Face facts, Joe.
newspapers are nearly as dead as weekly news magazines.
The mayor is right of course.
Boy, this guy's indeed out of touch.
"Gentlemen's Club" now means cocktail waitress in tights, longnecks and rotgut bourbon shots in sticky glasses and the smell of stripper patchouli. (So Laz tells me.)
Most newspaper classifieds are filled with abbreviations and have no grammar because each word costs more money. It was the original text messaging language and is painful to read.
The writer mocks Craigslist’s standard of English (and it is dreadful) but I recall many auto classifieds in years past with ‘RUNS GOOD’ as the hook. Newsprint isn’t a guarantee of Shakespeare-caliber copy.
As with all ivory-tower liberals, the writer either ignores or resents the economic aspect of the Craigslist phenomenon. Nowhere in the piece do the words ‘cost,’ ‘expense,’ or ‘price’ appear. How many thousands, even millions, of times did papers abuse their monopoly by charging exorbitant rates for classifieds? Have they ever considered that the rise of Craigslist was a direct reaction to being gouged?
Admittedly, the writer is relying on anecdotal evidence but he is also ignoring the very empirical evidence of circulation. Readers have abandoned classifieds because they have abandoned the newspaper for ideological reasons.
Doctors don’t make housecalls, milkmen no longer make daily home deliveries, but some news accounts that are 16-48 hours old are delivered every morning to the public’s doorstep, sometimes even if they don’t want it.
Newspapers will have “free trial” weeks so they can boost their circulation figures and demand higher ad rates.
The post office wants to drop out of delivering mail 6 days a week (I suggest that they use ALTERNATING days rather than ending Saturday delivery, but that’s another discussion).
The post office wanted to assign everyone an email address and then charge old folks $0.25 an email to print them out and hand deliver them if you didn’t have a computer. Why not? Mostly the post office is delivering paid spam anyway. If they cut out the mailbox stuffing of grocery store coupons, their job would be accomplished in less than half the time.
I still laugh when I see someone selling a “Chester Drawer”.
*shakes head*
Over the weekend, I ran across a copy of the 1908 Sears & Roebuck catalog. Fascinating to see the difference a hundred years had made in the world of advertising copy.
I used to use “The Want Ad” and classifieds in papers...I BLOODY WELL HATED THEM. They were a pain to use, a pain to pore through, there was NOTHING good about them except that there was no alternative.
And dipstick that longs for the days of the classified ads has a screw loose. Newspapers are dead, Dead, DEAD. They just don’t know it yet.
And, I say, GOOD RIDDANCE.
Must be a slow opinion day.