NY Daily News Cuts Staff ... and nickels and dimes their website

Only slightly less pathetic than those "WE SEE YOU'RE USING ADBLOCK...PLEASE, PLEASE DON'T DO THAT" memes, are the sad cries about bargain subscriptions.

The NY Daily News, the outfit that got sold to some giant company of creeps, thought it was a good idea to get rid of half their editorial staff. Oh yes, and raise the price on the paper. What futility. More and more people go to work toting their teeny-tiny cellphones, and squinting at the FREE news they can get at Google or Bing or most any newspaper or TV news website.

They also use their fabulous tablets.

Realizing this, the NY Daily News limits "free" reading to 3 items for a certain period of time. They also flash (see the top right) their not-too-enticing offers of "hey, how about PAYING us?"

PAY? For enjoying copyrighted material? WHO DOES THAT ANYMORE?

People are busy. And cheap.

They can get the basics from thousands of newspaper and TV news sites. There are outfits like NEWSER that just re-write what AP and others post. There are bloggers trying to make money off daily news theft.

An entire generation has gotten the idea that the Internet is, and should forever be FREEEEEEE. Self-entitled uploaders and downloaders "share" everything from book, magazine and newspaper files (epub, kindle, pdf etc.) to music (mp3, FLAC) to movies (MKV, avi, etc.) WHY PAY?

When piracy became rampant, the excuse was "why pay $10 for a download music album? Why pay $10 or $12 for a download book that you can't even re-sell? It's just a blip that anybody can copy."

Copyright owners were told, "Lower your price to something REASONABLE, and people will buy." No, they haven't. It's human nature. Barnes and Noble routinely runs "sales" of eBooks for $3.99, and iTunes offers bargain music albums (most anything that is a year old).

Still nobody's buying. The Daily News is begging people to sign up for $2.00 a week.

WHAT? $2.00 a week when the headlines, gossip and weather can be had elsewhere FREE???

Hell, the NY Post has no restrictions on how much news you can read FREE. Neither do thousands of other sites.

The inconvenient truth here, is that the situation will not get better, and in fact will only get worse, unless DMCA laws are strengthened, and it's easier for copyright owners to get effective takedowns.

Begging to get $2.00 a week, crying on GoFundMe, or trying to get people to take pity on your pipe dream via Kickstarter is as ridiculous as busking on the street. It's no life. It's not dignified.

At one time the book "industry" and the music "industry" and the movie "industry" and the TV "industry" called the shots. They were powerful companies. Now? Now it's the INTERNET GIANTS who own everything. GOOGLE runs some of the boldest copyright-flaunting sites around. Jeff Bezos of AMAZON, who pushed the Kindle and helped kill bookstores and libraries, is the richest man in the world. These companies continue to intimidate politicians.

Senator Chuck Schumer is like some little old lady being shoved on the sidewalk by a skinhead. He and Senator Leahy tried to push SOPA through, and they meekly gave up.

Crapathetic sheep tsk-tsk when a giant store like Lord & Taylor gets BOUGHT by an Internet outfit (WEWORK) who will turn the building into office space. They tsk-tsk when a bookstore goes under. They tsk-tsk when the Village Voice shuts down. That's all they do, because they don't mind the alternative of shopping online and getting FREE downloads from bootleggers on blogs, forums, torrents, or even eBay.

Will we soon get the news (off NEWSER, or HUFFINGTON POST) that there will no longer be a real, hold-in-your-hands version of The NY Daily News? Hell, it happened to the Christian Science Monitor years ago.

Tsk tsk.