A real problem to worry about for once

Somehow I think a newspaper conglomerate shutting down
one of the country's biggest daily papers to back down a union is worthy of discussion. From experience, workers in nonunion states have virtually no rights or protection, the fact that a newspaper can be shut down to force concessions is a frightening trend.

www.washingtonpost.com...

Nice find and thanks for posting something a bit different yet very important to our times .

When I hear story like this I can't help but sympathize . We will just have to see how this plays out and lets hope its not some new trend and lets also hope that the unemployment numbers don't go any higher .

Newspapers are dying and have been for awhile.

Basically, the Internet killed them off, because people have access to free information and articles and don't need to pay for a paper. I would subscribe to my local paper if there were no internet. However, since it, and zillions of other papers around the world are free to me to read online, I do not.

Online advetising cannot pick up the slack for lost eyeballs. Its simply not as effective, and everyone knows this.

If you want something of value in this universe, somebody has to pay for it. That's how we overcome entropy (second law of thermodynamics). This is a very fundamental equation. Newspapers were able to thrive and fend off entropy because under the old model, both advertisers and the public would pay. Now the public wants it for free and the advertisers don't want to spend as much on a dwindling audience. What part of this doesn't make sense?

"information wants to be free," blah blah blah. Well it may want to, but in the long term, again, if it is neg-entropic (and, by definition, information is the opposite of entropy), then effort has to be put in by somebody, i.e., somebody has to pay. It doesn't matter who -- it might be me, it might be you, it might be the advertisers, it might be the govermnet, who knows --
but somebody has to pay.

All the people who thought the Internet and the print world could survive in harmony forever are wrong because the model is disrupted and there is not enough neg-entropy in the form of MONEY coming into the system anymore. YOU CANT GET SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. I'm not saying this is good, or bad...its just a universal law.

Newspapers have failed over the last 10 years to come up with a viable model to plug the entropic gap created by the Internet. So they are dying. Bottom line. There are sad things about this, there are some benefits in the changing media landscape as well. But the change is unalterable. They are sunset industry, soon to join the buggywhip manufacterers on the ashheap of history.