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This morning I checked out the local paper from my hometown, who is starting a “pay a subscription for online news” push and I saw this interesting article that was syndicated from Debra J. Saunders (dsaunders@sfchronicle.com) at the San Francisco Chronicle. I felt compelled to write a response in the comments but I went over my limit. So I emailed it to her and the local paper it was also published in and now I am posting it here for anyone else who stumbles upon it. It deals with how newspapers are trying to find ways to make money in a changing digital landscape where they just don’t seem to get it yet. Read her article here:

 ”If you can read this, thank a writer:

We who work for newspapers have a love/hate relationship with the Internet. On the one hand, more people than ever — millions every week — are reading our product. On the other hand, many people don’t pay for it.

Search engines, such as Google, make it easier to look up information, but they’re pirates that make money off print content without paying for it. Facebook and Twitter get our names in front of new noses for free, which is good, but those sites require constant care and feeding.

Well-meaning people now chime in and suggest that newspapers could make more money by dispensing with print. They don’t understand that pop-up ads generally don’t produce the revenue needed to bankroll a room full of editors and reporters.

With e-books, there’s an advance that bridges the two worlds. Paperless need not mean payless anymore.

I bought my parents a Kindle two years ago, and I’ve had my Nook for about as long. The Wall Street Journal reports that there are 40 million e-readers and 65 million tablets — iPads and other devices. In the first quarter of this year, e-books generated more revenue than paper books.

Newspapers, including the Statesman Journal, now boast smartphone and tablet apps and e-editions, which allow readers to browse an on-screen version of the print edition.

Political writers have seized the opportunity to produce the sort of books on the presidential campaign trail that used to appear postelection but now run in installments as the election plays out. Already, writers at Politico and RealClearPolitics have released two books each on the 2012 presidential race.

The walls at the home of South Dakota author Joseph Bottum are lined with beautiful books carefully collected over a lifetime of loving literature. “I like the physical object of a book,” Bottum told me. “It’s a technology that I was trained very young to use.”

Nick Dunne, the protagonist in Gillian Flynn’s new novel, “Gone Girl,” was a New York magazine writer before magazines began “shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy.” He was on the top of the world — actually getting paid to write — when suddenly, he laments, writers “were like women’s hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers.”

I read those words on an e-book. And I wonder whether technology and innovation finally have come to the rescue.”

Here is my response, first to the local paper about their site and second to the issues Debra posed in her article:

“I read this and I am not going to thank the writer. Sorry. I have had pieces published in the commentary section of this paper including a “Guest Opinion” spot several years ago with a great picture of me and all! I grew up in Salem, I then moved away. I occasionally come over to the website to see what is going on in the town that I came from. Catch up on small town life if you will. However, recently your parent company, Gannett, took over how your site is laid out and made the content much harder to actually digest. The multi-media aspect is great for people who just want to look at a bunch of pictures but the site feels empty as far as content goes with actual… well news. Links are buried and often stay around for several days. I know there is new news to report but I guess I will just have to search around to find it online. I was up in Salem a couple weeks ago and was SHOCKED that there was a ton in the physical printed paper. Awesome that it winds up somewhere I guess. Gannett should take a page out of the LA Times site and their blog-like constant feed of “local” news in the LA Now section. I know that I can hop on there and click the link and see everything that is happening at any time during the day.

That all being said; I know the trend with pay-for-online-content that’s been happening, LA Times does it too. I know the world is a scary place for old timey companies that are used to generating revenue a certain way and then suddenly, in almost an instant, the whole game changes (Look at what happened to the music industry in the 2000s) but there are ways. Yes we have services like iTunes and Amazon where you still pay for it, but piracy still exists, probably even more now than before but, that industry is thriving again. Even streaming services like Pandora and Spotify offer it up free of charge, with ads of course, but even those are not as intrusive as the ones on TV or Radio. It’s all about adapting, and print media’s new quick fix is to try and lock people who aren’t actual daily paper subscribers into some sort of quickly thought up weekly pay scheme. It’s scary when revenues decline that rapidly, I get it. But in short, you just aren’t at a viable fix to it yet. Your bandaid approach to solving YOUR issue was at the expense of a lot of your readership that honestly, you probably didn’t even factor in when you made the decision.

