I've actually made it a point to go out of my way and subscribe to my local, finding out about the jackasses screwing up my life on the local level was one of my new years resolutions.

Yet again I ask, what are we supposed to read on the shitter???

Emmeran wrote:

Yet again I ask, what are we supposed to read on the shitter???

Books.

You perhaps need to work on your diet, by the by, if you're really spending that much time on the can.  Shitting should be an in-and-out, businesslike transaction between you and the toilet.  If you're in there long enough to do more than open the damned newspaper, then you're either eating wrong or you're a passive-aggressive shitter, and I'm not sure which is worse.

Last edited by jesusluvspegging (2009-01-27 00:15:30)

Emmeran wrote:

Obviously you don't have a house full of kids

I had not considered that aspect.

Nice find, George. I enjoyed that very much.

Gawker's reporter insists he'll cry if the New Yorker croaks and I know how he feels. That damn rag just got its legs back. I read it cover to cover and haven't made a claim like that for ANY magazine since the early 80s.

From bad to worse.

I just caught, cleaned and inhaled a humgoid grouper. They'll have gag, hog tie, and goosestep board me for the flight back. Texas still sucks.

Taint wrote:

George Orr wrote:

Link to YouTube page

Just as a side note, I know the reporter who did the story. I should get in touch with him.

When you do, find out if the old guy croaked yet.

The newspaper people like to give themselves credit just like the Hollywood people do....  Ever watch celebrities at the Emmy awards sitting around sucking each other's dicks talking about how genius they all are?  Same fucking thing.....  They're a bunch of self-important pricks that are getting their asses handed to them by the competition....

SF Chronicle dying

Washington Post profits down 77%

Hartford Courant cutting jobs

Thank God, the newspapers are dying.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2 … l-edition/

I don't know who this guy is, but he's really on the ball.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?"  To which the answer is: Nothing.  Nothing will work.  There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

If you're not making money anyway, why not make it official?

Seriously, why do reporters keep trying to blame news aggregators?  Are they really stupid enough to think that they would be getting that same traffic and would be able to keep all of that juicy ad money to themselves if only those pesky news search and aggregator services weren't there?

George Orr wrote:

What's your opinion of this guy?  I'm watching The Wire and liking it a lot, and I know he worked for the Ballmer paper IRL; but does he know what he's talking about?

Simon's a very good reporter.  His flaw is that he is steeped in the newsprint mindset and can't see the truth in the Clay Shirky piece I posted above.

A telling part in the article linked from choad's Baltimore Devolves thread is that Simon never seems to realize that it is not his association with the Sun (or their lawyers) that gave him access to arrest records; it is his relationship with the judge.

Some corruption will still be uncovered.  It will just tend to come from the subset of prosecutors with both integrity and balls and from partisans exposing their enemies.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

George Orr wrote:

A couple years ago they were whining about "the bloggers" but then most of the public figured out what a "blogger" actually is.  So now they've switched to nattering about "aggregators" because the public doesn't know what that means yet.

Fuck aggregators with a pointy stick. They're parasites sucking their hosts dry. See AIG bankers.

David Simon does get one part of the equation entirely wrong.

"The internet does froth and commentary very well, but you don't meet many internet reporters down at the courthouse."

Mr. Simon needs to visit courthouses and local websites like mine. It's rude, it's coarse and often ungrammatical. George would stroke out in a heartbeat.

But it works and it works better than any newspaper I ever knew.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

Will investigative journalism be saved by bloggers after all?

choad wrote:

tojo2000 wrote:

Choad, I know I've been ranty on this subject, but I really want to know; what is your beef with the aggregators?

What's not to like? Someone else profits from your hard work and you get nothing.

If you get nothing, it's only because you aren't selling anything.  If your site makes any money then they drive more traffic to you, ergo you're getting something out of the deal.

What separates a news aggregator from a search engine?


Keep in mind, blogs or whatnot that actually post articles are a completely different animal, but I'm assuming that by news aggregator you're referring to one of the various sites that gathers headlines and snippets in one place so that people who are interested can see what's in the news.

George Orr wrote:

Link to YouTube page

Interesting and prophetic too. 

So Georgi, how's the new job?  Are you at work now, or did you get the night shift?

Guardian wants money from Google, only they don't.  WTF?

tojo2000 wrote:

Basically the traffic is too valuable to lose, but not valuable enough to keep.

Except when they're gone. Then we're all fucked. Google's blind pursuit of profit is every bit as self defeating as Detroit's and Wall Street's greed. Google is giving it all away in China for the sake of market share and content providers get what? That's right, nothing.

Last edited by choad (2009-04-03 10:33:06)

tojo2000 wrote:

choad wrote:

tojo2000 wrote:

Basically the traffic is too valuable to lose, but not valuable enough to keep.

Except when they're gone. Then we're all fucked. Google's blind pursuit of profit is every bit as self defeating as Detroit's and Wall Street's greed. Google is giving it all away in China for the sake of market share and content providers get what? That's right, nothing.

What are they giving away?

And by the way, I'm not just trying to be argumentative.  I understand how news aggregators hurt the physical newspaper industry, but they actually add value to the websites.  Nobody, not even the Guardian, disputes that, otherwise they'd go through with asking Google not to index them.  Google doesn't host news articles, though, except for certain cases in which they pay the AP to host an article.

So I'm really trying to understand:  What is Google giving away (especially in China, I'm not familiar with what you're referring to)?   What is Google taking?  As far as I can tell, the relationship between news aggregators and news sites is pretty much symbiotic.  Aggregators can't exist without online news sites to index, and news sites don't get nearly as much traffic without the aggregators.   

So maybe I'm missing something, which I'll admit is entirely possible.

choad wrote:

tojo2000 wrote:

So I'm really trying to understand:  What is Google giving away (especially in China, I'm not familiar with what you're referring to)?

Music and video. Obviously, the Guardian just doesn't like Google.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 … e-industry

The music and video thing is interesting.  Google has always been a distant second place in china, and the #1 search portal Baidu has a very popular MP3 search service which allows people to easily find (pirated) music.  I haven't seen Google's offering, but supposedly it was an attempt to use licensed material to try to compete.

I was afraid that you were saying that Google really was reproducing the news stories somewhere, and was wondering how they would get away with that.

The Street View thing is an interesting thing, too. I saw a post (might have been the Guardian) yesterday about  a mob of British villagers who accosted a Street View van driving through their neighborhoods.  (neighbourhoods?)

Anybody here used a Kindle?

sigmoid freud wrote:

Anybody here used a Kindle?

I got one for my dad.  He loves it.  I got him a leather cover for it, partly because I thought it would feel more like holding a book.

Dmtdust wrote:

Taint wrote:

sigmoid freud wrote:

Anybody here used a Kindle?

I like the idea of the Kindle, but I enjoy the sensual feel of holding a book and I find my shelves-full and piles of books oddly comforting, although it's becoming difficult to convince friends that moving them is no problem. Some of my favorite books are favorites not only because of the contents, but because of the care that went into the layout and typeface. I appreciate a well-designed web site, but it's just not the same thing.

Yep.  What da man said!

The only thing that I still miss about books is the smell of old paper.  I can't get enough of it.