Do you find it interesting that the largest newspaper in the US is cutting jobs?

The New York Times plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs — about 8 percent of the total — by year’s end, offering buyouts to union and non-union employees, and resorting to layoffs if it cannot get enough people to leave voluntarily, the paper announced on Monday.

There are a couple things to consider when hearing this. One of which is the fact that print media is dying and the people who have been running this media have been ignoring the problem for a long time. Case in point is a great video/audio that talks about the Denver Rocky Mountain News vs the Post.  In it John Temple talks about all the mistakes they made in the long run when dealing with new media (web) vs. print.

The paper has made much deeper reductions in other, non-newsroom departments, where layoffs have occurred several times. But the advertising drop that has pummeled the industry has forced cuts in the news operation as well. The newsroom already has lowered its budgets for freelancers and trimmed other expenses, and employees took a 5 percent pay cut for most of this year.

Nearly all papers in the metropolitan region have been cutting their news operations for years, and some have fewer than half as many people in their newsrooms as they did in 2000.

The Times’s news department peaked at more than 1,330 employees before the last round of cuts. The current headcount is about 1,250; no other American newspaper has more than about 750.

Advertisements are seriously down – but moreover they are down in media that does not have as much of an audience.  Circulation is down – and there are many factors of why it is down but one of the many is  because papers like the New York Times are in the bag for Obama.   When an organization is so biased that they purposefully sit on news that other organizations have been reporting on – and had a Republican been in office they would have reported on – it is clear that many readers  look else where to get their news and information.

But its more than that.  The medium is dying because we’ve been conditioned as readers to want more now.

I want it now!

We crave 24 hour news updates, tweets pushed to our mobile devices about breaking news because we can’t have enough up-to-the-second-in-your-face-crammed-down-your-throat news feeds.  We’re conditioned for instant gratification so by the time the newspaper writer starts to type on his keyboard for the story in tomorrows paper, its old news.

“I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation,” he wrote, adding, “Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.”

I think, unfortunately, that day will be a long ways away.

Side note – funniest comment winner from the Times blog:

“No worries. I’m sure there will still be plenty of people to cover the always important kid-in-a-runaway-balloon beat.”

This may be a cold, callous thing to say when the body has barely started to cool, but when the person is someone who got all molesty and junk on a child cancer patient and avoided jail simply because he could afford to buy the family off?

Good riddance. Your family and others may grieve, and they have the right to. From myself (and I know of at least one other person on the site who would agree with this), I say this…

Rot in hell, you sick fuck.

Out.

Austin 3g Coverage

I’ve marked the areas that so far I’ve found to be the “suck zone”.  It appears AT&T’s coverage in the Austin surrounding areas is less than lacking.  I’m hoping that they improve it, you would think that being a fairly large iPhone market here that they would beef up.  What bad zones have you run across here?