The hungry gannets at Gannett are eyeing full ownership of Cars.Com and will throw nearly 2 billion...while they toss their print division (USA Today...) to...who? Who in their right mind is going to buy into what everybody says is a dying business?
Rupert Murdoch tried to make people pay for the "free" news on his newspaper websites. That didn't work. He couldn't get enough banner ads to make money, either. What Steve Allen called "Dumbth" is the word of the day. The culture is speeding up and dumbing down. Nobody wants to read very much...only what fits on a tiny screen while riding the subway. Want to know about the latest in Gaza? Go to Facebook or Twitter. Somebody will be saying, "Israel is a genocidal state" and somebody will be saying "Israel must be free to exist," and you can leave your quick comment. Who needs more?
Want to check the obituaries? Google has a page that lists who died. You get the name, the claim to fame, and the age. Who needs more?
Right now there are people who only know "text speak." R U 1? They can't write a coherent paragraph. At best, they can plagiarize one off the Internet to hand to a teacher or a boss. Many don't know what cursive writing is (no, it's not rap lyrics). Many have trouble signing their name because they don't use a pen very often.
Bookstores have been closing as fast as record stores did, and the ones that survive do it by selling pricey coffee, and offering that are called "Graphic Novels," ie, over-inflated comic books for morons who need to see a picture for everything. Or better yet, just wait for that "Graphic Novel" to be converted into a movie, because it's essentially just a story board anyway.
Nobody's friend Mort Sahl (iconoclast that he is) once said that USA Today was "Egg McPaper." How much DUMBTH do we have, when even this ridiculous newspaper, which exists primarily on hotel food trays, can't sustain a built-in audience?
While one doesn't want to enter fogeyhood, and grumble that every newfangled invention is bad, the loss of the traditional newspaper is NOT a good thing. The disappearance of the traditional half hour it takes to peruse a newspaper to learn all that's going on in one's city, if not the world...is NOT a good thing. Especially if the alternative is wasting that time texting, sexting, Tweeting, leaving smug and stupid comments on Facebook, or posting selfies. What do you see on the bus or subway? People reading newspapers...or sitting and squinting, hunched over their little idiot screens?
There just ain't no "paradigm," that seems able to turn this around. Newspapers are getting more expensive. They put more and more of their energy on "look who didn't shave her armpit well enough" and "guess which hottie is in this thong" photo pages on their websites. The inevitable spiral will continue...since God only knows, the Christian Science Monitor was actually one of the FIRST to murder its print version and go "Internet only."
The future might be one newspaper...The Sunday New York Times...sunday only. But the traditional morning spent swapping different sections of the Times while feasting on bagels, lox, cream cheese, scrambled eggs, pancakes, orange juice...nah. Plug in the laptop at Starbucks, spend $7 on a cup of coffee...and after a quick scan of who had a wardrobe malfunction and what bad boy Bieber did last night...courtesy of the NY Post...you've got all the news you need.
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