Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, Online Advertising, the Decline of Newspapers, and the General Future of Media Encapsulated in One Pathetic Banner Ad

As newspapers continue their self-imposed march to the grave, Rupert Murdoch, who, whatever you may think of him, deserves our respect for his agressive belief in newspapers, has announced tentative plans to move begin charging for access to the vast array of international newspapers in his News Corp Empire, including the New York Post, the Australian and the Times (UK). His recently-acquired Wall Street Journal already charges for online access to its content. News Corp may also strike an exclusive deal with Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, whereby surfers would not be able to use Google or Google News to search for News Corp content.

It's a bold gamble. But it's a gamble predicated in a belief that good content is still valuable. And it's an idea better than whatever else has been proposed by other newspapers, because they haven't come up with any. Well, except for the still-in-development Google Fast Flip, which promises to replicate the actual experience of reading a newspaper i.e. turning the pages and coming across articles that you may not have read if you just scanned headlines on a news website all in a graphically-pleasing, fast-loading format. The question is if anyone even wants to read news in a traditional-manner any more. Certainly, banner ads and web-ads in general would be more effective if they were presented as part of a graphically-pleasing whole, rather than as afterthought add-ons to already clunky news pages.

Because that is the current model, and the current model is not working, as evidenced by this pathetic banner ad that accompanied my surfing of the nypost.com site this morning.

This man does not own a home. Also, sugar cubes do not turn teeth white.

Shocking Real Video Footage of Tiger Woods Accident (via Taiwan)

Mayhap many you are tired of the endless Tiger Woods coverage. Or maybe some of you are confused by all the differing accounts of what happened.
Where to turn to get the facts? With American Journalism dying rapidly, the Taiwanese have thankfully stepped in to set the record straight.
So, here it is, the first, the last, Nay, the only word needed on Tiger Woods' "accident." Slight translation needed, perhaps, but really, this succinct video speaks for itself.

LazyNDaLaz Dayz

This could be a portrait of any newsprint sports columnist in America. It is Bill Dwyre.

One of the hardest parts of leaving New York is losing access to the New York Post. Now, the LA Times is a perfectly fine newspaper, perhaps even underrated when considering the generally weak state of big city dailies today. The paper does hard news well. But a man cannot exist on trouble in Tehran and investigations into water-main breaks alone. A man needs a lively and light-hearted sports section. Internet sites/blogs cannot compete against the big newspapers in hard news, but it's easy for them to outshine a daily's sports and entertainment sections which are mostly based on opinion and conjecture. As youngster Freddy Coups points out, sports blogs have made sports sections near-irrelevant, and he has since dropped his daily newsprint habit.

Sports Guy has highlighted the reasons why the big papers can't compete, what with their union rules and ties to longstanding writers. Hence, we get the cavalcade of chumps that hog the columnist pages of our nation's dailes. A typical example is Bill Dwyre of the LA Times. This past Friday, in the wake of the Angels' 2nd win against the BoSox he wrote of how the Angels were erasing their hex against Boston's cop-looking corps. Already we have the overdone chump angle of "curses." Not content with this chump point he exhumes poor Donnie Moore to make his belabored point.

"Now, so sadly, figuratively and sordidly, every Red Sox victory since [1986] had seemed like another nail in Moore's coffin."

Figuratively? Thanks, Dwyre, I thought that after Game 1 of last year's ALDS, Yooooouuuuuuullllllk held the flashlight while Tacoby Ellsbury dug up Moore's grave while Terry Francs held the nails betwixt his teeth.

Sordidly? I guess if the above scenario were true then yes, but, well, now I'm just confused. Let's just leave it at that this column is FUCKED, and shows just how awful a sportswriter can be when he tries to get grandiose in illustrating a stupid point.

We can get lazy opinions on any sports blog. What we need is investigative writing, or writers who actually leave their seats to write a story, like Jerry Crowe's column today on Wilt Chamberlain's super-sexy house.

Our sports pages need to change quick. they need to heed the advice of 3-6 Mafia and get "CrazyNDaLazDayz."

L.A. Haters

This here is T.J. Simers, a sports columnist for the L.A. Times. Most sports coverage in brah-burg veers into lazy homerism. There's also the opposite, lazy hating. The day after the Lakers deservedly copped the championship, T.J. Simers spat out a caustic holier-than-thou column titled "Idolatry of Lakers is Ludicrous."

