Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

If you think what I've mentioned about the article Georgie Ann Geyer has written about is bad, it even gets worse as we'll look at here.

First she describes the recent selling of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain which is probably goint to be broken up and sold. Her next comment is one of those again that if she wasn't saying it seriously, and with a straight face, we would all get a good laugh at, as it would have been a great one-liner on David Lettermen. She says "the bottom-line guys are taking over from the old family-owned newspapers with traditional news values and principles, and all they care about is making money, not news."

The statement "old family-owned newspapers with traditional news values and principles" is a great one-liner for the late-night comics. This (refusal to embrace traditional values and principals), along with the technological advances, are what have caused the downfall of the mostly anti-family newspapers to begin with.

And the final statement in this sentence saying that all they care about is money, not news, is borderline silly. How can you run any business if it isn't making money? Newspapers have always been a capitalist business operation, no matter what type of statements somebody makes: they're in it to make a profit; period! They always have been and always will be.

Guess what? It still get worse in her statements. Listen to this one: "That probing capacity to ascertain the depths of the conflicts we face is the kind of coverage they will first do away with."

What? Oh, Oh, there's that mysterious "they" that will do away with what? The tree-based newspaper industry's "probing capacity" (can I say "probing capacity" on this family-based site) is what "they" will do away with first. If any of you have lived long enough, you'll remember the anti-war movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, that is essentially what's troubling Georgie here, that there isn't the same thing that she lived in and influenced, isn't going to happen in this generation.

I bet you still don't think it can get worse? It does. Now she get to the finale of her article by saying "And we'll be stuck, alone and uninformed, in a society atomized in its news absorption, broken down into ever smaller and less effective civic parts, and finally more dangerously susceptible to the domination of the government -- and of war and peace -- by the ambitious few."

Now she's just trying too hard here to make a point that is incoherent and rambling. Now the newspaper decline in readership is going to result in us being stuck, alone and uninformed.

Then, because of the decentralization of the news, and citizen journalism, we are going to be "dangerously susceptible" to the domination of governement...by the ambitious few.

This is so far out that it won't even be able to make the next edition of the "Twilight Zone." Empowering of people to be "citizen journalists" that can offer an array of thoughts and ideas about what is happening in the world, are going to result in being taken over by "big brother" represented by the "ambitious few."

The truth is that the very opposite will happen as a result of this fantastic change in centralized media.

I was going to get into the core issue but wasn't able to -  next post we'll finish with what the real issue is here.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five