New Victims in the 'Billionaire War on Journalism' (newsweek.com) 207
Newsweek offers a new reminder that internet journalism can vanish in a corporate shutdown or be "sued out of existence" -- so it certainly isn't permanent.
Writers at the local New York City news sites DNAinfo and Gothamist -- as well as Gothamist's network of city-specific sister sites, such as LAist and DCist -- learned this chilling lesson on Thursday, when billionaire Joe Ricketts abruptly shut down the publications and fired their employees. The decision has been widely regarded as a form of retaliation in response to the newsroom's vote last week to unionize with the Writers Guild of America, East. Worse, for a full 20 hours after the news broke, Gothamist.com and DNAinfo.com effectively didn't exist: Any link to the sites showed only Ricketts's statement about his decision, which claims the business was not profitable enough to support the journalism...
The larger tragedy is a nationwide death of local news. Alt-weeklies are flailing as ad revenue dries up. The Village Voice, a legendary New York paper, published its final print issue in September. Houston Press just laid off its staff and ended its print edition this week. Countless stories won't be covered, because the journalistic institutions to tell them no longer exist. Who benefits from DNAinfo being shuttered? Billionaires. Shady landlords. Anyone DNAinfo reported critically on over the years. Who loses? Anyone who lives in the neighborhoods DNAinfo and Gothamist helped cover.
The larger tragedy is a nationwide death of local news. Alt-weeklies are flailing as ad revenue dries up. The Village Voice, a legendary New York paper, published its final print issue in September. Houston Press just laid off its staff and ended its print edition this week. Countless stories won't be covered, because the journalistic institutions to tell them no longer exist. Who benefits from DNAinfo being shuttered? Billionaires. Shady landlords. Anyone DNAinfo reported critically on over the years. Who loses? Anyone who lives in the neighborhoods DNAinfo and Gothamist helped cover.
Lose your own money (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly - they already had negative pnl (Score:5, Interesting)
These newspapers were already losing money. He was paying for them out of his personal wealth. Forming a union is going to drive costs up, not down. They basically wanted to take more money out of his pocket. I would have closed them also.
Re:Exactly - they already had negative pnl (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exactly - they already had negative pnl (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Exactly - they already had negative pnl (Score:5, Informative)
I work at a company that is owned by the employees and we are in dire, dire need of a union. The thing is, while employees may have ownership shares held for them in a trust, they have no say in any of the business decisions and the shares of stock function in no way that gives them any votes or power of any kind.
You should tell your managers that they are doing it wrong. Harvard Business School did a study [hbr.org] of employee owned companies, and found that they generally outperform competitors, but only if employees participated in decision making and felt involved in setting goals and resolving problems.
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That's socialism, so obviously won't work. Next you'll find some study that shows co-ops are efficient at infrastructure, more socialist propaganda.
Big business in partnership with big government is the true way to have profitable businesses.
Re:Exactly - they already had negative pnl (Score:4, Informative)
That's socialism
Nope, it is capitalism. ESOPs require the employees to buy or earn their shares. Once vested, they can sell their shares, either on an exchange or back to the company. Not all employees participate, and of those that do ownership is not equally distributed.
In principle, in is no different than any other stock ownership, and you can't get more capitalist than that.
The only real "socialist" component, is that most ESOPs are part of tax deferred retirement plans, so there is some taxpayer funded subsidy upfront. But most retirement savings are subsidized, so that is nothing special.
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Socialist in the sense that the workers own and run the company, capitalist in the sense that the workers raised the capital.
There's no reason that socialism means no capital or no market, at that a market is a good way to price stuff and show efficiency, even in a socialist society, though in theory a socialist market shouldn't be so cutthroat.
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he thing is, while employees may have ownership shares held for them in a trust, they have no say in any of the business decisions and the shares of stock function in no way that gives them any votes or power of any kind
Then it isn't really employee owned, is it? Because if they owned it they would have voting rights.
Why would they want to spend their money on that? (Score:2)
There were a hundred writers, so we can estimate at least another 50 employees selling ads, doing to accounting, running the servers, etc. So minimum $150,000 / month for salaries. Employee benefits, payroll taxes, office space, etc would be at least $50,000 / month. So bare minimum expenses $200,000 / month. Revenue was about $110,000/ month. Why would the writers want to work another job to support the $80,000 / month such a site loses, and work at the new employee-owned company?
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If he shut the business down because he believed unionization would increase costs, that is against the law and he might end up paying their salaries for the next decade!