Our wanna-be Fonzie begins with:

"The Lakers won. Yippee, hooray for them and all that stuff."

Yeah, like whatevs, daddy-o, who cares about anything right?

"As civic pride dictates in these things, of course, everyone is supposed to be a Lakers lover now, giddy and overcome with affection for their heroes, but excuse me if I sit this one out."

Why, oh why do you yawn Simers? Let's see:

"The Lakers were good, all right, and gritty when they had to be, Kobe brilliant as almost always, while Trevor and Lamar added spice to the championship mix."

Hmmm, where's the beef?

"But winning it all makes them no more appealing, Kobe still over the top absurd in his mood swings, Pau still carrying on like someone swiped his rattle, Phil so above it all it's surprising he doesn't demand to be carried off the court like Cleopatra.

The Lakers are champions, but they did little to cozy up to the folks of L.A. beyond being good -- Kobe and Phil, the two leaders of this outfit, just as removed as always."

C'mon Kobe, can't you do a lil soft-shoe for our man Simers? Can't you guys do more than just be good and win ballgames for the ol' man? Can't you let those pearly whites gleam? Can't you preen?

But that can't be it. No, can't just be the lack of 'pizazz' that has ol' Iceberg Simers' panties in a bunch. Give it to us str8, no chaser, Teej:

"But now there will be a parade here, so everyone can pay homage to a bunch of people blessed by God with extraordinary athletic ability, but in some cases, the social skills that would make them outcasts in many workplaces.

Wouldn't you like to see the look on Gasol's face if your boss yelled at him?

You want to have a parade and scream your lungs out for a job well done, then invite the young men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to walk down Figueroa Street and be feted like heroes in the Coliseum.

How many people give it their all every day in their jobs, every year until retirement, 30, 40 and 50 years, with no chance of a parade -- as determined as Kobe, as focused as Kobe, as accomplished as Phil?"

Laziest sports journalism of the highest order. Most of us sports fans have bought the ticket, taken the ride, we consciously divide the back pages of the paper from the front. Without doing that, following sports would be impossible. In the context of all the crazy shiznit that goes in the world, investing our emotions in the athletic accomplishments of strangers is foolishness bordering on mental illness. But again, what makes it not insanity is our conscious division of real shiznit into column A and our entertainment, whether it be sports, movies, robots that transform into cars, videos of people getting hit in the groin with footballs, whatever, into Column B.

We don't need need holier-than-thou hacks like Simers to pull the "fuck these guys, they're not the real heroes" card on us. Go embed yourself in the frontlines in Fallujah if you're gonna pull this kind of armchair harrumphing. Otherwise, if you're gonna stick to the sports pages, stick to the ballgames. Same reason I don't follow Heathcliff's madcap adventures in the funny pages for insight into our crumbling economy.

Reminds me of Rick Reilly, who's so fond of churning out compare/contrast pieces between some supposedly spoiled athlete and some salt-of-the-earth coal miner. There was the time he said QB Kerry Collins had "the 'nads of a danish," and, wow, aint this a knee-slapper, saying if World War II had been up to pastry-pubes Kerry, "we would all be using umlauts now and taking Monday off for Goebbels Day."

Oddly, eight years later, Reilly dropped a Collins love letter, ending a column about him from this past season with this killer coda:

"If you look at Collins' face this week, you'll see a big cut on his nose. He was deer hunting, saw a six-pointer loping by, didn't have time to get a good rifle rest on his shoulder, fired anyway and the recoil nailed him. But he got the deer.

Figures. He never did like to pass the buck."

That's another calling-card of the sports-hack, ending their hard-hitting columns with lame faux-Hemingway-tough guy sparse prose. Let's see how cold-blooded Teej can be with his ending:

"[W]hat's the difference between a Lakers championship and one won by the Sparks?

As far as I'm concerned -- with no rooting interest in either -- nothing."

Would you believe he rolls ciggies into his white-shirt sleeve and can make a jukebox hum just by elbowing it?

Now, I love newspapers more than anybody, but why shouldn't fans today read anything but newspaper sports sections if their prime column space is wasted on the ham-fisted humbug histrionics of grumpy geezers?