Kentucky basketball game tonight; flame away on me

Dear Fredrick: In my new, non-newspaper job, part of my duties is intense reading of advertising and marketing trade journals. Several facts emerge from that scrutiny.
1. It's way too late to put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
2. It's not just newspapers. EVERY form of mass media is getting murdered by the disparity between Internet advertising rates and what they charge for ads in their traditional format. EVERY form of mass media is losing audience in huge chunks. Holy cow, better to be Sam Zell than to be General Electric watching NBC's ratings do an Acapulco cliff dive.
3. The person who solves these two problems will become richer than Bill Gates and a figure in American history alongside Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Whether that happens in my lifetime or not, I dunno. But my belief in capitalism tells me somebody eventually will.
P.S. Even though Ashley Judd is among their number, Kentucky basketball fans are not a group with which I care to associate, or even think about.

 

Love the cheerleading squad, though.

 

How does that fit in the paper?

 

Your "take" has been discussed on this board for years, and for the reasons Michael Gee has listed above (and for other reasons), people don't feel the need to rehash the same discussion about something they have no control over. We're too busy looking for jobs with a future.

 

People go to ESPN.com and they do not turn on their TV.

How will ESPN survive?

If you have not noticed, what ESPN is doing with their online features is amazing.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=ghanasoccer

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=nicklaus

 

The root word of capitalism is "capital." ESPN can do amazing journalism (I have many, many friends there whose work I admire to the max) because showing the games pays the freight. The issue is, where do newspapers (sources of information in whatever format being my definition of that word) find the capital to perform their function?

 

Frederick,

I agree that the internet cannot sell ads. It is the advertising salespeople who do that.

Think when Google started giving searches away for free that was a good idea?

 

"It's just G now. I sold the E."

 

Kentucky lost to Virginia Military Institute?

 

It's all those extra push-ups.

 

It's all the Internets fault.

 

Well, at least North Carolina is in the same sentence.