Who's Sorry Now?
American (big fat lazy) business, we hope. Over the past 20 years, main-stream American business and government agencies - especially the FEDERAL government, for the most part, have gotten fat, happy, lazy, "entitlement" crazy, etc. And they produce products NO ONE WANTS. GM cars, current politicians on both sides, hard-copy newspapers.
Let's focus on the newspapers for a minute. We read with interest all the back and forth about blogging...it's a good thing, it's citizen journalism, it gives everyone an equal voice, etc. Or, it's crap, no one really reads blogs except for a few "friends" of the bloggers, not really news, no fact checking, etc.
What we like is the transition time of change going on...the redefining of what IS news, how people consume news, and how they participate (or not) in it. It is true that most blogs won't ever be read...in fact, as a new blogger on the block, Post An Apology is taking a 120 day review next week to see how we're doing, what to do different/better, etc. It's a big committment to blog. You build an audience and have to stay connected to that audience at the same time fulfilling your "promise" , whatever that is...serious, funny, irreverent, crude, mean, whatever.
So we take with interest this article in the Philladelphia Inquirer that says Paperless news is doing just fine Newspapers are dying. "This isn't an ideological statement or a heartfelt wish, just a simple observation. Horse-drawn carriages yielded to cars, and steamships and ocean liners yielded to airplanes. Consumers prefer efficiency, and the market cannot be denied.
The news business, on the other hand, has never been healthier. At one level, everything is just text, to quote blogger and newspaper columnist James Lileks. Whether written or spoken, it is all just text. A lot of that text, though not nearly as much as a decade ago, still appears in the print of a newspaper. But in the last two decades, much, much more of that text was spoken over the airwaves of talk radio and cable news.
In the last half-dozen years, a huge portion of that text was made available exclusively over the Internet, much of it via the online editions of newspapers, but far more via the more than 25 million blogs that have sprung up since 1999.
Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas. Lots of folks - especially liberals and elites - still like the old Sherpas. The mainstream media - MSM - are populated overwhelmingly by left- and hard-left-leaning writers and editors, and few people even bother to argue the point anymore. American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt."
