Dana Blankenhorn

Save the paper and kill the AP

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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While leafing through what is left of my daily newspaper it suddenly occurred to me how such dinosaurs can save what is left of their franchise.

Stop running AP shit. (Picture from Creative Loafing next to a story on Atlanta Journal-Constitution losses by Scott Henry.)

I don't need the national or international news, in brief, printed and distributed. Neither does anyone else. We get it on TV, free.

What I want from a local paper is the local news. The sports. The local happenings. Exclusive stuff no one else has.

So strip the paper down to that essential. One section, 12 pages, magazine-sized. Then, when you post the stories online, give every one that runs in the paper a simple URL that you can also print in the paper -- since it's going online first anyway.

You're essentially printing a guide to your Web site, and an ad for it. It may be no more than 12 pages which, with ads, may be about 30 before you start your comeback.

Then give it away.

Journalism's Real Problem

You may (or may not) know that newspapers are once again threatening the Internet, claiming once again that links are theft (so don't expect me to link to any AP copy in the future). 

Lauren Weinstein writes (correctly) that a well-written Robots.Txt can stop any links you don't like and that in any case Google (which seems to be the target) already has a valid business agreement with AP to host stories. 

But that's not the problem. European newspapers are, in fact, doing quite well. American publishers have plundered their assets, first demanding enormous profit margins (by cutting jobs), then overloading the assets with debt, and now blaming the workers for all their faults.

Which brings me to the clip above. You'll note how six-figure salaried Ali Velshi, in his $1,000 vests, is calling an 84-year old waitress "lucky" because she has such low expectations.

That's the problem. The journalism industry, like the rest of America, has spent the last decades hollowing-out its middle class. There are a few at the top (and all on-air talent like Velshi counts), there are some people struggling at the bottom (like yours truly), and there is no longer anything in the middle.

Confederate People

What do you do when your belief system has been rejected, after you were told for generations that those who objected to it were illegitimate? (Picture from Firedoglake.)

What do you do when people you respect say that there is nothing to be done now but take up arms to defend your rights and your lifestyle, or public officials you trust tell you to be armed and dangerous?

We saw what happens once before. War happened, in 10,000 places, a conflict that transformed us from united States to the United States.

For the generations which followed the result of final defeat was not quite so violent. Populists melted back into the Democratic Party. Progressives melted back into the Republican Party. Hippies grew up. There were a few fringe elements, a few incidents, but generally civil peace was kept, and the country moved forward.

Will that happen this time? The evidence so far:

• 5.5 million background checks on new buyers of firearms since November.
• A heavily-armed gunman in Alabama who lived with his mother killed 10 using two military assault rifles, a handgun and a shotgun.
• A man in North Carolina shot up a nursing home where his estranged wife worked, leaving 7 dead.
• 14 died in Binghampton, New York when a right-wing fanatic opened fire on an immigration center. His parents had been immigrants. 
• Three cops were killed by a heavily-armed right-wing fanatic in Pittsburgh, their bodies bled out because he also had body armor.

Maybe the words of the leaders are just talk. Maybe these are just isolated incidents.

Or maybe it's the start of something larger.

The Man Can Do The Job

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I want what I'm about to say to be as non-partisan and objective as possible.

The new guy? He can do the job.

If Republicans were not so busy dismissing his politics I'm certain they would admit, too, that Barack Obama does a good job of being President. Certainly they can see the Reaganesque quality in him, the Teddy Roosevelt fondness for the "bully pulpit," and the love of language in a trying time that became Lincoln's gift to history.

If he were on their side they would love him to pieces.

Try this exercise. Separate the style from the substance. Pretend this is the new Republican President, that he is selling your policies as well as he's selling those of the Democrats.

But with all Presidents there is the substance. And here's what I realized about the Obama Thesis of Consensus just this week. It's not just about us. The essence of it is for everyone around the world to chill, to take a beat, and to find where we agree, then work outward, rather than the other way around. That's the essence of the story (possibly apocryphal) being spread this week about Obama, Sarkozy and Hu Jintao.

Once we can find common ground, even a little bit, even if it's watered down, we become invested in one another. We can  smile, joke,  see the humanity in the other person.

Humanize, don't dehumanize.

U.S. finds a center

My daughter and I watched last night's U.S.-T&T tilt and for me the big news is we found a center at last.

Football players come in three varieties -- forwards, midfielders and defenders. The first two are sometimes called strikers, the second sometimes wingers. The strikers are the important ones. They put the ball in the onion bag most often.

Of these the rarest breed are the centers.