The Washington Post continues its rapid and strange descent into a paper equivalent of the six o'clock news (now with more conservative columnists per square inch!). It's almost comical to see an outmoded form of technology ring the clarion alarm bells about another newer form of technology. The cloistered monks from The Name of the Rose were dead-on about how much trouble that scurrilous Johannes Gutenberg was going to be. Mass-produced writing? Why even the little boil-ridden plague children will be able to read, and then who wants to blindingly listen to the church for all matters great and small? Not knowing that the fat lady has sung, WaPo continues to try to pump its daily and Sunday subscriptions by sending multiple mailers to me offering Saturdays and Sundays free. Here's a thought. How about I read for seven days a week free, and occasionally click on an ad, so I indirectly pay for content? Since you layer in so many pop-up ads like a struggling porn site, it's almost unavoidable without an adblocker anyway. Any business plan where you horribly cannibalize your own distribution model probably deserves to fail. I know people in the newspaper biz, smart and hard-working folks without a doubt, none of whom deserve to get canned, but the obvious problem lies in the ad-generated Internet newspaper monetization model. As this blog and a million other ones like it attest, content is cheap and ubiquitous, if not (in my case in particular) remotely as professionally rendered. There are lots of interesting funding ideas for on-line newspapers, some of which I'll cover at a later date. In the meantime, scaring parents and clucking about the scary "digital unknown" seems desperate and weak.
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