Open Letter to the Washington Post
I have some left over discontent still with me after I finished the
post I wrote about Prof Winners talk last week. More from the NYRevBook
piece the end of News. It has to do with the print media's endless
wingeing and hand wringing over putting up their content online - free
- just hanging up there like wash on the line, where just anybody can
read it, and for free. Without coins hitting the bucket. Its just
killing them, you can tell. You'd think they weren't advertising:
banner ads, panel ads, popup ads, ads in the RSS feeds. To the
Washington Post then, paper of my metropolitian area, I address this
simple open letter.
I buy yer damn paper. I buy it every damn day, ok! Weekdays,
Sundays Saturdays (well no not Saturdays). But you're right; I don't
have a subscription. During the week I read it at lunch, buy it from
the box in Tydings. Sundays, I buy it at the 7-11. You've got your
money, we've killed trees together. I have seen the pages turn, heard
the rustle, felt the oneness with the centuries of your tradition
surrounding me. Now please just let me link-reference the
Universal resourse locator code of the electric world wide web version,
so I may discuss your learned reporters eruditation with others (other
than my co-workers who have heard quite enough). And quit roiling in
anguish that you haven't yet hooked it up to a punishing enough profit
scheme. In two weeks at any rate you will take it away to your
for-pay-only vaulted archive. Where no one ought disturb a single comma
or dotted i of any of it again. Its value dropping closer to absolute
zero than even Lord Kelvin ever allowed for.
A recent interview [from the Campus Progressive] I saw in alternet with Paul Krugman Alternet Wiretap: Five Minutes With: Paul Krugman
he comments on being part of times select the New York Times
subscription content features. This is a tool I suspect the Post would
love to deploy. Krugman demonstrates he can be diplomatic.
[CP]: How do you feel about Times Select? We are a bit heart-broken about it.
[PK]: There's no question that for the columnists, Times Select was a
really significant reduction in readership and it happened just as the
dam is breaking on the indictments and all of that, and now people like
Frank Rich and myself who would normally be emailed all over the place
are suddenly behind a pay wall. On the other hand, the Times is a
business, and it has to pay its way. It is encouraging that now
columnists are a profit sector, because they can see who generates
revenue. I would certainly have had more Internet hits by a large
multiple right now if they hadn't put in Times Select, but I'm living
with it
Columnist David Brooks is in Times Select too. Of course it
would never occur to me to exchange money for Brooks' meanderings, or
go looking for him should I not find him in his accustomed place. So I
just regard him as having lost grace with gravity and floated wanly off
the planet. Therefore in the next fear and desire drenched
death-of-our-bidness-model meeting you hold, do not assume either an
instrinsic value to everything you supply, or with the other hand that
the public has turned its back on value. They're just getting it, by
small but gathering amounts, elsewhere.
1:38:41 PM  ;;
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