T-P THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE

Since Thursday, I've been trying to write the story of the death knell sounded for the Times-Picayune, the 175 year old newspaper that serves New Orleans.  Oh, the powers say that they will produce a paper version three days a week, but they're just prolonging the agony, because the paper version will die, and I believe it's quite probable that the online version will eventually wither and die.  I hate to make such a statement in the face of the staff members who will not not lose their jobs in the cuts, but I believe it to be true.  So, New Orleans will be the largest city in the country without a daily newspaper.  How special.

The online version, produced by NOLA.com is pathetic.  The search function is useless, so I go to Google to search for articles on the NOLA website.  We subscribe to the paper version, and I cannot imagine reading the online version in it's present form.

The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzers, including the prestigious Public Service award, for its coverage of Katrina. The paper was forced to evacuate its offices and publish online for three days. As the only major newspaper in the city, it was heralded as the most vital source of information for besieged residents.

No matter.  The once proud newspaper is going, going, gone, and I am grieving.  I grew up with the Times-Picayune, and I've read the paper as long as I've lived in Louisiana, with a only a three year hiatus when we lived in Mobile, Alabama, many years ago.

I'll let Athenae at First Draft, who has worked as a journalist for a good many years, speak for me.  She lives in Chicago, and she cares!

Paywalls have nothing to do with what happened to the Times-Picayune. I saw a lot of carping last week about "how many people bitching about this on the Internet actually subscribe" and whatnot, as though commenting on Twitter was itself an act destructive to Noble Print. I saw a lot of whinging about how "people don't read" anymore. I saw a lot of eulogizing about newspapers being a dying form, as if the Times-Picayune wasn't profitable.

Make no mistake here: The Times-Picayune is not the victim of the Freedom Loving Internet or changing times or reading habits of the young'uns or anything other than a rapacious corporate desire for profit over the public good, and that's a problem that afflicted journalism long before the Internet came into being. Speaking as someone who worked in newspapers when we went from cut-and-paste to actual computer layout, who saw two newspapers create their very first web sites, both before and after the same problem existed: The people in charge were greedy, venal, lazy and stupid, and liked playing with matches.

They liked fudging circulation numbers and screwing up distribution routes, undermining newsroom budgets when they weren't outright stealing. They liked telling reporters there was no money for journalism while buying drinks for their parties. They liked firing people who had been in place too long, hiring young cheap college grads, and then telling the older folks still left that it was the younger folks' fault for taking a job that was offered to them. They liked changing what was covered from one day to the next. They liked letting minimum-wagers "sell" their subscriptions and they liked delivering so inconsistently that even if people wanted the paper, they couldn't find or get it.

And they could get away with all this because even with TV and radio, they were still the dominant form, and there was enough money to cover up all but the most catastrophic of their mistakes. When the dot-com bubble burst and American manufacturing went into a death spiral and the economy started to tank, the money started to dry up and people started seeing fire where before there'd only been smoke.

The idea of that "industry" (really a disparate collection of corporations that have no incentive to cooperate in any way and in fact share little beyond a medium) "swallowing hard" and coming to one conclusion about improving itself is impractical at best, even if you believe paywalls are the answer. Any smart companies will let the stupid, greedy ones burn, and paywalls or no, the stupid greedy ones will end up as charcoal because this isn't about form, it's about managing money and mission, and these people suck at that and have no incentive to change. What incentive is there, when you can gut a company and walk away with millions?

Forever and ever.  Amen.

Photo at top from Wikipedia.

Thanks to Steve Buttry via Paul (A.) for the picture of the Times-Picayune T-shirt.

LISTENING FOR THE FUTURE (MASCULINE)

I'm on my way to the future, he said & I 
said, But you're just sitting there 
listening & he smiled & said, It's harder 
than you'd think with all the noise 
everyone else is making.

From StoryPeople.

WAXING CRESCENT MOON

Amber crescent moon
Hangs in west-southwestern sky
Pure delight for me

JB

Yes, I am moonstruck.

Picture from Earth/Sky.

THERE'S JOY IN THE LAND...

...also concern and trepidation for some members that St David's Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, will be amongst the first in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas to perform same-sex blessings. 

The Rev David Boyd, rector:

Jesus friended us all before Facebook was popular.

Amen.

H/T to Ann Fontaine at The Lead.

PUNOGRAPHY

I changed my iPod name to Titanic. It's syncing now.

When chemists die, they barium.

 Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.

 I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.

How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Than it dawned on me.

This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore.

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity . I can't put it down.

 I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.

They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a Type-O.

A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

Class trip to the Coca-Cola factory. I hope there's no pop quiz.

Energizer battery arrested. Charged with battery.

