LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy | ARTHUR MAGAZINE - WE FOUND THE OTHERS
http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/03/16/let-it-die-rushkoff-on-the-economy/
Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing | Politics & Media | SPLICETODAY.COM
http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reasons-why-newspapers-are-failing

a little too long and paginated (argh!) but the guy gets many key points right ... will little Artie Sulz who pays himself $4MM a year bother to read it? ... send to evan ... "(I worked for a household-name news organization whose top web editor told me the design of the site didn’t allow links in text. The assertion raised so many questions in my mind I was rendered speechless. It was almost like a Zen koan; the terrestrial equivalent might be of a newspaper whose pages were all glued together.)" I'M LAUGHING BUT IT'S WORTH A CRY ... "Let’s be honest: These papers deserve to die. " AMEN ... "If I were running a chain of papers, here’s what I’d do:" THE NINE SUGGESTIONS THAT FOLLOW ARE GREAT BUT OF COURSE WILL NEVER HAPPEN

One of the things the digital convergence is doing is exposing that fact. Newspapers have to understand that the value that they could as a consequence offer to advertisers just doesn’t exist any more. Another thing: since that delivery monopoly is gone, you can see how much of the production of the American newspaper was not only promotional, but redundant.

Splice Today: MUSIC : POP CULTURE : SPORTS : MOVING PICTURES : POLITICS + MEDIA : WRITING : CONSUME : ON CAMPUS : SEX : DIGITAL

"Press releases contain dated information, the release of which is valuable only to the companies involved; in most cases, they’d actually pay to advertise it, and in that sense it has a negative news value. But vast swaths of a typical American daily is filled with news whose primary source is a press release of one form or another, from entities governmental, political, or corporate. It was part of an unspoken but implicit agreement the papers had with advertisers—that the vast majority of what the paper printed would be complementary with the advertising. (It would be complimentary too, of course.)"

got mugged on Christmas Eve. I was in front of my Brooklyn apartment house taking out the trash when a man pulled a gun and told me to empty my pockets. I gave him my money, wallet, and cell phone. But then—remembering something I’d seen in a movie about a hostage negotiator—I begged him to let me keep my medical- insurance card. If I could humanize myself in his perception, I figured, he’d be less likely to kill me. He accepted my argument about how hard it would be for me to get “care” without it, and handed me back the card. Now it was us two against the establishment, and we made something of a deal: in exchange for his mercy, I wasn’t to report him—even though I had plainly seen his face. I agreed, and he ran off down the street. I foolishly but steadfastly stood by my side of the bargain, however coerced it may have been, for a few hours. As if I could have actually entered into a binding contract at gunpoint.

How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

By: Douglas Rushkoff

In Wal-Mart's Image The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing.

"The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing."

"Wal-Mart's more serious failure of market penetration remains its inability to break into America's major coastal cities or Chicago. There, the specter of its superstores -- stores that include supermarkets, whose success has already given Wal-Mart 30 percent of the U.S. retail food market -- poses a direct threat to unionized supermarket workers. In 2003, Southern California supermarkets, after decades of mutually profitable labor relations, told the United Food and Commercial Workers that they would have to reduce wages and benefits to compete with Wal-Mart, and, after breaking the union's strike, imposed a contract in which new hires were offered not the traditional health insurance package but one modeled on Wal-Mart's. At the time, the proportion of Southern California grocery workers with health insurance stood at 94 percent; by 2007, it had declined to 54 percent."