To be legal, normally you'd have to wait until costs suddenly increased, and then you can point at real, actual increases that are not based on personal opinion about unions.
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If employees want to unionize in pro-union states is either allow it or go ou
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And why would you have even bought a 14-year old company, 8 months ago, without doing your due diligence to understand the potential for profit? Face it, this was clearly union busting. They were told the company would shut down if they voted to unionize, they voted to do so, then they were shut down 1 week later, before any kind of discussion about contracts and cost
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Re: Exactly - they already had negative pnl (Score:5, Insightful)
The news organizations that are more dependent on advertising for their funding tend to be closer to propaganda than news organizations with other funding sources. The ones dependent on advertisers can't really publish anything that might depict those advertisers in a bad light, even in the most minor way. They end up having less freedom, and thus are far more likely to become defenders of their advertisers, rather than objective reporters of fact.
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Does "Mother Jones" take advertising?
Does "Mother Jones" take advertising? (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, I just went to MotherJones.com for the first time in ages. I used to read it in the 1980's a lot. You can look up who owns it, funding, advertising issues, political bias, etc. right on the website. More transparent than most.
(I predict a lot of people will not believe what is asserted on Mother Jones about their political bias).
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Those people will likely quickly land somewhere
Journalism isn't like tech. They have low pay, and no job security. I have met several Uber drivers who tell me that their "real" job is journalism, and they just drive for Uber to pay the bills.
if they're smart, start their own news website.
Sure, because the world needs yet another news aggregator that nobody is willing to pay for.
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Re: Exactly - they already had negative pnl (Score:3, Informative)
It takes time and money to do good journalism. It doesn't take that much time or money to publish revenue generating opinion passing as news to make money. It used to be that many news orgs actually cared about good journalism, very few are anymore.
It's foolish to think that news should be profitable, they never were. What makes money and supports good journalism is good entertainment and the big networks chose to skimp on the latter for profit and the whole thing went to shit.
The people on this thread that
Re:Lose your own money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lose your own money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Lose your own money (Score:2)
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You want moneylosing local journalism, fund it yourself. Don't expect others to fund it for you.
Thank Deity we have laws here in the UK that prevent rich people from just suing things they don't like out of existence. If a paper publishes something damaging against a rich person here, their ultimate defence is demonstrating that it was factual. If they can do that, they'll have high priced QC's (very expensive lawyers) knocking down their doors because they'll get their exorbitant fee from the losers (the rich people suing). Its nice for the little guy to be given a fair playing field.
Also, its goo
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What? The UK is unique. Being factual is _not_ a defense against libel in the UK. All they have to prove is you were 'being mean to them'. The Chiropractors won a fairly famous case based on that.
South Park makes jokes on it. Tom Cruise: 'I'm going to sue you in England!'
Local Blogs (Score:2, Insightful)
There are plenty of local blogs out there that cover fairly low-level neighborhood news. They don't have massive readership but I see them shared all over facebook when they publish something interesting. The best part about it is the writers are mostly doing it as a hobby.
Re:Local Blogs (Score:4, Insightful)
The "best part" is that these blogs filled with innuendo, incorrect information, and metric-tons of bias are done by hobbyists. Brilliant!
Re: Local Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's my complaint with them, too. The quality is often total crap, and the bias is thick and obvious. The articles are less about journalism and reporting the facts than they are editorials pushing a narrative or agenda. Some of them are so bad that they make /. look good!
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Look at the sarcastic idiot with a proper name. As usual, the right wing conflates the minor inaccuracy of the major media with the major inaccuracies of the non-major media and tries to draw moral equivalence. I don't know whom to be more disgusted with - idiot right winger here or the morons who modded him up.
By your "news has to be perfect or it's all crap" standard, why should we take time to find out facts at all? Which, of course is the point of your rant - to promote and perpetuate the ignorance of
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That said, I'm feeling gregarious today so I'll respond to your insults with civil conversation and present an example of the kind of propaganda the MSM engages in all the damn time. The following NYT article [nytimes.com] contains a "minor factual error" that's not at all germane to the topic of the story: it refer
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The irony is that he was "unarmed" in the sense that he was not holding a weapon, nor was he actually reaching for one. He would probably be alive today had he not behaved responsibly and told the officer who stopped him that he was in possession of a firearm. That statement apparently made the officer nervous enough to shoot Castille who was in fact reaching for his wallet.
