving newspapers and REAL reporting? Not so fast.
Go to the Daily News website and see how they keep begging you and bargaining with you to BUY an "all access" subscription so that...er...you can read every miserable local story of rape and robbery, get MORE info on how Jenner "rocks" her bikini and how Kardashian "shows her ample assets" while walking her brats or how the ROYALS are dressed. Or can't you get that everywhere else?
OH GOD. Yeah, 99 cents...that's gonna help any newspaper that is hemorrhaging MILLIONS...
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