On the heels of my “what’s wrong with newspapers” post, starting September 1st, both the Seattle Times and the Seattle P-I will raise their price to 75 cents from 50 cents for the daily (non-Sunday) paper.

From Downsizing the News And Pretending to Increase Quality :

During the past few years, newspaper owners demanded and were getting at 20–40 percent profit, among the highest for any industry–and that includes Big Oil.

Go to any journalism conference, and you’ll see a lot of hand-wringing. Reporters and editors are whining about how bad it is. They rightly blame owners and publishers. But, they also blame readers for accepting abbreviated news drops from TV and myriad cable networks. They whine about the Blogosphere and Internet domination. They complain about the short attention span of their readers. It’s this and it’s that. And so, with the help of $500 an hour consultants who eruditely harrumph their grandeur of divine guesses, they make cosmetic changes.

The system is broken, and it’s the owners’ fault.

According to the Wall St. Journal , "Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.’s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld," a stodgy oldster who appears mainly in reruns of a TV show that began 19 years ago and ended 10 years ago.

He will be paid $10 million as part of a $300 million ad campaign that promotes Windows Vista.  Story also reported in the Seattle P-I .

From not just NBC ("Nothing But Commercials"), but also the usually far superior CBUT Canadian broadcast. Are men’s beach volleyball or traditional indoor gym volleyball Olympic events?

"The small screen" is a common phrase. Several recent articles even discussed at length how the smallness of the screen changed the experience of what the writer was watching.  The self-absorbed authors did not make it clear whether they were watching a TV, a desktop computer, a laptop with a smaller screen, or an even smaller iPhone, iTouch or cell phone.

Each one of the above devices stood for "the small screen."  I’ll take a stab that the age of the author is directly proportional to the size of said author’s screen. Meaning, the older the author, the bigger his or her so-called "small" screen.

The title, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus , intrigued me, but the first paragraph of an essay by Clay Shirkey had me hooked and the essay just gets better:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

Every year

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

TV fritters away your life. There is so much more to life than staring at a lame TV. Turn off the TV and turn on your life!

This is National Turnoff TV Week. Get up off your duff! Move around. Get a life. I turned off the TV nearly 4 years ago and can say that TV is a huge waste of time and creates sedentary slobs.

TechCrunch hit the daily double today by using “lame” and “naked” in the same paragraph. Gotta love it.

Lame doesn’t begin to describe this three-and-half-minute comedy about the hijinks of a window-washing crew. The acting is horrible and the jokes fall flat—drunk, naked window washer (don’t ask) scares kids in a day care class as he dangles outside their window. It is something that ABC, one hopes, would never put on television. So why subject Web audiences to something like this? In another clueless move, ABC has turned off the embedding feature in the YouTube player. I guess it doesn’t want people spreading the show around.