I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.

How do you make holy water? Boil the hell out of it!

Did you hear about the cross eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?

I apologize.  These puns are the wurst.   And how about this naughty cartoon?  I don't have the nerve to publish it here.

MITT ROMNEY - UN PETIT BIJOU

The little jewel is set in an interview with Mitt Romney by Mark Halperin:

Halperin: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically.  Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office?  Why not do it more quickly?

Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%.  That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression.  So I’m not going to do that, of course.

And yet we've heard shouts to the president from Republicans, with even some Democrats chiming in, to balance the budget, "Faster, faster, faster!" in the midst of a sluggish recovery from a deep recession.

Soon to be heard in a campaign commercial to reelect Obama?  I hear the cries already: "Not right! Not fair! Taken out of context!"  How long as it been since rightness, fairness, and quotes taken in context went out the window in campaigns for public office?   

H/T to Charles Pierce, and thanks again for the use of his mantra: " Fck the deficit.  People got no jobs.  People got no money."

THE GIFT OF COMPASSION

A person who, in your judgment, is irritating, disdaining, unacceptable, frightening, is probably a person who needs help, perhaps is crying for help. If you know enough to be irritated by them, you likely also know enough to help them, certainly not to hurt them more. Draw from the grace of your own memory about rescuing, saving them, through the gift of compassion.

-Br. Curtis Almquist
Society of Saint John the Evangelist

Bro John Anthony posted in St. Cuthbert's Cottage

BLOGGER HELP

Click on the image for the larger view.

Can anyone tell me how to get rid of the list of "Links to this post", which are not really links at all?  Some days there are 8 or 10 links supposedly from "Of Course, I Could Be Wrong", and when I click the link and go to the post, there is no link to my post in any of the posts at OCICBW.  Each time MadPriest puts up a post, I get the link appended to one of my posts, to which there is no link.

I can delete the links, but it's tedious to do 8 or 10 a day, and I never know when they will turn up or to which posts they will be attached.  When I turn on the "Hide" function for "Backlinks" in the settings, they do not appear, but then I screen out all legitimate links from other blogs.

Am I making sense?

WE ARE ALL SO PROUD

The bright and good-looking lad pictured above, my grandson Bryan, will graduate from high school tonight.  His Mom, Dad, Gramdpère, and Gramdmère are very proud of him.

Congratulations and blessings, Bryan!

That's Gino looking adoringly at Bryan.

PS: I'm sure his brothers are proud, too.

BISHOP ALAN COOKS THE NOT-SO-VERY-ROTTEN EGG

(1) “This isn't, of course, about gender. Perish the Thought.”
This assertion is a lie. It is, and it always was. Discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It is not for the discriminator to judge the matter, based on their intentions, but those discriminated against, based on what actually happens. All else is illusion.

(2) “This is about theology not discrimination.”
This assertion is a lie. However you tart it up, Trevor Huddleston showed us years ago, discriminating is actually a theological assertion. Imagine, as I have attempted sincerely to do, that there is a theology that justifies treating women, against their will and calling, as inferior. I can't conceive of such a thing, but let's suspend disbelief for a moment. What is the difference between that noble theology and cultural prejudice dressed in voodoo? At no time in the past five years has anyone showed me. All that unites reactionaries in this matter seems to be a cultural prejudice against seeing women in positions of authority, reinforced by a reactionary subculture. It is every bit as much drawn from the contemporary world’s values as progressive aspiration. It’s just drawn from the reactionary quarter of them.

Read the entire excellent post.

If the amendments to the legislation on women bishops from the House of Bishops were not so tragic for the Church of England, I could view the entire enterprise as farce.  42 of the 44 dioceses have spoken that they want women bishops.  General Synod has voted for women bishops, and yet the senior bishops in the church do not get the message.  As Bishop Alan says:

Many of our senior men probably thought on Monday that all they were doing was giving the women what they wanted whilst being as nice as possible to the other lot.

It appears to me that the House of Bishops plays a game of chicken with the members of Synod, but perhaps, as Alan says, many of them are merely clueless. The diocesan synod votes and the vote in GS should have put the senior bishops a bit more in touch with the rest of the church.

From Thinking Anglicans:

The Synod has no power to amend the legislation further but can adjourn the Final Approval debate and invite the House of Bishops to reconsider the amendments that they have made. If such an adjournment motion were passed the House would have to meet again-and would at that point have power to make further amendments- before the Final Approval debate was resumed. An adjournment motion in July would mean that the further meeting of the House and the resumption of the Final Approval debate would have to happen at a later date. The earliest that the General Synod might be able to conclude the Final Approval Stage in that eventuality would, therefore, be in November.

There you have it.