Paranoia Still Striking Deep

[dewline]

The paranoid in me keeps saying that you can't have a dictatorship - never mind which nation(s) - without a Depression first.

And there's Professor Krugman over there trying to remind the powers that be that austerity is THE worst thing for avoiding a Depression...and being ignored.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/opinion/krugman-death-of-a-fairy-tale.html

(And the New York Times is shrinking their paywall-free article access from 20 articles/month to 10. This is going to have to be Dealt With by the Net at large some day, yes?)

Comments

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Our local paper is following that limited article trend - someone sent me a link this morning, and I couldn't click on it since I'd already gone through my 10 article limit for the month without realizing it.

The odd thing is that a) our local paper, in general, sucketh mightily (I did, however, click on the Zimmerman coverage, thus going over the limit) except in its coverage of Disney and Universal -- coverage, I might add, that often leads to me and others heading to both places and spending money, and b) our local paper is also about the only place where I look at and respond to ads for various things, because the ads are somewhat relevant.

I realize circulation rates for this paper are declining, but it's not because people are choosing to read the online articles for free instead of subscribing to the paper; it's because the coverage sucks. My advice to the Orlando Sentinel would be to improve the quality of the articles so people want to read them, instead of saying, "Yeah, well, it was the Orlando Sentinel, so the article didn't say much," and focus on advertising revenue, which might increase if people had a reason to visit the site, or didn't think, oh, I've gone through my article limit, never mind. Maybe charge Disney for their ongoing Daily Disney coverage (which is one of the few decent features of the paper.) Or something.

But this doesn't seem to be the approach.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I've read reports that the local Postmedia paper, the Ottawa Citizen is also considering taking a similar approach. And yeah, I think that reducing reporter staffing levels in order to keep the shareholders happy enough is effectively shooting your corporation's "cash cow" assets through the vital organs, both in the short and long haul.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

I honestly think our local paper would be better off financially if it focused on targeted, local ad revenue -- directing people to various events/ things here. For example, putting ads about various bike stores next to an article about planned expansions to bike trails in the county. Revenue for bike stores=bike stores think it's worth advertising there=paper now has money to hire reporters and monitor progress on creating/maintaining bike trails and so on. They did note, correctly, that Winter Garden, where I live, got a major economic boost from the bike trail -- but never mentioned that Apopka, to our north, also on the trail, didn't. Why? Investigating would have been interesting and focused on why/how/where we are spending county money.

Instead, the Orlando Sentinel keeps doing worse and worse coverage. And there's consequences to this. The Zimmerman/Martin case got out of hand partly because the cops screwed up the initial investigation, but also because the Martin family was justly infuriated when the local paper didn't pay any attention to their son's death or to the fact that the local cops didn't do much of an investigation. On a lesser note, the Zimmerman family is irritated that the local paper didn't pay attention to increased robberies in their area/failure of the police to solve said increased robberies in their area.

Mind you, I don't know that press coverage before this could have helped avoid the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy. But the lack of coverage before and immediately after didn't help and has ended up causing additional pain to the Martin family, who certainly didn't need more of it.