Wonkette
The journalistic newspapers have found a new business model! It involves begging the President to either:
- A. criminalize the Internet, or
- B. monetarily reward the newspapers, with American currency, for their Stockholm syndrome in broadsheet prisons of their own creation.
Every few months Robert Gibbs bothers to respond by asking them why they think anyone on Earth, much less the President, would give them money. WELL: today the newspapermen received a thrilling categorical “dunno, give it a shot?”
Hear ye, hear ye, read all about it:
“The president said he is ‘happy to look at’ bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.
‘I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them.’”
The “Newspaper Revitalization Act” would give money to newspapers who restructure as non-profits. It has like two supporters in the Senate, but the sky is the limit after they write the inevitable Huffington Post blog post arguing for the necessity of the newspaper bailout.
[The Hill]
But if you take the profit motive out of the newspaper business, what incentive will there be to deliver the oversenationalized not-news that we’ve all come to know and love?
Would “non-profit” translate into “non-corporate pro-war doofus whore legion”? Well then do it.
Making them non-profit. Heh. That’s the problem. No profits! No revenues either…
D. Rounding every executive branch purchase up to the nearest dollar, and giving the newsies the difference.
And why aren’t we considering “revitalizing” Fox News and CNN, hmmmm?
There are millions of unemployed bloggers who are entitled to this money.
Aren’t the already “non-profits”? In the most relevant sense, I mean.
Non-profits are not an adequate substitute for a public option.
Socialized newspapers? But they’re already run by socialists! In the future all newspapers will be run by religious cults.
alt-text: “RYE-elle.” “Dammit, no! I’m telling you, it’s REE-elle.”
Somehow the MSM would figure out how to be non-profits while still toadying up to the military industrial complex.
If they are not making profits, why would they need tax breaks?
So, the prezzydent is “happy to look” at balls?
Gay porno, newspapers, the autumnal equinox — our Wonkette has confused me much too muchly.
Haiku time:
Porno equinox
Autumnal president looks at balls
No newspaper profit
That is all.
I’m really looking forward to the pledge drives, when every other article will be interrupted by a long, boring note from the editor offering to send you a stylish canvas laptop bag in exchange for your modest donation of $100 or more.
Non-profit? Was there ever a time when newspapers were actually for-profit?
Save our Parade magazine!
Papers shouldn’t get a penny. I worked in the newspaper industry for years. Papers dug their own graves and most of them are still digging. I have no sympathy. It’s an industry of dinosaurs that still refuses to change and adapt. Before quitting, I warned the newspaper I worked for numerous times to change or die. It went out of business 5 years after I left.
I actually suscribe to my local newspaper, though I barely read it and it has a conservative-leaning editorial board. I guess I suscribe mostly out of pity, because it would be too sad not to have a local newspaper. Plus, the paper comes in handy when I have to change the rat cage.
I love newspapers. I read several everyday. You know, any of them. Most of them. All of them. Any of them put in front of me all these years.
Way Cool Larry: I cancelled our right wing rag, and a co worker brings me the coupons from his. Win!
queeraselvis v 2.0: Yeah. They made shit-tons of money in the ’90s and early ’00s. They became just another business that Wall Street would buy up, gut, extract all possible profit, and destroy. Haven’t you ever heard David Simon’s bitter, bitter analysis?
Dinosaur in tar pit,film at 11:00…
I got close to actually subscribing to one of the local rags, but then the telemarketers and the door-to-door sales started. Did you know that in Florida, the already toothless state telemarketing laws have an exception just for newspapers?
Maybe if they tried a business model that didn’t involve harassing or pissing off their customers. All I know is that neither GM nor even Bank of America has tried this kind of stuff with me.
hahaha. non-profit status means having no political opinions. Suck it, WSJ
Way Cool Larry: It may be sad but many papers deserve to die. Our local paper has stories that frequently lack details reported by other papers located 60 to 120 miles away, unless they’re writing some racist editorial against low-income housing. I cannot stand to give this Gannet Media zombie any subscription money, and I instead grab free copies of the area’s more professionally written college newspaper.
First I thought this would be a cool idea, just for the sight of conservative columnists like Kristol (not the dead one), Brooks et. al. working for a nonprofit. Then I remembered that the Washington Times and National Review haven’t ever made a profit and are propped up by regular infusions of money from their idiot owners. So much for that.
Funny but true; the local rag calls frequently and begs me to subscribe, basically they’ll almost pay me to. So I do, because my wife needs them for the parrots. We absolutely never read them. Maybe the parrots do, but I don’t think so. And when I tell them that we’re only agreeing to subscribe to get parrot cage liner, they act like they hear that all the time.
I thought I was the only one–I started subscribing to line my guinea pig cages. Sometimes I’ll read an article when I’m in the middle of changing cages.
The guinea pigs do like to chew the paper and sometimes they pull it up through the shavings and burrow underneath it. So there’s another use.
I like the feel of the paper in my hands when I read it when I get home from work. Just like a book. I hope I never have to give either up.
That said, the majority of the major papers are just reprints of AP stories. I don’t think many have real reporters any more. most of that I read online.
Will they have to provide news?
Every fiscal year that ends without the Gummint squeezing the Internet’s balls until they burst like ripe grapes, I’m surprised all over again. I understand that the value of a fully observed and penetrated Information Tijuana is too good to piss away, and that FidoNet would take about six months to rise from the dead on steroids, and that the definition of asymmetric infowar is bombing your own ammo dumps while the enemy giggles like so many schoolgirls, but this is America, damn it. We’re too venal and stupid to be properly evil.
If Rupert Murdoch decided crippling the Internet was in his best interests, Oceania would go dark overnight. Then Belgium would plug in a few patch cords and flip a switch, and the whole thing would light up again, except that every single packet would no longer pass through Google and Crypto City. D’oh! Better to carry on with the “keep ‘em partisan and bickering” plan, I suppose.
Newspapers are cheap and absorbent. For fifty cents you get a hulking great wad of poster-sized paper towels, except instead of flowers or seasonal decorations, they’re covered in ignorant horseshit. Personally I love newspapers.
I miss wisecracking reporters like Jean Arthur, Ros Russell and Paul Muni.
My local, small-city newspaper is one of the many Gannett zombies. It’s actually left-leaning, but Gannett has carved it out so much that there is very little left. I buy it by the day depending on how I feel. Usually, someone just gives me their copy, and I read what I like and do the daily crossword.
I, for one, am a fan of papers. And, as some have brought up, it’s not so much them being dinosaurs as so many being Wall Street-influenced having been bought out by corporate interests and gutted so that they’ve basically been on life-support for years, anyway, the only difference now being the corporations have gotten all they can out of them.
Maybe I’m not getting something here. Isn’t becoming a non-profit already something of a tax break?
Taxpayer Funding of Propaganda Rags