Editorial: December 9th
My God - that Chinese curse 'May you live in interesting times' never sounded so relevant.

It’s quite a shock to read that the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune are bust. (More correctly going into Chapter 11 (bankruptcy protection) administration after the owner/CEO Sam Zell who also owns KTLA-TV Channel 5 was unable to make interest payments on nearly $13 billion of debt.) Sam Zell bought The Tribune using leverage from his property empire and we all know what happens to empires…

Although I have no affinity for The Trib, I do for the LA Times over the years and even on-line (although to be honest there is no symbiotic relationship with a digital version). I used to like getting into training to lift the weighty Sunday edition and it took at least two days to get through it all – perfect for a procrastinating writer. It was a slimmer version I read in Vancouver (a city without a decent Sunday paper).

But on reflection I guess it shouldn’t be a shock at all. (I’m guessing the guy who owns these papers isn’t a newspaperman, he’s a gambler, a property speculator who has come a cropper and this was just like some people who own football teams, an investment, but not something he ‘loved or nurtured’). Newspapers are something you love, can’t live without, but that too may be a last generational thing. I am now in that vast wasteland my fifties and considered ancient. Getting your headlines from your iphone or USA Today is a poor substitute, watching Fox News is the opposite of knowledge,

So I guess the LA Times and The Trib will suffer that fate of ever-downward spiral as advertising revenues fall and content suffers, journalists fired. Want to know something, Google it. No need to buy a paper. I realise now that what I have been teaching for twenty years ‘that everything you know will be superseded, most everything you thought was fixed in the universe will change or be disproved, everything you care about will disappear,’ is coming more true by the day.
The New York Times is going to have to sell 58% of it’s headquarters to stay in business according to The Times and that’s pretty serious. We are in danger of losing all the serious papers in the next five years and although I will care, a whole generation behind me won’t miss them one bit, they don’t even know they are there.

The recession could kill off anything that’s valuable, venerable and vulnerable. The web will eat it all.

Yes something new will emerge and some of it will be good, breathtaking even, but just as Facebook proved that we have a generation of kids who care nothing for privacy, I believe they unwittingly lay themselves open to the menace of ID cards loaded with personal (but hidden information), control by a extreme paranoid government (New Labour has set in motion a law that will let them read all your emails and listen to all your phone calls).

I happen to love newspapers, always have and my life will be diminished by the lack of them in the future. You could say adapt, and I can see the potential of the Sony Reader for example in storing 300 books at a time, but it’s not paper or bendable or even chuck –awayable in disgust when you don’t like it. (Delete just doesn’t cut it).

I shall continue to read newspapers until they all go bust and even as I write this I hear rumours that ‘The Independent’ in the UK may fold in early ’09.
Joy to the World huh.

Culled from: http://www.hackwriters.com/welcome.htm

_{Well what can I say? Its a brave, new, and GOOGLED world!}