One of the main points you attempted to make in your article is that pop-up adds don’t generate the revenue to pay for all the things a classic newspaper company needs to run (journalist, editors, etc) in the traditional sense. Lump that in with the addition to the new digital realm (people hired solely to focus on web content) and I can see how you might think that something has gone wrong with the internet world and people just not paying for news anymore. I get where you’re coming from, I really do, and I even have the answer for you! How do you pay for it all? You don’t. Journalist and the editors they have are not as necessary as they once were. Sorry, they’re just not. As you mentioned we are in a world full of smart phones and those smartphone owners are often bloggers reporting mini-news to their Facebook pages and snapping pictures of things like accidents they just saw and the names of those involved. We still need some journalist and editors, just not as many. Live people now send you stories directly to your digital inbox as they happen. You don’t have to hop in the white van anymore and drive around all day searching for news. It comes to you in real time, on-demand. All you have to do is pop it into a modern editor (a word processor with a decent spell check) make a phone call to someone nearby to check some facts on your phone, the same one you just read the email about the story to begin with on, and BAM! News story is ready to go. The days of bullpens full of reporters is done. Gone. Finished. You now only need a handful of people sifting through the flood of info that comes to you now. And proper, well placed and negotiated advertising on your site, in the videos, and ads on the phone applications should be designed with the budgets of the staff in mind to keep the costs where they should be and even possibly profitable. You have the opportunity to run an efficient and fast machine that can deliver real content to consumers extremely fast at a fraction of the cost. You just need to figure out that the old days are gone and start making the changes now, before you fold up and fade away like yesterday’s newspaper.”

Knowledge is power. It’s what really separates an ordinary individual from an extraordinary one.  You don’t have to cure cancer or invent a Shamwow to be extraordinary; you just have to be different from the rest. Since GI Joe said it best and “knowing is half the battle” I guess knowing exactly what I want now is going to be hard to stick to, but I must!  Things in life really couldn’t be going any better as far as big picture goes.  Still, sometimes I find myself thinking back to the past and where I was from 2006-2009 and how life was so much different back then.  I thought I had it all figured out. To a point I guess I did.  Everything was on track and I was accomplishing every little thing that I had wanted all my life.   For some reason in my youth, I guess, I got restless and always thought there was more I should have or deserved. Looking back a couple years, I wrote something on this topic about this character flaw I have and now I think I might have overcome it. When things got stable I used to let my mind wander around and let me think that there could be more.  Now I don’t. I now realize that I want my life to be more like the way it was back then.  Stable.  No worries. I was content. I let my mind trick me into thinking I was bored and unhappy.  Now I don’t really know what else to blame except my own naivety.

Now I am a few years older, and a few years wiser, and I feel like I have come to grips with the reality of what I really want. Now I simply must find it. I am not going to let little things slide anymore. I have very clear goals for my career and personal life and I am tracking ahead of schedule to achieve those.  I just need one last piece of this puzzle to fit in to it. This time I will require it to fit in perfectly with no jamming or forcing. If it doesn’t fit perfectly I will simply try and find a better fitting piece. No more games and no more half settling, I am only reaching for the stars now! I know I have said it before but this time I mean it, as evidenced by my actions the last couple of months.  I am working on building the best me possible and slowly introducing others back into my life and it’s working out great. Much like how they are rebuilding ground zero in New York; I am rebuilding my life after it stood proudly in all its glory many years ago. And it will again. It’s going to be an interesting ride. I am excited to see where I wind up!

Let’s do this!

You know I’m pretty much over this whole 99% being mad at the 1% crap.  It’s actually pretty fucking stupid.  For example the guy building the Titanic replica; who the FUCK cares about how he spends the money he made for himself. Now the “99%” people have their panties all in bunch over it and lighting up the internets. Well maybe the fact that you’re a fat fucking lazy arm chair internet crusader who can barely get off the couch long enough to take a shit is the reason for your economic despair? Ya’ think?  This fucker created a mining company from nothing!  Bet you couldn’t even stay focused long enough to dig a hole in the back yard. Even if you could you’d bitch about it the whole time because you think you’re better than the work.

