Posted on 12/27/2008 11:43:59 AM PST by shoptalk
When my colleague at the Newark Star-Ledger John Farmer started off in journalism more than five decades ago, things were very different. After covering a political event, he'd hop on the campaign bus, pull out a typewriter, and start banging out copy. As the bus would pull into a town, he'd ball up a finished page and toss it out the window. There a runner would scoop it up and rush it off to a telegraph station where it would be blasted back to the home office.
At the time, reporters thought this method was high-tech. Now, thanks to the Internet, a writer can file a story instantly from anywhere. It's incredibly convenient, but that same technology is killing old-fashioned newspapers. Some tell us that that's a good thing. I disagree and believe that the public will miss us once we're gone.
Mr. Farmer, who is now the Star-Ledger's editorial page editor, retold his experience of the old days a short while ago at a wake of sorts for departing colleagues. The paper has been losing money and might have had to shut its doors sometime early next year. So the drivers' and mailers' unions made contract concessions, and about 150 nonunion editorial staff took buyouts as part of an effort by the publisher to save the paper.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Nice try, Mr. Mulshine, but you fail.
Sadly, most "real journalists" only encourage the tax raising which springs from the equality-of-outcomes mindset.
I can easily imagine you as wordsmith to the Crown in pre-Revolutionary America, comtemptuous and dismissive of incensed anti-tax pamphlet writers - patriot bloggers, if you will.
‘zackly.
What passes for journalism these days is a joke. Bloggers can’t be easy worse. And the internet allows people who are actually close to the news to post the truth directly without having it distorted and filtered. Dinosaur media indeed.
Why don’t these so-called hacks that self-title themselves as “journalists” just come out and say “we’re PROPAGANDISTS for the Dumocrats”?
Mr. Mulshine is smoking the drapes. FR breaks more news than the WSJ and NYT combined, unless it is news that hurts national security or helps the dnc, which is where these leftists rags excel. Good riddance Mr. Mulshine.
The strength of real journalists is the unshaven, cigar-chewing, blue ink stained editor who slashes copy to the quick. Bloggers lack this vital organ.
Sorry, Junior. Newspapers are even less so.
Yeah? Too bad we have NO REAL journalist anymore.
I bet you believe in unicorns too, right?
I still believe there is a role for real journalists, to bad we can’t seem to find any.
Fixed it.
Mr. Mulshine of Dorkville
...oops....dupes....poops......
The Gas Tax [imposing a gas tax or similar levy to keep gas prices up......] New York Times
Posted on Saturday, December 27, 2008 9:27:24 AM by Sub-Driver
The Gas Tax
President-elect Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress seem to have a clear vision of the auto industry they think the country needs. It must be financially self-sufficient. It also must be capable of producing highly fuel-efficient, next-generation vehicles that can help the nation cope with climate change and finite supplies of oil.
Yet for all the conditions attached to it, the multibillion-dollar aid package for Detroit’s carmakers approved by the White House (with Mr. Obama’s support) fails to address one crucial question: Who will buy all the fuel-efficient cars that Detroit carmakers are supposed to make?
The danger is that too few will, especially if gasoline prices remain low. Therefore, it might be time for the president-elect and Congress to think seriously about imposing a gas tax or similar levy to keep gas prices up after the economy recovers from recession.
Americans did not buy enormous gas guzzlers just because Detroit marketed them relentlessly. They bought them because they wanted big cars — and because gas was cheap. If gas stays cheap, Americans would be less inclined to squeeze their families into a lithe fuel-efficient alternative.
Furthermore, even if the government managed to convert General Motors, Chrysler and Ford to the cause of energy efficiency, cheap gas could open the door for a competitor — Toyota, perhaps? — to take over the lucrative market for gas-chuggers, leaving Detroit’s automakers eating dust once again.
Americans have flirted with fuel-efficient cars before only to jilt them when gas prices fell. In the late 1970s, for instance, they spurned light trucks as gas prices doubled. But as gas prices declined between 1981 and 2005, the market share of sport-utility vehicles, pickups, vans and the like jumped from 16 percent to 61 percent of vehicle sales in the United States.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don't expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up. Soon, newspapers won't be able to do it either.LOL, the local press are apoligists for higher taxes, it is bloggers who are fighting the good fight, God bless them, every one.
Well said!
The Big Leftard Media has become nothing more The Ministry of Truth (Propaganda) for the Democommies...and the public is aware of this fact and have quit buying the product.
The bloggers have stepped in to fill the media vacuum.
This is the New Media rising.
Newspapers are failing because their product sucks and no one wants to buy it.
Good riddance.
L
The message is lost among the glaring errors.
Print media suffers message loss due to bias.
Either way, there is loss.
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