Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Always The Last To Know

I read somewhere the otherday that there is some serious speculation that up to a full dozen Dead Tree newspapers might go tits up here in the coming year, looks like we have our first candidate for extinction right here in rainy Washington state.

Here is the current front page of the Seattle Post Intelligencer,(What kind of goofy fucking name is that, anyway?) as of three minutes ago.

Here is the word on the street from Google news, also as of three minutes ago;

"Hearst Puts 'Seattle Post-Intelligencer' On Block".

Ruh Roh copy boy.

Just because I am such a nice guy, I just spent ten fucking minutes creating an account I will probably never use to get the rest of this story from Media Post Publications.

Just for you guys.


Anyways, here is the gist of this,

The Hearst Corp. put the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale on Friday, saying it will close the newspaper if it can't find a buyer in the next two months. As print ad revenues tumble and the recession deepens, it's likely that the final outcome will be closure rather than divestment. Thus, the Seattle P-I, founded in 1863, joins several other big newspapers threatened with extinction.

sssnip!


In making the announcement on Friday, the president of Hearst Corp.'s newspaper unit, Steven Swartz, told employees that "at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print," adding that the newspaper lost $14 million last year. Hearst has held out the possibility of switching to an online-only publication if no buyer emerges, but this is small consolation for the newspaper's staff of 170.

sssnip!

The prospects for a sale are slim.


No shit?

In fact, big newspaper companies themselves face bankruptcy and dissolution in the worsening economic climate. In December, the Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection, indicating that it is unable to service its $13 billion debt under the terms originally agreed with lenders. Philadelphia Media Holdings, the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, defaulted in June, followed by The Journal Register Co. in July.

A December report from Fitch Ratings warned that "more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010."


And so it goes.

The Whitehouse finally acknowleged we have been in a recession for a fucking year,

last month.

This is the tip of the iceberg but I will go out on a limb and predict the LA Times is on this list.

Advertising revenue went and jumped off a cliff because all these papers thought their shit didn't stink and were charging a ton of money but what killed these guys is the little guy advertising, the Want Ads, Cars for sale, Help Wanted, etc., etc.
I read one guy bitching that it cost him more to advertise by the month than it did to advertise at the weekly rate.

Nice move, Einsteins.

I used to read the paper, honestly. I like the fucking comics.


The trouble with Dead Tree news is that it is AT LEAST a day old, that don't cut it in the digital age my friends, I want my fucking news NOW!

I still read the paper occasionally, it is good for local news, who died, who got married,who had a baby, who is getting divorced and things like local bond measures and local projects.
All well and good.

Most newspapers get a great deal of THEIR news from outfits like The Associated Press.I no fucking linky to those assholes after they declared war on Bloggers last year, Fuck Them.

Right, I had it coming. Lick me where I pee.
As my personal philosophy, I try not to copy and paste anyone's complete work directly unless it is very short. I do not do the research or the legwork to publish the original content and I do not feel it is fair to just copy someone else's work. I try to provide a snippet of whatever it is I am commenting on and at the very least give a link to the original source and if I can, to the actual author.

Anyway,look for the trend of newspapers going belly up to continue and expand into a lot of small towns across America, which is actually a shame because that is how a great deal of Americans have gotten any news at all since Benjamin Franklin was printing it out, one letter at a time.

4 comments:

  1. I used to read newspapers too until I discovered the interwebs. Now, if news is more than 4 hours old, it's 'old news'. How are the 'dead trees' supposed to compete with that?

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  2. The wife still buys a newspaper once in a while. It sits on the kitchen table for about a day and then gets thrown out, mostly unread. The internet supplies most of our news. But in this day and age we read blogs like Ornery Bastard to keep up with the happenings of the country. Don't know what we will do when the power outages shut down the internet. I guess we will just have to go pull guard duty. Or maybe go pull weeds. There will be SOMETHING to keep us busy and that is for sure.

    Michael

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  3. The sad thing is was the dead tree news sounded the death noll during the last newspaper strike. After which the wizards in charge fired nearly all the good writers. Their "news" was reduced to what we used to get directly from the teletypes in the backrooms from AP and UPI. They won't survive because they didn't change with the times. We can just put them on the shelf in the museum next to the buggy whips.

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  4. HA! The friggin' mullet wrappers have been printing nothing but tripe and puff pieces for years, and now they wonder why they're goin' tits up in a recession! It's 'cuz people are tired of bein' fed BULLSHIT, that's why! Let 'em burn.......

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