Have you heard that the newspaper business is going to hell? It’s in all the papers, but nobody reads the papers anymore so you might have missed the news. Assuming you still care about news, which you don’t, according to the papers.
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But Craig is not the only culprit. There’s also eBay, which has siphoned off who knows how many more millions of dollars by making camera-for-sale ads obsolete. And Google, which has rocked the advertising world by delivering ads to people who might actually want to see them. And online journals like Slate and Salon, and Yahoo and Microsoft, which lurk behind their mountains of cash waiting to spring out and copy anything that works for Google or eBay. And Wonkette and InstaPundit and the Decembrist and all their blogging friends whose idea of a good time is giving yourself a funny name and distracting normal people who used to read newspapers.
And of course there are the newspapers themselves, which, back in the days of Internet Bubble #1, in their desperation to maintain “mindshare” trained readers to look for their news online, for free, rather than on newsprint spread out on the kitchen table, as God intended.
The day after Craig first talked publicly about his new project, I noticed the lead item on Wonkette, about an announcement that Dick Cheney would appear at a fund-raiser for beleaguered congressman Tom DeLay. I noticed that, according to Wonkette, the news story that inspired her fulminations (“Evidently the more event-appropriate MC team of Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham is already booked for that night”) had come from Yahoo, via Sploid. In other words Wonkette, whose blog is owned by Gawker Media, spotted this news on another blog owned by Gawker Media, whose writer had spotted it on Yahoo. Nowhere does Wonkette betray even the vaguest awareness of the person who actually reported that story or even the “mainstream media” that disseminated it. The Yahoo story came from the Associated Press, which had picked it up from the Houston Chronicle. For the record, the Chronicle story was written by a Washington bureau reporter named Samantha Levine. But as far as Wonkette was concerned, it came from Yahoo, via Sploid. That’s the way it works in the blogosphere. The stories are just . . . out there.
Meanwhile our beaten-down journalists will get a much-needed year of rest and relaxation. Or maybe some time to learn a new skill, like computer programming.
