Tuesday Mini-Rants
May 13, 2008 by John Hewitt
Amazon Goes to the Dark Side
Amazon has been squeezing print-on-demand publishers, trying to force them to use their print services in order to get a buy-now listing with them. To me this is a case of a big company using near-monopoly tactics to put smaller companies out of business. I’ve been a big fan of Amazon over the years, but this stinks. Anne Wayman has been covering this over at The Golden Pencil, I advise you to take a look.
The Television Networks Blew It
As I predicted months ago, the television networks are seeing significant drops in viewers. Now that almost all of their shows are back the networks are assessing the damage and trying to convince themselves that the cause is anything but the WGA strike. Oh no, it couldn’t be that! The true test will come next fall, when the new season debuts. I predict that we will see an erosion of about ten percent from last fall’s already record low numbers. Of course, if the actors go out on strike over the summer, things could get much worse.
My Local Newspapers Suck, Again
I’ve chronicled the downward spiral of my local daily newspapers a few times. At this point they mainly serve as a place to recycle day-old national headlines (the kind I can get up to the minute on Google News) criticize the local sports teams and send some poor schlep to city council meetings. Oh, and they love telling you who got shot, though they generally get the details wrong (it turns out that loudmouth neighbors don’t make for reliable sources). Thats all fine, but now they’ve decided to charge more for their useless rag. It now costs 75 cents a day to pick up a copy of the morning paper at the newsstand. The afternoon paper, always known for its irrelevance, only raised their price to 50 cents. At this point, I am beginning to suspect that the papers want to drive readers away.
Related links
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- Why Newspapers are Dying (and what they can do about it) (0.427)
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Well, comparing newspapers to the internet… those pieces of gray look so less imposing then. I’m under the impression that newspapers everyone are under one great big simultaneous fall.
Rants are always good.
Johnny Martins last blog post..Saw Me Up, Babe!
@ Johnny
My general opinion is that newspapers need to become hyperlocal in order to survive. I don’t need them for national or international news. I can get that anywhere. Unfortuantely, it takes real money to hire reporters to cover local news properly. Newspapers are far too used to just rehashing the national news. it’s cheap, but pointless.