And why was he stopped?
Re:Local Blogs (Score:5, Interesting)
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> The "best part" is that these blogs filled with innuendo, incorrect information, and metric-tons of bias are done by hobbyists. Brilliant!
In other words, they're just like CNN and Fox News.
Re:Local Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
> The "best part" is that these blogs filled with innuendo, incorrect information, and metric-tons of bias are done by hobbyists. Brilliant!
In other words, they're just like CNN and Fox News.
What's sad, is that the best coverage of U.S. news seems to come from the UK. The Mail, the Telegraph, the Beeb, and, occaisionally, the Guardian , , ,
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That's a nice little homage to the Grauniad ;-)
But proposing the Daily Mail as a news site is a couple of million miles off target.
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So ... you wanna say that they are a pretty good replacement for local papers? If they now have some "information" about the sales from local stores that drop their prices from three times Amazon's price to twice it, it would be complete.
Re:Local Blogs (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not ready yet to permanently divide the world into billionaires and hobbyists, though I can almost see this day coming in my lifetime.
Re:Local Blogs (Score:5, Interesting)
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Let's not forget NPR and PBS.
Although the average "advocate" seem to think they're only worth the 5% of of their operating cost (the part the government actually pays for).
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That 5% killed Big Bird. And turned Elmo into a gay sexual predator.
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The BBCs news site has gone drastically down hill in recent years - it used to be my go-to site, but their recent design update basically reduced actual news content on the front page to around 30% of content. The rest of the space is taken up with "most read", "most watched" lists (both 10 item lists, which are styled to take up the same space as the news content blocks around them), "Full Story" magazine style human interest, which has an equal space dedicated to it as the top news block, "Must See" cont
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Their reward was nine years of funding freezes, while the corporate media (owned largely by two massive multinationals) tugged the forelock and published media releases without question.
The media landscape where I live is about as bad as it could be at the moment, largely due to media consolidation, but there seems to be a few gree
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We still have government funded news sites. The BBC and Al-Jazeera both do good work. They might be under pressure to not report negatively on their patron but there are enough of them (with different patrons) to fill in the gaps. The TV networks once funded news sites as a status thing because news isn't profitable.
The Beeb is still pretty good with political news, they'll happily dish the dirt out on the government in power (be it Labour or Tory) as well as the opposition but I feel they weren't harsh enough on Brexit, the BBC was too afraid of upsetting people on that subject so I felt their efforts were half hearted. When the head of the BoE says that the UK would be in a boom if not for Brexit I tend to believe that over Nigel Farage.
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My hobby is being a billionaire, you insensitive clod!
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I've found https://www.nextdoor.com/ [nextdoor.com] to be a far more reliable source of what's going on in my neighborhood than anything else.
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I've found https://www.nextdoor.com/ [nextdoor.com] to be a far more reliable source of what's going on in my neighborhood than anything else.
I concur. Our local discussions on NextDoor brought up issues that didn't even make the remarkably bad bi-weekly local paper. . .
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I just tried it, and it told me "Welcome! General Tice is your neighborhood."
Who the hell is General Tice, and why is he in my neighborhood?
You're gonna see a lot more billionaires (Score:3, Insightful)
So get used to this. When they can't crush they'll buy and vice versa. If you want the kind of muck racking that shines a light on the bad parts of the world you've got to pay for it somehow. That used to be the tabloids, but folks seem to have forgotten that, and all that's left is corporate propaganda paid for to push their message.
Re: You're gonna see a lot more billionaires (Score:5, Funny)
This could be a great exit strategy for small news organizations. Focus on digging up dirt on billionaires with the goal of getting acquired and shutdown by the billionaires. That way the billionaires are funding their own unwanted public attention.
Re: You're gonna see a lot more billionaires (Score:5, Insightful)
Focus on digging up dirt on billionaires with the goal of getting acquired and shutdown by the billionaires.
Peter Thiel didn't acquire Gawker. He funded lawsuits against them and drove them into bankruptcy.
He spent $10M to inflict $140M in damages.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Personally, I hated Gawker ever since they fired Original Wonkette and replaced her with a man using the same pseudonym.
Back when they were known for being the most over-the-top tabloid comedy-news. The news was real, but the commentary was comedy. It became a whole genre on TV! But without OW the comedy was too weak to pull it off. Same thing with the TV genre; people tried it with weak comedians for years and it sucked. Then they tried it with quality acts and it took over late-night! Gawker did it in rev
Wonkette wasn't fired (Score:2)
I agree with that the style of Gawker's blogs - Valleywag was another one of them - was extremely entertaining while also being informative with occasional bursts of actual investigative journalism.
