Hilarious.

RECENT RELICS- 1980 – 2030

The Rotary Dial Telephone
The 33 1/3 Long Playing Record
The 8-Track Cassette
The Audio Cassette
The Typewriter (manual & electric)
The Videocassette Recorder
The Picture Tube
The Internal Combustion Engine
The Free Market Capitalist
The National Hockey League
The Newspaper

Yup. It’s a shame anyone should suffer because they quit that abomination.

To people still employed by the LAT, though, let me say this: this is what you have to look forward to, creeps.

1. Newspapers’ (not just LAt/TribCo) failure to react to competition. Think Craigslist.

2. The real estate bubble predictably bursting, eliminating revenue that the papers’ biz plans irrationally expected to continue to grow.

3. The auto slump (driven in part by the credit slump, driven by the real-estate bubble’s pop) pulling another revenue rug out from under them. I don’t think people get how much of a mainstay RE and auto ads were to newspaper finance.

4. Newspapers’ collective decision to halve their funding base by taking partisan positions in a 50/50 nation; minus the degree to which their readership was nonrepresentative. So for LAT they’re maybe only throwing away 40% of their revenue, assuming their circ area is 60/40 liberal/left.

5. Rejection of the papers’ greatest strength and hardest-to-duplicate capability, and hyperconcentration on something readily available to consumers in greater quality and diversity elsewhere; even, more convenient for consumers elsewhere. I refer to hard-news gathering versus opinion. Example: while Patrick has broken real stories here, he can’t do what the Times could do (if so inclined) to cover a beat story. But he can analyze events as well and, for half or so of the former Times readership, more agreeably. The other half of Times readers can find better written opinion on their side at other sites, which, like Pat and unlike the Times, don’t deny their partisan nature and so don’t start off lying to you.

6. Most papers’ failure to monetize their new media properties effectively.

Some of these are environmental; some of them are management “own goals.” Some, you can argue the degree to which a more astute management might have handled them.

Along with the writers who are the face of the newspaper to the public, a great many behind-the-scenes folks lose out when a paper fails. Many of the production workers, for example, the IT people who trend libertarian or the pressmen who trend conservative, are not part of the newsroom’s liberal monoculture (and so they’re generally looked down on, sneered at, and insulted by the reporters). The good news is that, unlike the reporters, most of them have real skills that employers will pay fair wages for. (Being able to write literately is a necessity for many jobs, and beneficial in almost any of them, but on its own opens few doors).

Some guy in the New Republic has already called for Obama to provide do-nothing jobs for unemployed writers. Of course, since it’s TNR, home of Steven Glass, Scott Beauchamp, Eve Fairbanks and Fabricating Franklin Foer, you gotta take it with a grain of salt. Or maybe a salt lick, given their history.

When next in LA, I’ll be sure to tip my waiter generously. Thus will I support unemployed Times writers.

I wonder if the Feds could argue now, with so many corruption events identified, that the government of Illinois is an “ongoing criminal enterprise”

If only.

Great day for Conservatives.

I hope that came out right….

I once read the Times-Pick-your-nose in New Orleans, but, have literally stopped reading the printed copy, and done what little I still do on line, because they are just not worth the 50 or so cents a day of reading….circulation is way down, because the paper does not write about what happens in New Orleans, but hammers the surrounding areas, which pisses off those who live in those areas….there is a direct “class envy” of those areas by the publishers/writers, so, why read that….the important news can be gotten elsewhere….