A Tale About Newspapers

 Hot Off The Press

From The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/23/california-newspaper-industry-wisdom

Conventional media wisdom posits several ways for a newspaper to commit suicide. It can drive up costs by multiplying staff and pagination. It can prioritise print over digital. It can erect a hard paywall to seal itself from the internet.

Or, if you are the Orange County Register, you can do all three. The California daily did so almost exactly a year ago, prompting astonishment and morbid curiosity. How long would it last? In a crisis-stricken industry more accustomed to death by a thousand cuts, the Register, which dates back a century, at least promised a dramatic and original demise.

But this week, as the paper prepares to celebrate the experiment's first anniversary, it appears to be thriving. "It's working," marvelled the editor, Ken Brusic. "We believe that this will work."
The paper's ambitious expansion and defiance of conventional wisdom has cheered and baffled the industry. Is it for real? Is there a magic formula to avert cutbacks and slumping circulation?...

Register staff – the newsroom has doubled to 360 in the past year – exude giddy, wary optimism that their paper has a bright future. Instead of rewriting stories they are filling multiple new sections with original reporting. "Feel the weight. This has 10 sections – and on a Tuesday. If it hit your cat, you'd kill it," said Rob Curley, deputy editor of local news.

Survival by concentrating by doing what you do the best you possibly may. That is innovative, especially in a time when most content and quality is compromised to increase profits. Look at any industry and you can see a conscious choice to reduce quality or reduce content; from Orange Juice - the 64 oz. containers now have 59 oz. - to newspapers, such as in Detroit, where the Detroit newspapers led the way into journalistic irrelevance.

And speaking of Detroit, again we see a hint of some further dynamics behind today's urban crises. Detroit stopped doing what it was best at. The question is why? There are answers at all levels, from city government all the way up to a Society which creates great inequities, thereby stirring the flows of people and capital. (I am only speaking of inequity such as establish by law and customary usage and norms, not purely economic differences in levels of economic entities.)

If we cannot succeed by doing the absolute best at what we do, we can only stave off disaster for a short time.

How long now has it been that we have not really been trying?
It's been a while.

--

Globalization

Globalization will have disappeared by the end of my life. The food crisis which is coming and which will meld with the energy crisis which will conjoin with a confidence crisis, will serve to cause the pendulum to swing back to more protected markets.
Globalization was a embarking on unknown territory. It was a large change, and , thus, a cause of anxiety. Thus far, the political leaders who followed the innovators have been dismal people with no vision for their countries as a whole. They were only able to muster the piggish glee of unruly children who are dumped miraculously into a chocolate factory, and who then hire the rest of us at starvation wages to endure the stomach aches that are consequent to their gluttony.
Take George Bush. He is abnormally obtuse and has nothing to offer the vast majority of people he leads. When there is a crisis on Wall Street, it is George to the rescue. However, let some of the lesser breed loose a few millions houses here or there, or not have enough to buy proper and nourishing food for their families, it's the same old dance about the Free Market!  

"I am the very model of a modern free economy, even though I speak and act as if I'd had lobotomy!"
-----
Consider that financial problems at present stemmed from an unprecedented creation of money by various financial instruments; consider that this would have created an enormous Inflation, BUT....... ...it did not because we had had the forethought to counterbalance this by the destruction of the manufacturing base in the USA. This destruction of the manufacturing base opened the door to imports. Since imported products were cheaper, the cheaper products offset the Inflationary pressure of the insane things Wall Street was doing. Inflation is hitting India and Asia, however, particularly in food and energy. Prices are beginning to go up. Once the imports rise in price to the USA, the lid on inflation will blow off like a 4th of July rocket. Of course, the Fed will have lowered interest rates....no, you figure out the rest of the scenario. 30years from now, the only people talking about Globalization will be the inhabitants of Hell.

--