Too late (Score:2)
TMZ already does this. Ironically they sometimes break news before the big guys because they can afford the reporters. I don't remember the exact numbers, but a NYTimes reporter was lamenting how TMZ had like a dozen reporters at the LA courthouse all the time and the NYT's only had one occasionally. TMZ will pay for tips which also gives them an advantage according the NYT reporter. Interesting times. And yes, full disclosure, I check out TMZ's website from time to time to see if they got a scoop.
Then they'll be the next target (Score:2)
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If Gawker didn't break the law, they probably would have faded into oblivion.
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Evidently people are talking about them.
Horror! Tragedy! Things aren't Permanent! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how the OP feels about the fact that the National Geographic media operation was quickly and spectacularly swirling the toiled and about to fold and take hundreds of jobs with it, without a single white knight showing up to bail them out and fix what was broken, except for (horror! tragedy!) Rupert Murdoch. Now they're back on their feet and solvent and writers, photographers, production people and the rest still have jobs there. Eeeeevil corporatism! Except it wouldn't have been evil if a notably lefty billionaire had used one of his companies to buy NatGeo, in which case that would have been great for journalism and everything else, la la la.
Paying professional people to produce media for an audience is a business. If it can't survive without generous patronage, then it needs to die and be reborn as part of someone's foundation or other personal project, or simply die because it can't produce the value that everyone working there wants to take home every week. Buggy whip factories, etc.
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Sure, in the long run everything's doomed.
That doesn't mean that when things go away nothing of value was lost.
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The employer doesn't pay the union, the employees do. Just, so you know next time.
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The employer doesn't pay the union, the employees do. Just, so you know next time.
Do you really believe the things you say? Are you actually convinced that once a news operation's employees unionize that their new collective bargaining arrangement won't increase the payroll overhead for the employer? That's the whole POINT of unionizing - to get more out of the employment arrangement than the employer would otherwise be able or inclined to pay. The costs of unionizing are passed along to the employer (and to the employer's customers), by definition.
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> Can we fire the boss if he's funding super PACs
You mean like Brendan Eich at Mozilla? https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Not a war on Journalism. War on unionization (Score:5, Insightful)
Heard an interview with one of the employees on the radio earlier this week.
The way it was done was a deliberate slap in the face to the employees.
There's some debate already whether Joe Ricketts violated labor laws.
I've no doubt he can show internet journalism isn't profitable. And anyone paying attention in 2008 (when he got into it) knew that, too.
The benefit Joe Ricketts gets from a "newspaper" is a place to shout from and a tax write off. It was never going to be profitable.
It was done a week after writers unionized and the last message shouted from the "newspaper" was crystal fscking clear:
You vote union? We vote scorched earth.
Now. Anybody else who still has a job--do you want a union?
Re:Not a war on Journalism. War on unionization (Score:5, Insightful)
Guy is running a newpaper that loses money. A change is put through that will make him lose considerably more money. So he decides it's not worth it. I am shocked.
Re:Not a war on Journalism. War on unionization (Score:5, Interesting)
There's some debate already whether Joe Ricketts violated labor laws.
What labor law would that be? As you say, he can prove that the entire venture was loosing money. He closed it all down. You think that, just because the employees voted to unionize, the NLRB can force a company to remain open? It would be one thing if he fired all the employees and hired new ones. If he simply winds down the entire company, there isn't much a lawsuit is going to do.
Now. Anybody else who still has a job--do you want a union?
I've only had experience with a unionized position three times. All three times I was screwed over by nepotism, organizational politics and either lies or incompetence by the union reps. So no, no union for me thank you.
Re:Not a war on Journalism. War on unionization (Score:4, Insightful)
"It" happened because "it" didn't really happen and you can't prove it.
You can shut the business down and open a different business later. That part is no problem.
The problem, or lack of problem, comes down to the actual decision to close it and if they left some sort of trail that makes it clear it was shut down over the union. It has nothing to do with if the business was shut down, or if you started a new one; it comes down to why, and what was documented about that question.
Retaliation over labor organizing is illegal, but failing after labor organizes isn't. Nor is trying again later. But shutting them down because labor organizes is illegal. So it depends largely on if he said stupid shit to his employees while trying to talk them out of unionizing. If he said stupid shit he might be screwed. And all I know about the guy is: he's saying stupid shit now, on the same subject.
