Gawker 
Enter your username and password.
New York, 11:14 AM
Sun Nov 22
11 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip Your Editors:
tips@gawker.com
Tipline: 646-214-8138
Editor-in-Chief:
Gabriel Snyder | Email
West Coast Editor:
Richard Rushfield | Email
Contributing Editors:
Valleywag:
Ryan Tate | Email
Media:
Hamilton Nolan | Email
Politics:
Alex Pareene | Email
Investigations:
John Cook | Email
Entertainment:
Brian Moylan | Email
Nights:
Adrian Chen | Email
Azaria Jagger | Email
Ravi Somaiya | Email
Weekends:
Foster Kamer | Email
Video Editor:
Richard Blakeley | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
05/11/09
[commerce.senate.gov]
That video starts a full hour before the hearing so manually skip ahead if you don't want to just stare at the hearing title for an hour.
The gist of it was that the Newspapers squandered their resources in the 90s when they should have been modernizing and they were still profitable. Now the money is gone. The only solution (other than perpetual government support of course) is for them all to form a jointly managed walled garden of news (and not let Google and other aggregators in of course). They would need to amend current antitrust laws to do this... very unlikely to happen.
Not ONCE was the following pointed out:
You don't need a big-budget newsroom to regurgitate press conference materials from the Whitehouse, Pentagon, State Department, etc. In fact, those agencies, as well as local police departments, high schools, local Little Leagues, and other organizations that reporters used to cover ALREADY HAVE THEIR OWN ONLINE PRESENCE!
Any newspaper that gets their coverage from Iraq off Reuters isn't really providing "Intellectual Property" for which they should make exclusive profit. Hence this notion that they should all get together and share this content among themselves, but not let it get out the the unwashed Internet publishers.
There are things that a newspaper can do that fall into the category of investigative journalism that would make each newspaper a source of unique information, but sorry, you already laid those guys off.
Finally, toward the end, someone pointed out that it was Craigslist that took gobs of revenue from the printed papers, not Google. DUH.
05/11/09
The newspaper business conditioned everyone to believe their product will be free, forever. And there's no turning back.
05/11/09
05/11/09
05/11/09
05/12/09
05/11/09
Owen, tech reporting isn't reporting. Get serious. It's trade reporting
Or the citizen journalists of the Huffington Post, whose scoops shaped the last election.
Sure, domestic news can be covered adequately given a large group of volunteers, but serious international news? That's not going to happen.
There's a reason why America is falling so far behind the world in serious knowledge about the world. Canada too, our newspapers are a pile of shit.
05/11/09
05/11/09
05/11/09
05/11/09
05/11/09
02/06/09
This is what Nick means when he tells you guys that the housing crisis is a media creation.
02/06/09
So you do need to have some assurance that your house is not going to lose value while you still owe a large amount of money on it.
You could just save up and pay cash, sure, but that's historically not a very good idea in financial terms. On a 30 year mortgage, you usually end up paying a total of about 1.5 times the selling price (including interest) if you carry it to term. Thing is, the house (normally) will also have gone up in value at that time through basic inflation and the magic of compound interest (while you're only paying simple interest on your mortgage), so you usually make a profit *and* you've had the benefit of living in the house all that time. You basically get the house "for free". This is not just in bubble times, this is true during normal real estate cycles too.
You also get some big tax benefits for owning a home, so you don't really pay 1.5 times the amount but more like 1.3 times. So that helps the bottom line too, and you come out even further ahead.
But if you instead just saved up all that money all that time, you'd get no tax benefit, you'd get no compound interest on the inflation of the value of the house, you'd at best get maybe a point or two of interest on a savings account or CD or t-bills or whatever. (You wouldn't want to invest your savings in the stock market, that's for sure.) *Plus* you'd have to pay rent in the meantime, which is just throwing money down the toilet and would more than erase that point or two of interest. So you'd come out way behind vs. just getting a mortgage and buying a house earlier.
You need to plan for the future. You can't just buy or not buy based on your financial condition right now. That's really short-sighted. It's not what any big financial decision is about.
So there does always need to be a question asked of what the market's likely going to do in the next 5-10 years vs. where it is now. People who aren't thinking that way get where they are - good or bad - through dumb luck.
02/06/09
02/06/09
02/06/09