"They go on to advise that 'the more lines of writing that can be coerced onto a slide and the smaller the font, the lower the risk of anyone criticising any data which has accidentally been included' and that 'the number of slides you can show in your allotted time is inversely proportional to the number of awkward questions which can be asked at the end.' "
If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
Rewriting history to fit current ideologies (i.e. Columbus as native killer) is called “presentism.”
10 Newspapers That Will Survive The Apocalypse
Nicholas Carlson|Mar. 28, 2009, 6:30 PM
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-local-newspapers-investors-want-to-acquire-2009-3
Believe it or not, there are investors who still want to buy local newspapers.
Our favorite person of this stripe is an investor who has already plunked millions into the industry and is in the process of spending much more.
"I might be running head first into the buggy-whip business, but I'm not sold on the death of print quite yet," he tells us. (He's asked us to keep him anonymous because many of those deals remain under non-disclosure agreements.)
So what does this investor see in the newspaper industry that the rest of us don't? Lots of room for improvement, for one thing.
His view:
*For most of their existence, newspapers were steady sources of revenue that required little management -- "cash cows that you put your brother in charge of."
*This led to bloat at the large, public conglomerates that now own many of our best local newspapers.
*Then came the Internet. It brought some competition yes, but more devastatingly it brought the perception of a paradigm shift.
*Suddenly, the bloat-tolerant managers at the top of the newspaper chains couldn't turn left without hearing from an equity analyst threatening to slap their company with a "sell" rating if it didn't invest enough in the Internet.
*After a decade of investing in the Internet -- but doing little to fight the bloat -- the conglomerates are collapsing under a weight of debt.
*This debt remains and online ad revenues aren't helping reduce it. The LA Times claims its online ad revenues pay for its newsroom, but our source doesn't buy it. "You had to pull out the duct tape and rubber hoses to make [their formula] work," he says.
Our guy is convinced that underneath the mess, there are plenty of local newspapers that, after cutting newsroom bloat and R&D costs, would be plenty profitable. He says these local newspapers just need to stop "spending on trying to find their way out" and "instead run their current good business."
What does our source think of newspapers on the Web? Not much. He says local papers should have a Web site run by two people that links to international and national news and keeps all local content behind a pay wall or off the Internet entirely.
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I believe in God -- but I can't stand his fan club.
My favorite prayer: "Lead me to those who seek the truth, and deliver me from those who have found it."
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[Newspaper failures]
Mono cultures spawn simultaneous failure
The problem is not the new business model, as I wrote in my DaniWeb post, it's the way the business has changed. Instead of concentrating on what they do well, newspapers have become monolithic and brittle. In his Keynote speech last week at AIIM, Andrew Lippman, Founding Associate Director at the MIT Media Lab [7] was talking about the issues related to mono cultures: "I think the institutions are out of scale, past the point of their design," he said "Another problem is they are mono cultures. They are all the same." This means, Lippman pointed out, that when it goes south--as happened last year in the financial sector--all the businesses fail at the same time because they are all doing the same thing. What he said applies to the news business.
--http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/node/2358/print
--Ron Miller, Apr 8 2009
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The original name of the movie Amelie was "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain"
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Guaranteed Solution to Our Economic Crisis
[I regret to say that I don't know where I got this.]
"Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: Immigration.
"All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese, and Koreans," said Shekhar Gupta, editor of 'The Indian Express' newspaper. "We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate -- no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans."
Problem solved! The real joke is: He's almost certainly right! And of course, it will never happen, which underlines the constraints that prejudice, nutty economic theories, and shortsightedness place on our future.
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The key to success for Obama, if he can figure out how:
"You gotta give 'em HOPE!"
-Harvey Milk
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'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. '
Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982) "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" 1978.
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