No Longer News or General

I just heard another story on NPR about the “death of newspapers”. This particular story was about the small publications and electronic postings and blogs that have rushed in to fill the “void” created when the Seattle Intelligencer folded recently. (Note to NPR: There is no void) I was immediately reminded of the book I mentioned a few weeks back, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. (Matt Miller) That book is about our desire to hold on to dead ideas that prevent progress and throttle forward thinking.

Let’s face facts: “newspapers” have not printed any “news” for a very long time. They report on what happened yesterday or last week or last month. They tell us about the automobile accident in front of the local liquor store yesterday morning, the missile North Korea fired two days ago, who died during the past week and what line of judiciousness has been taken out of context from an appeals decision made by a SCOTUS nominee seven years ago. They offer (all too often) locally biased reporting of actions, social deeds or indecency, political misdeeds, unfaithful womanizers, corrupt former mayors, illicit love affairs of last year, some yellow journalism: most of this is sensationalism, but hardly “news”. And of course there are pages and pages of advertising for products we do not need, everyone apparently desires and fewer and fewer of us can afford to pay for, on each succeeding day the economy continues to crumble. And on Sundays, more than other days, the paper is used as a “propaganda mule” to carry pounds of glossy paper advertising “supplements” for even more “stuff” we don’t need, or “Sunday Magazines” that report and recount even older social trends, gossip and lengthy nostalgic recounting of the warm and fuzzy remembered events of days gone by. And we waste countless reams of paper which we (mostly) trash and (sometimes) recycle.

We do not get news from newspapers anymore. We get, at best, stories that are 24 hours old, that we have already heard from CNN, MSNBC-TV (or .com), Yahoo News or the AOL home page on our laptop. We saw or read all of these from the flat-panel TV in the coffee shop or taco restaurant or while surfing the net on our Dell mini-laptop or Apple Air or IPhone in whatever friendly locale has free wi-fi (another reason to skip Starbucks). Maybe (probably) we can do this on our computer at work, while the conclave of managers down the hall decries and bemoans our corporate lack of productivity.

The electronic age has rendered the printed page a Tyrannosaurus Rex Press. It is serves no more purpose than to exist as a reporting device about what was or was not yesterday. And as far the value of the research and exposure/educational value of the investigative reporter go, the good ones now have daily blogs or work for web sites, and just as many quickly manage to publish books, almost overnight. And Amazon’s Kindle means you don’t even need to buy the printed version of that.
Newspapers are no longer “news” papers and have not been such for a very long time. Like so many other aspects of modern life, newspapers have lost their way, been preserved and perpetuated for too long and have lost their relevance. Hell, most people in the U.S. don’t even read anymore, anyway. In increasing numbers they wait for John Stewart or perhaps Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olberman to tell them what it all means. Newspapers continue trying to inform people who do not want to be informed, unless it is about their 401K or something about Brittany’s underwear. Like the British Empire, the newspaper empire no longer exists. And that noise you are hearing in the background is the sound of the magazine industry crumbling alongside the newspapers. I have heard it said that the average New Yorker knows more about current events from looking briefly at the jumbotron TV in Times Square than from almost anything else. We should stop weeping for the dead newsprint mastodon and put our efforts and energies behind the continued expansion of unfettered, un-managed, open electronic information systems. If the government wants to do something really helpful to American life, it should guarantee and (OMG) subsidize the internet and not let Time-Warner et.al. get richer by metering and charging for my emails and WWW access. And it would naturally follow that taxing internet usage is counterproductive as well. (That is a message that should be sent to the Congress, but I understand that most Arlen Specter types don’t know what the internet is, anyway. There was story about it in the newspaper, but they didn’t read it).

The newspaper ship of state has become the Titanic of the information industry. It has a huge hole ripped in its hull, it is sinking without hope of rescue for any good reason, and the best thing we can do is to save as many passengers as possible, so that they can go back to work somewhere else.