YOU’RE THE PROBLEM! Why haven’t you seen that yet??? Just because you can’t make that kind of wealth for yourself doesn’t mean the ones who can should give you some of theirs for being smart enough to figure out how to make it and driven enough to actually obtain it!

“Oh he didn’t pay enough in taxes…” Bet the fucker created a ton of those job things you haven’t heard about.  Bet he’s gonna make a lot more of them too with people building his toy boat and staff making it work.  Fuck come to think of it maybe you should all be paying him.  I’m starting to think he might be Jesus.

You bet your fucking ass I found a picture of Jesus with the Titanic!

Today I guess I am supposed to be sad. I mean that would be the normal reaction when something ends that you really thought would last forever. I’m not though. Sure I am sad that the time is gone and that there won’t be any more of the fun adventures we shared, but at the same time I guess I just feel like it had reached its end. I wanted it to last. Of all the people I had ever written about this was the one that I felt was right for me. I felt like I had actually tried to find the best fit for me and I had succeeded finally at that. All was perfect. Both of our goals in life, our dreams, the city we wanted to live in, the hobbies, and even the spiritual ideals. The struggles that we went through together over the last 8 months made it seem like we could get through anything; “the worst was over” type thinking. Guess we were wrong.

I am writing once again from Los Angeles. As you all are well aware of it’s a city I have always dreamt of and finally made it to a few years back by reaching hard for the most in life and never taking no for an answer. After a couple returns to Oregon to clear my head I decided the time was right to once again head back to the city of angels, this time with what I had always wanted by my side. We had no plan, no job, no house, and no money. We did it anyway. Thinking that if it was meant to be it would all fall into place. And it did. But it took a while. The stress about finances drove us both into frustration often taking it out on the other. I do feel bad, I was drastically harder then I should have been. Through all those outbursts and stresses there was still forward progress towards the goal we had always talked about. I landed the job that I wanted more than any job I had had prior and was excited for it to change our lives. We’d never get that far.

I’ve mentioned before that relationships take work. They shouldn’t take too much work however. They exist to provide you with companionship through the hard times and extra joy during the good, a support system that you can’t find on your own. When that support system starts to deteriorate there becomes little use for the relationship as it becomes more work maintaining the relationship then it would without it. I tried to stretch myself so thin for this one. Doing all I could to build that dream we spent 8 months talking about always sacrificing personal gains for the better of the both. I already know that she’ll saying I’m trying to make myself out to be a god or that I did nothing for her, but I did. She forgets the little things; the times I was there through tears after 3am walks to a parking lot, the venting phone calls, the stressed out nights I sat up and talked, the siding with her always, and everything in between. I admit that when we came to LA my fuse became shorter and I would lash out in inappropriate ways and I shouldn’t have. However at the same time I felt like I was the only one pushing to be better. I just know her potential; when she sets her mind to something she gets it. I wish she would have done that more.

When I took her back to Portland I knew that it would be the end. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t. Despite her telling me the night before we left that “we’ll be ok” I knew we wouldn’t. We would get there and get all her stuff squared away with her car then I would return to LA and she would start doing the same thing she was here in Portland, trading one bedroom for another. I tried to keep it alive and of course my frustration came out one night when it shouldn’t have. I just had a moment and let my anger fly. I don’t know why but that is all in the past now. I don’t even know where I am going with this…

I guess I just wish that I could find someone who is committed to make something work. Someone to fight for me like I fight for them, to adore me like I adore them. To find, once again, what I almost had here and all the rest of it too. I’m not perfect. I have my flaws. I am trying to work on them. I just need someone who is willing to work through it all with me too; someone that I can spend my time with constantly growing and becoming better. There will be hard times and slip-ups but how we will recover from those is what will make us untouchable. Does that even exist?