CSotD: Reality
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Matt Wuerker on the pending demise of competent, professional journalism, with a cartoon that both delights me and leaves me dismayed.
He's certainly right that journalism is in a world of hurt, though I hope he is only mourning the fact that people have free access to the news, and not blaming them for taking advantage of it.
Yes, Dear Reader, here I go again.
The wounds are self-inflicted, and maybe, in order to fully appreciate that, you need to have worked in other departments of the newspaper besides the newsroom, but even the folks in that idealistic zone must have seen this coming.
Part of it is indeed the Internet, because the combination of Craigslist and Realtor.com stripped enormous percentages of revenue from newspapers, doing for local print what Amazon did for local bookstores.
However, it's more the response to the Internet than the fact of its existence: Newspapers could have handled those rivals early on.
Not, as they did with classifieds when it was too late, by offering free print ads, but by creating responsive, well-tended, locally based sites.
A few tried, but I saw too many good attempts short-circuited by Corporate's insistence on over-riding local innovation, and then making bad decisions.
They are stock-swappers and not newshounds and they don't understand the business or have any long-term interest in it.
But they sure know how to give orders, and, instead of sharing and developing good ideas, they cut them off, ordering their papers to follow the corporate lead.
If newspaper executives ran a chain of home improvement stores, the fact that the Duluth store sold 200 snowblowers would mean all stores would be ordered to sell at least 200 snowblowers, including the ones in Florida and Southern California.
Meanwhile, their primary response to the Internet was similar to a fast-food restaurant deciding that they'd give food away at the drive-thru, while firing the manager if he failed to maintain revenues in the diningroom where people still had to pay for their meals.
Then, as things cratered, corporate became obsessed with "readership" as opposed to paid circulation, and began to pressure the industry's auditing group to loosen its definitions, on the theory that advertisers were idiots and wouldn't catch on.
Okay, if you come here often, you've heard my rants and I won't repeat them all, but I mentioned recently that my mother's local paper fired their Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and began to run USA Today generic inserts in place of wire stories chosen on site.
I should add that they've reduced the paper to what is basically a pamphlet and recently sent subscribers a notice that the subscription price was increasing by 50%.
If they were the only newspaper in America doing that, it might be funny, but it's an industrywide trend to offer less, charge more, and insist to investors and advertisers that everything is just peachy.
I do support a couple of news organizations, and I hope you do, too, but I can't afford to subscribe to them all, and certainly not at a level which would impact their actual costs.
I say this as someone who once had four newspapers landing on his porch each and every morning, and five on the days the Wall Street Journal published.
I won't pay higher prices to get 24-page pamphlets.
There's plenty of blame to go around, but when it starts losing news junkies like me, the industry needs to look inward.
Meanwhile, you should be subscribing to something. Not everything, no, but look at how much you consume, how much you can afford, and be proportionate in your support.
Are you depressed yet?
Clay Jones on the verdict in the (latest) St. Louis shooting of a black motorist, in which a judge ruled that the police officer's declaration prior to pulling him over that he was going to kill the motorist, and the fact that the handgun found in the car had the officer's DNA but none of the victim's, and the fact that the officer's partner never found it necessary to unholster his own gun, did not mean that the officer had done anything wrong.
Not murder, and also not manslaughter or any of those lesser things people get convicted of when they screw up and cause someone's death.
Out here in the real world, I know a kid who did time because his opponent, who started the fist fight, hit his head on the ground and died.
And god help anybody who has a second glass of wine and causes a fatal auto accident.
The question in my mind being whether the defense, having decided they couldn't get this past a jury, actively shopped for a friendly judge, or just knew who they were going to get or simply knew the judges well enough that they didn't care who they got, as long as it wasn't a dozen random citizens.
Recent cases have shown that "self-defense" can be successfully invoked by police officers who are afraid of negroes.
That approach does not seem to work in the other direction.
And then there's this
I don't often use the name "David Rowe" in the same sentence with "more compassionate take," but his commentary on Myanmar, the Rohingya and Aung San Suu Kyi is strikingly compassionate.
I suppose she may well be the captive of the regime more now than she was when she was under house arrest, and I'm willing to extend her some sympathy and understanding.
In a minute.
There are about 400,000 Rohingya in line ahead of her.
Plus this
Speaking of cartoonists who rarely hold back, Michael de Adder offers this analysis of Trump's shift to working with Democrats.
I haven't seen any cartoons that really explain it beyond the fact that it pissed off Republicans. Certainly none that analyzed it in policy terms.
But de Adder seems to have the basics covered.
Now here's your moment of blood-curdling tally-ho
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