And speaking of sinking ships, those newspapers almost daily carry countless pages of advertising for automobiles. Despite cars.com, electronic AutoTrader and countless others like them, too many auto dealers continue to advertise too much for an ever shrinking audience. Which brings us to General Motors. We seem hell-bent on bailing out this behemoth and no one is clear as to why. The obvious answer is always that we will save thousands of jobs, but the General is not as has not been ”general” for a long time, except to generally subsidize fat cat top exec salaries and offer meager returns to the myopic and backwards-thinking stockholders, who are still driving Cadillacs. The General has been largely out of touch with the changing needs of the personal automobiles for decades. The General should have started being specific about the time the first Datsun hit our shores and it has not (The General gave a disdaining nod to the Volkswagen, called the Corvair, and we all know how that turned out). The Chevy “Volt” is too little, too late and too expensive and already laden with dated technologies, and the recently disclosed revelation that GM will return to maybe a new prosperity, which may be just a still-born and very expensive re-birthing of a dead monstrosity by importing more fuel efficient, old-technology, cheaply produced autos from China is an affront to all Americans and American workers, who are paying the bill to save a dead whale. Despite the current hoopla and the kind (and empty words) of Barack Obama, General Motors is doomed. Get over it.

General Motors is the automotive version of the Titanic newspaper sinking, while working for decades to live off the past and throttle new ideas. And while guilty of greed, poor or non-existent visions of the future, haphazard bookkeeping, and short-sighted gain taking and tax breaking, they are not alone, just the most immediately visible. Chrysler, is about to go on life support, with the help of the American taxpayer and the Italians. But Tony’s Tiny Buggyworks has never made it in the US and this will only be a postponement (albeit it glamorous and expensive) of the end. Ford appears to have more alert accountants, a little better balance sheet and slightly more and better vision, but no one believes they can re-invent themselves fast enough to keep from eventually being overtaken by the world-wide shift in eventual transportation needs. Despite the recent and difficult to imagine developments in auto production in China and India, the future of transportation lies in mass transit (Chinese and Indian peoples are thinking like 1950’s and ‘60’s Americans and will strangle themselves with oil woes and highway construction) and the former “Big Three” will wind up being footnotes in the history books.

The Mercedes arm of Daimler-Benz (the Smart Car is ultimately not so smart) and BMW will discover one day soon that, despite their aura of haute couture , or VW’s insistence that they will be the eternal “people’s car”, the future of what they do best in this decade will be almost hopelessly irrelevant in the next one. Toyota is obviously out in front, with Honda pulling a close second, but they, too, need to start thinking in terms of mag-lev trains and something they can sell that does not use an internal combustion engine (or some variant) and runs of four rubber tires. Mitsubishi and Fuji Heavy Industries will either wind up building personal conveyances as a novelty or find something else to manufacture, altogether. The General, given the world-wide prognosis of the industry and the transportation needs of the future, does not deserve any hall passes to go to men’s room and smoke something funny in perpetuity. We should quit playing pretend and “used-to-be” with both newspapers and the auto industry. And the US needs to begin thinking transportation “new-frustructure” instead of re-paving interstate highways for autos we do not need.

After the battle of the Alamo, in a surprise series of military “lucky strikes”, the Texian Army destroyed the arrogant General Santa Anna’s army and captured him (he was betrayed by the discovery of his silk underwear). There were many who wanted to hang him from the limb of one of our famous Texas live oak trees. But Stephen Austin and others thought it best to make the General sign away his claims to lands and property rights and send him home to Mexico in disgrace. It was a quiet, discreet and mostly un-objectionable way to get rid of the problem and end the nuisance. We should work out the same sort of arrangement with newspaper corporations and the US auto industry.

Nostalgia is always counter-productive and winds up smelly, musty and stale. The least we can do is stop making it so damned expensive. And does anyone have a clue what we should do with all of these soon-to be-dead, toxic used car batteries? Maybe the General can devise a way to manufacture an electric Yucca Mountain and the non-newspapers can report on how they did it yesterday.