Friday, October 14, 2016

Blogs, Facebook and Twitter

When I was a kid my father would only buy one newspaper – the Sunday paper, along with pastries and a gallon of milk. The only thing I’d read are the comics and Parade magazine.

Then, in my 20’s, after I graduated college, I’d buy the daily newspaper. These days, I can’t remember the last time I bought any newspaper.

Newspapers are dropping like flies. They brought it on themselves because of incompetence. The three newspapers I used to work for are now out of business. I wasn’t surprised. All my bosses except one were incompetent (this includes MBAs from Harvard).

Today the only news I read is Bing news – and I’m paid about 20 cents a day to do it. Then after about a month I get a five dollar Amazon gift card, which I store at Amazon until I have enough to buy something.

Instead of having to buy a newspaper I’m being paid to read the news!

Otherwise I get everything off of the Internet. To me Facebook is entertainment, blogs are entertainment and opinion (and as I written before some of the writers are close to morons). Then there is Twitter and Reddit.

Online magazines I read are the Alternative Right and Radix Journal and Taki’s magazine.

I still buy paper magazines and even have a subscription to Popular Science.

Newspapers are supported by advertising. Much of the advertising has moved to the Internet. No surprise there for me.

I don’t know why blogs are free. I only make about $120 a year off my blog. I could buy a website but they cost about what? Two dollars or three dollars a month? But I’d had to move my entire blog over there and it’s not worth it.

Advanced technology is amazing. People had no idea what Gutenberg would lead to, and I don’t know of anyone who predicted what would happen with the Internet.

Now TV news – which is liberal – needs to be destroyed. The only way to do is for them to lose their advertising.

Fat change of that happening right now. Maybe someday, though, with the advent of cheap ad-free entertainment such as Hulu and Netflix.

I can barely wait.

The day that Lester Holt and Scott Pelley and George Stephanopoulos and Chris Wallace are gone will be a day of celebration.

There is no journalism in this country anymore beyond the Internet. The MSM is a political special interest group, nothing else.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I follow the big networks on Twitter just to see the comments below their political stories they put out there. Let's just say there are plenty of people onto their games.

This isn't the 60s anymore where people thought anything Cronkite said was gospel.

Lab Guy said...

I've read a number of blogs written over the years written by some fine blue collar folks that have something interesting to say and know how to write. They are probably more above average than most college graduate in knowledge and ability. But yes, there is a lot of crap out there as well, but it does take some commitment such as your blog to do it well.

Post Alley Crackpot said...

The American papers that are surviving have decided that their readers really do want local news, and that the long-running game of simply siphoning off AP and Reuters content to be reprinted is very much over.

It's not just in America though -- the papers in rural England that are surviving have managed to do decently precisely because of a huge emphasis on local content. They've figured (rightly) that since the Grauniad, Not-So-Independent, rorriM ehT, and so forth are covering various bits of "global news" (even if some of it's just slag gossip in tabloid form), the only remaining news to cover is all local.

Overlapping concerns don't help, and there are plenty of newspapers that have gone under because they'd cover the same beat as other papers.

Even a little rag like the East London Advertiser can survive if it gets the right kinds of advert support -- it doesn't hurt that there are a few Canary Wharf advertisers who can afford to take out more or less permanent space, especially since most of the paper is given away in broadsheet form, and it's still pressing on even with circulation numbers well below ten thousand.

Let's also face facts: you have your own "news beat" as well, and it's specialised enough that you can do well enough in it to pay for the costs of what is essentially a vanity press presence online.

How to grow the size of that presence, of course, then gets into the problem of overlapping concerns, which is not a small matter to take under advisement ...

Naturally, you'll be off to write your own version of "Areopagitica", because long-form essay arguments in defence of "I'll Do What I Bloody Well Want" are all the rage in the early twenty-first. :-)

[... also, Robert Young Pelton once reminded us that "journo" rhymes with "urinal", and is usually full of the same stuff, so it's surprising that you don't have to squeeze dry the newsprint before reading it ...]

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