DO NOT tell me the word "nazi" is inappropriate. STOP being so damn naive.
They’re Hunting Nazis. New England Is a Target-Rich Environment
Thank christ every single fucking article is paywalled on this shitbox of a planet.
I opened it, burned my free read, and foolishly clicked on their link to TF Butler, thinking it would link me to their page or something. Nope, it redirected me to another Rolling Stone story and robbed me of the ability to read this one.
It's not your fault, obviously, I just...jesus fuck, who'd have anticipated that we'd have to subscribe to 56 newspapers and magazines just to read about the violent threat down the fucking block.
Sorry. Needed to vent. Since this paywall horseshit has made it *harder* for me to access news than it was a decade ago.
@Bullix I hear you. I was feeling the exact same way yesterday. There's a dire threat to our existence, but unless we pay to read about it, we won't know. WTF. Capitalism sucks ass.
@StillIRise1963 @Bullix I agree with you both at a certain level -- there are various sites I simply don't read, because they want me to pay to do so -- it's also true that if you're not the consumer, you're the product. Media outlets serve the interests of their funders, whether that's readers or advertisers.
I don't have a great solution to this, or I would have implemented it myself.
@StillIRise1963 @Bullix I've mulled over ideas similar to that.... a single subscription price that would get you X number of articles from a whole network of affiliated sites. It's an open question first, how we'd ever organize such a thing, and second, what kind of competitive dynamics might emerge within it. There are plenty of niche communities out there, and it's unclear whether this would leave them behind or be just the support they need.
@StillIRise1963 @Bullix I think that might work if the internal funding were split, with a portion being divided equally among all producers and a portion allocated by popularity.
I think this would be worth exploring for most publications. I think for news orgs, though, until the profit motive and popularity cease being critical for "doing business," we will be doomed to have opinion, news, propaganda, fluff, and yellow journalism all mixed together into an infotainment casserole that informs few, and satisfies fewer.
Not only that, but when the news has to appeal to popularity for clicks and views, it ceases to be news.
There is really absolutely no need for 24 hour news networks. They are mostly a cancer on public discourse. And, frankly, they repeat the same shit all day. Only they do so in huge swaths of pundit segments and silly talk shows.
They aren't news. And when something big breaks, they cut into their programs just like any other station can.
24 hour networks seem to exist, mostly, for bored politicos and terminally online types. It's almost like they try to project this air of always giving news, when, in reality, they just recycle the same points dozens of times an hour, for hours on end, in between viagra commercials.
I can't say this country seems better informed or more civic minded than I remember it being before the rise of infotainment and 24 hour news channels. In fact, it seems much worse off.
@Bullix @StillIRise1963 @Steve I agree completely, and that's why I haven't had cable in over 20 years. I wouldn't want to encourage them.. Maybe if more of us realized that we can stay informed without paying for that crap, maybe they would realize that they should find a better business model, or pass the baton to somebody who can do it right.
