"I think it would be fun to run a newspaper" -- C. F. Kane

[ToddBaesen]

***

Charles Foster Kane thought it would be fun to run a newspaper, and it still may be, but it seems that these days nobody wants to read or advertise in them.

This piece in The New York Time reports on what seems is more than likely to happen to most newspapers in todays gloomy economy.

Rather strangely, the San Francisco Chronicle, owned now by the once mighty Hearst empire seems to be one of the first papers heading towards a rapid demise.

According to the article in the Times, they lost a million dollars a week last year. Unfortunately, there is no Mr. Kane around to keep them open, so it looks like they will have to close their doors in 60 more years -- or should I say weeks!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/busin ... rs.html?hp

[purplepines]

The publisher of the NY Times 57 year old Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. has said something that I take to be very cryptic:

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either."

More: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/004038.php

[Glenn Anders]

Nicely and sadly done, Toddy.

CITIZEN KANE provides a parallel in the decline of newspapers for what is going on today in America. All those graphs of contracting Kane enterprises in the tide of the Great Depression are now online, amid the eBaying, Craig-Listing, and twittering miliions of nervous citizens, and it will be interesting, perhaps frighteningly so, to contemplate how a nation so large and amorphous as the United States, in large towns and small, will begin to reconstitute its various ethnic, ideological and religious societies into something our people, the World, has never seen before.

Today's counterparts of Charles Foster Kane, the later Hearsts, Ochs, Sulzberger, and Knights will find other enterprises in which to invest their money for profit, for that is the corporate imperative.

I can't help but think that, as we gather around our electronic fireplaces without newspapers, we shall be more isolated, lonely, and vulnerable than we were in the past. The simplest of transactions, social, financial, personal, will now be out of our hands -- carried on over the Internet, shared with people we have never met in the flesh nor vetted as to who they really are and what they are up to. As I learned in teaching, most of us, certainly in recent decades, have wanted to learn what we already know; hence, the rise of tailored news in the Media and on the Internet. To an extent greater than ever before (but hinted at over the last eight years), people, by and large, will no longer allow themselves to be confused by facts, nor be forced to modify their prejudices by exposure to opposing information, attach their real names to their opinions, nor will they have to justify their beliefs, face to face, The subjects of Culture and Truth will prompt millions upon millions to reach for their guns, an urge Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was infamously able to utilize in another confused nation.

My fear is that we will be part of an ever more Cowardly New World!

Thank goodness, we know who everyone is at Wellesnet, Toddy.

Glenn