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When I first began blogging back in July of 2003 on a now-defunct site, one of the reasons I gave for my doing so was that I was already aware that the news media was clearly biased in favor of George W. Bush and the Republicans. I was concerned at the time that the GOP policies would cause great harm to the nation, and that the mainstream media was ignoring this probability. Events since that time have shown that in general, I was right - not that this earns me any special distinction as I'm barely a footnote in blogging history. I'm no Kos, no Atrios, nor am I as well-known as the late Steve Gilliard.
Despite this lack of Web stature, I felt that every little bit would help, and it looks like I was correct. An ABC News/Facebook Survey has found that, for the first time in polls since 1996, Internet news sites are rivaling newspapers as Americans' sources of presidential election news. We bloggers are also the only election news source to show growth.
This is good news, as buggy-whip sources of news are closing down due to necessary changes (mostly at the top of the masthead) delayed too long. The Cincinnati Post has ceased printing already, and in Chicago, both hometown dailies - the Tribune and the Sun-Times - are facing serious cutbacks.
New Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell plans to wring additional profits from company assets, which include Chicago's WGN-TV, the Los Angeles Times, New York's Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel, the Hartford Courant, The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., and the Daily Press of Southeastern Virginia will "serve as his lab". Employees of those papers are extremely concerned about termination.
Up the Chicago River from Tribune headquarters, the Sun-Times staffers fear the shutdown of their paper, which would make the Tribune the sole printed daily. There are suggestions that maybe both papers could merge while maintaining separate staffs, something which has already occurred in Detroit, Denver, Seattle and Cincinnati, but I wouldn't hold my Windy City breath on that idea.
A major owner of Sun-Times Media Group Inc. - Boston-based K Capital - is pushing for Media Group execs to be paid entirely in stock shares. Board members have since agreed to accept 100% of their compensation in shares, and the active publishing execs have agreed to accept shares as a large portion of their packages. If I had my way, all corporate executives would have to accept this condition. That way, they would directly share in the pain they cause when they screw up.
The print media isn't the only victim. Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal reports on some cutback efforts in television:
At NBC, they're talking cutbacks everywhere but at CNBC, which has to be able to compete with the Rupert Murdoch's nascent Fox Business Network. At Dow Jones & Co., which Murdoch's News Corp. expects to take over next week, the executive exodus began in earnest Thursday, a prelude to the new era from top to bottom.
Rosenthal also notes that much smaller and low-budget local news sources are under the ax:
At the Chicago Reader, the free weekly that has been shrinking in every aspect from page size to payroll since its takeover in July by Florida-based Creative Loafing, four positions were sacrificed Thursday in what Editor Alison True said in a memo to staff could be attributed to "the financial pressures of our industry [that] continue unabated."
The overhead of newsprint operations, and the high cost of operating powerful television transmitters and studios, make for a prime cutback target for "frugal" corporate executives, whose focus appears to be almost exclusively on maximizing their personal remuneration. Case in point: departing Tribune CEO Dennis FitzSimons' exit package amounted to more than $41 million. Severance accounts for about $17.7 million of the total, while another large chunk was an "incentive" (read: bribe) offered by Sam Zell for Tribune execs to remain on the job long enough to make the ownership transfer a smooth one. No pending layoff victim can expect even .1% of that when the pink slip arrives.
With this personal executive interest in mind, Google "layoff" on the news page and see just how many people are facing the loss of their employment in this coming economic train wreck disaster of a year. The specifics of the topic will await a future post, but suffice it to say that when George Dumbya Bush trots out his C-minus legacy edjimication from the Yale Business School and claims that the fundamentals of the American economy are stong, remember that he's only speaking to his "base" - the Haves and the Havemores - not those whose lost livelihoods provided the daily profit.
But what does all of this have to do with the bloggers of the Web becoming as important as the regular media sources? It's an economy of scale. The major portion of a typical blogger's investment is time. While a new computer is nice, older computers can still do the job. Internet access is generally under $50 a month, and there are many wonderful news sources across the globe that remain entirely no-charge. While I don't expect that this situation will continue indefinitely, there is no reason to believe that it will close down anytime soon. Even if it does change, there is plenty of time for those who are more serious about providing real news (as opposed to the corporate propaganda being spewed across America's need for information) to adapt to the new conditions. BuzzFlash, for instance, just held a reader's fund-raising campaign to cover their costs for 2008. This is something that the Pacifica Foundation has done for their five radio stations since their founding in 1949, and they are still hard at work.
Sure, no one is going to receive the kind of pay that Dennis FitzSimons got, but at least you can keep some day-old bread on your table. That is more than too many will be able to do as the New Great Depression comes to town on the foul winds of Democratic-abetted Republican excess. |