As Obama sends us on another trek into the abyss with even more soldiers to an impossible war, Google is simultaneously killing free access to news.
This has been coming for awhile now, newspaper publishers have been greedily licking their lips at online news profiteering. They've got ads on their sites, but this is not enough for these guys. You know, normal people can make a living from their news sites with Google Adsense. Why can't the news media not realize that newspapers are dead? Get over it dude!!
Now this, in our increasingly isolationist and news-poor Country we have to pay for online news. Well newspapermen, guess what? People aren't going to pay for that shit!!! You are setting yourself up for failure. The internet is too broad and wide for you to control all of it. We will get our news, just like we get our movies, tv shows and books. That is what I love about the internet, it's like a huge city. If you know where to go, you can pretty much find anything you want.
Welcome to the world of media nowadays guys! You need to think of novel, inspired ways of selling us products with your content. Also--if we are paying for something like the news I expect that ad space shows up no where near my news. You want me to pay for information? Well then keep it clean. How about some more journalistic integrity? That is something for which I would pay. $10 a month for peace of mind in knowing that what I'm being told is reliable? Hell yah!! You might get journalists using more than one verifiable source again!! Woo-hoo.
I realize our economy runs on money. I realize that people should be compensated for the work that they do. But what I am so sick and tired of is having to pay for something that either is so inconvenient that it almost renders it useless or that works as advertised but is so overpriced because of monopoly that normal people can not afford it.
Here is a fantastic example - - Time Warner Cable. I had been a customer for several years, always had so many complaints about their customer service, their terrible equipment, sucky service, pretty much everything. Well, I no longer pay for cable television service and I still watch all the same shows when I want to watch them. Thanks to the internet and sites like Hulu, I can stream and download a huge library of movies and shows. There are also illegal ways of accessing premium content (showtime, HBO) but they are illegal, ya know? Although there is certainly no better way to take control of your TV (instead of it controlling you) than opening up your My Documents folder and click clicking on the latest Demi Moore epic. Makes a nice night with some whiskey.
So where does this leave us now that Google is limiting how much news we can see? I foresee the inevitability of the death of the major newspaper outlets eventually. Hopefully this will usher in an age of independent (free) news sources! Maybe I won't have to listen to Tiger Woods explain why he took a midnight drive, while Iran builds more and more nuclear plants. Me love you Google, long time.
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