Hell with them (Score:2)
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Re:Hell with them (Score:5, Insightful)
You ... you really believe that one can get rich by working?
Hey, folks, gather 'round, I found the dupe that still believes the "American Dream"!
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Put those goalposts back where you found them.
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It was supposed to be ironic, back when I chose it I was full of ideals.
That changed in the past 20ish years.
Re:Hell with them (Score:4, Insightful)
20 out of 200.000.000?
By that odds, playing the lottery seems more sensible.
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He didn't say anything about wanting to have the guys stuff, or about transferring it to somebody else, or even about taking his money away.
Failure to comprehend the words does not imply [whatever your random offtopic statement is].
Hard lesson in the 1st Amendment... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a reminder that 'Freedom of the Press' just means that the government can't officially sensor your speech. It in no way gives you a right to have your voice heard. In practical terms it's not the 'right' for you to have to be give access to an actual printing press or by extension a news paper column, it's just that the government can't keep you from owning one without the due course of law.
If you can't get people to listen to you enough then that's your problem, and complaining about it on Slashdot is more than useless. You might have a case for anti unionizing practices, but that's a different story all together.
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Gone are the days when freedom of the press required owning a printing press.
Not only that but leveraging your reach can easily be much cheaper than with some local paper. I have quite a few websites that collectively get 10s of thousands of uniques a day and the hosting is less than $600 a month.
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" carried those ungrateful, entitled fucks long enough. It has no moral obligation at all to keep paying them when they're not producing."
Fill in with any corporation that has outsourced or imported foreign labor. Remember that when you get outsourced or have to train your replacement.
Re:What utter bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the whole 8 months that Joe Ricketts owned the Gothamist LLC? That has been around for 14 years? Yeah he carried them real far.
From TFA:
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NPR was shilling pretty hard on this Friday (Score:2, Insightful)
Puh-lease!
I don't even unwrap the newspaper (Score:2)
When my dad went into the hospital we ended up throwing his unopened newspapers away. A free local paper and we didn't even bother taking them out the plastic sleeve. It's littered with ads, the content isn't relevant, and it's not how people get news anymore.
Billionaire ownership of the media is a separate problem. The idea that money equals speech has unfortunately become deeply ingrained.
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This business model died, but it had a good run (Score:2, Interesting)
It's often difficult to pivot with a business and failure to do so is why we are seeing businesses go under today. Local reporting doesn't have to die- but the business model local news papers have relied on may need to be replaced or otherwise adapted to make it work financially. I'm involved exclusively in reporting on local news in New Hampshire. I film important issues at the state house regularly, police abuse (which you'll NEVER see stock reporters doing, not on the street anyway), unconstitutional po
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Not worth paying for (Score:2)
But now that the advertising revenue has shriveled the public do not appear to be willing to pay to read about the local flower show, a traffic accident, what the Mayor did last week or who married whom. If you were involved in any local event, you probably already know about it. If you weren't you probably don't care - and aren't willin
IF there's a demand (Score:2)
If there's a demand.. something else will rise to fill it. If there's no actual demand, then it won't really be missed.
Sounds like union busting done old school (Score:2)
And it's a federal offense.
This DOJ will be unlikely to do anything, but it times gone past...
Sigh. It's the dark ages all over again
Boy the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.
And you knew who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again.
Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.
Archie is laughing his ass off!
Bit of a perspective problem (Score:2)
Worse, for a full 20 hours after the news broke, Gothamist.com and DNAinfo.com effectively didn't exist: Any link to the sites showed only Ricketts's statement about his decision, which claims the business was not profitable enough to support the journalism.
"Effectively didn't exist"? You mean the archives were gone. Which is bad, I agree, but is that really worse than closing the business without even making an attempt to sell it?
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We all assumed you did.
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see if I can get my IQ down under 40. I'm already stupid.
If your brain activity was any lower, doctors would legally be able to harvest your organs.
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You still seem to be laboring under the delusion that either side is less in the pocket of the 1% than the other. Both just work for different parts of the aristocracy.
The only difference is which particular billionaires profit.
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Newsweek sold for $1 a few years ago. It already failed.
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TFA's premise is the exact opposite of "too big to fail."
First paragraph of TFA:
Re: EDITORDAVID (Score:2)
If this comment is amongst the best so far, then Slashdot has far greater problems than our moderation system.