Laura, pleas write more!

You’re an ass. I feel sorry for you because you’ve been thoroughly brainwashed by you’re version of “news.” I just hope you learn to think for yourself someday instead of having your government/media tell you what to believe. You might as well move to a socialist country where they can dictate you’re life! They need more people like you! You would fit in so well, really. Also, you should learn to write better because your comment there was filled with a bunch of shitty, unclear metaphors, attempting to sound sophisticated, but FAILING. Nice try.

My advice to you: Figure out out who’s lying to you and shoving crap down your throat… you’re letting them willingly, without any hesitation.

I think I’ll remember last week as the moment when I finally knew, with a certainty approaching fatigue, that the newspaper industry – the business and passion that both shaped and warped me over the past 20 years – had chosen ritual suicide. The choice appears grimly reached and irrevocable.

The issue is “paid content.” That’s the generic term. I consider it a euphemism for an entire suite of frustrations and furies that have been boiling out of my former profession since its once-invincible business model began its final slide to the deep in 2008. On the surface, paid content is the reasonable idea that people should have to pay for the professionally produced content they consume. Its core, however, is a post-rational demand that consumers abandon their habits of the past decade in favor of new behaviors intended to restore media companies to the profitability ordained to them by God Almighty.

Does it matter that this is an idea with a known, recent history of failure? Or that human beings have no intention of paying for news they’ve always received for free? Does it matter that we already know a return to the paywall-era of the early 2000s will cost these legacy media companies money they will never recoup? No, no and no.

There has been no shortage of writing debunking this, but what of it? The audience that counts in this case – media company executives – decided this future sometime earlier this spring. All that remains now are the details and marketing terms: “Paywalls” are out; “Pay Windows” are in. The wall must be easy to use, but it must also be “permeable.” And so on.

Confused? Don’t be. Your newspaper overlords believe they can sell you their content if they can just get everybody on the same page and nail the sales pitch this time. They’re looking for the magic words, not the underlying logic (the tricky part? Doing all this without breaking federal anti-trust law).

This is folly, of course. Even MIT Technology Review Editor and Publisher Justin Jason Pontin concluded that news and opinion must be given away to the aggregators, and that was in an essay advancing the case for paid content.

I am extremely impressed in your work (Mike) and think this campaign is vitally important to save upcoming human crisis through fair and objective writings…….I would appreciate any ideas that would make the difference in my research.

my personal email is
irfan.journalis@googlemail.com
Huddersfield- UK

I am extremely interested in this campaign and would be happy to receive ideas that would make teh difference in my research.

my persoanl email is
irfan.journalis@googlemail.com

When we at techdirt.com recently wrote about yet another journalist complaining about how Google exploits their content, someone in the comments made a really salient point that should get wider exposure. If you go by the journalist’s own logic, then the truth is that they are exploiting the newsmakers they cover. After all, it’s really the newsmakers who are “creating” the story, and all the journalists are doing is writing up an account of it, for commercial purposes, and not rewarding the newsmakers who make their jobs possible in the first place. Journalists have been freeriding on the backs of the people who actually make the news for too long! I think it’s time that everyone who is in a news story start standing up for their rights, and demanding that journalists pay them to stop this free riding. Perhaps some newsmakers will band together and create a new consortium, where journalists can just pay a one time regular subscription fee, to be divided up among newsmakers, based on who makes the most news. Yeah… that’s the ticket…

techdirt.com

Sean Stevens, 59, of Long Pond said he was just doing his job. Stevens faces felony fraud charges, after working the polls in Monroe County on election day.

He addressed the Monroe County elections board a few weeks after election day before the charges were filed.

“Had the machines been further apart, had people better knowledge of how to use the machines, there would have been less need, to me, to demonstrate,” said Stevens.

Stevens was a machine inspector for the 2008 presidential election. Court papers said Stevens reached over the back of voting machines to change votes and encouraged people to vote for Barack Obama.

Stevens said that’s impossible.

“The machines are just too high. You cannot look over unless you strain to do so,” he said.

Video from the Tunkhannock Township polling place on election day shows a platform behind the machines, where workers can easily reach the top and into the voting machines.

According to court papers, Stevens was a voting machine inspector for three other elections prior to this one. In November, 2008, election officials asked him to leave before the day was over, after voters started complaining about his actions.

Elections director Sara May-Silfee spoke with Newswatch 16 late last year on what she will do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. “Direct judges of election to be aware of what’s going on inside their polling place and that they’re going to have to be more careful,” said May-Silfee.

If convicted, Stevens could face up to nine years in prison.

“First it was the big win for Saxby Chamblis for the U.S. Senate from Georgia. The Democrats had a lot of paid people in the state to make sure that didn’t happen. They can’t change election results while counting if there is a landslide.

Next, in Louisiana’s runoff elections, two more wins for Republicans. This shows the people understand what absolute rule by the Democrats would be terrible for the nation.”

Hey Moron Mick: How did that prediction turn out for ya?
Bwaaaahhhaaaaa

Oh, and PS: All your “citizen journalism” on this site, I noticed, is nothing more than commentary on the work of real journalists. You don’t do any “journalism” Moron Mick – you’re just a moron.

“Without sounding bitter—and I’m not bitter—I do believe there was a media bias. I do believe that the media had a specific agenda and with that said, the American people cast their vote,” McCain said in an interview she gave to her daughter Meghan, a blogger who posted the transcript on The Daily Beast.

“I truly feel that unless the media goes back to unbiased reporting they are going to do a disservice to the youth of this country. The future of this country lies in the youth and we have to be good stewards of information and truth,” she added. “There is so much more to it than just one article and people telling lies, it affects much more than that.”

McCain was particularly critical of a New York Times profile of her that ran shortly before the election.

“It is interesting that it got to the point where the New York Times profile of me is being used as an example of the bias in reporting in journalism classes,” she said. “I had never spoken with the reporter who wrote the article. She contacted the kids that went to high school with my youngest daughter over the Internet, and as a parent, that was scary.”

Sam Zell has to stay away from the windows of the Tribune Tower. He was thinking he was the smartest guy in the room to take the whole Times-Mirror mess private.

“It’s fair to say that newspapers will disappear and I don’t think we should shed that big a tear for them,” says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative. And unlike the traumas of automobiles or real estate, the
change is fundamental, not cyclical. A down economy may have sped it along, but the business model itself would have been troubled
anyway. “My kids can’t imagine why anyone would read the newspaper,” Fader notes.