Plans Finalized To Shut Down Last U.S. Newspapers

Hey, America: This is what you'll lose, once the last bloated newspapers close forever: People like this, whining about the Most Important Thing Ever, a soggy newsprint version of yesterday's wire copy and weeks-old syndicate features about "winter vegetables," wrapped around a Big Lots! circular and six or seven pages of foreclosure notices in the back, along with a few "I HEREBY REFUSE TO PAY MY DEBT" classifieds, where the jobs/real estate ads used to be. Oh god.

Here's a little message for self-important douchesacks from Washington Post whiner Richard Cohen to this guy and his embarrassing YouTube performance: Shut up. There isnothingparticularly interesting or important about that clump of pulp tossed in the neighbor's wet driveway at 2: 21 a.m. Stop this fetishistic weeping over a long-expected technological change in news delivery. Do you goddamned people realize you're the ONLY ONES bemoaning a switch from inefficient, untimely dissemination of information?

Even cranky old John McCain and handsome young techno-president Barack Obama could at least agree that important information -- medical records, for example -- should be created and updated and shared electronically.

But it's not just the printing press you people are whining about. Most of you coddled cubicle hacks have never even seen the pressroom. What you're so pathetically grieving is your fading culture, a masturbatory profession of over-educated overpaid typists who had a stranglehold on American journalism for 30 years or so -- the Golden Era of the fat monopoly newspaper with its total control of local opinion, the real estate and jobs markets, which politicians were on the way up or down, who had an Important Wedding, what ladies were the stars of Society and the Debutante Balls. You people were the dam that held back all the world's information: stock prices, distant wars, consumer trends, comic strips, Fall Recipes, and those precious reprints of George Will columns. And you trickled out a little bit each day, the volume depending on the number of ad pages. It's a good thing nothing important ever happened on Mondays, right?

Somehow, insanely, this business model -- once the government helped newspaper publishers crush all local competition -- grew into ridiculous unsustainable monstrosities like theLos Angeles Times, withthousandsof editorial employees, to produce a newspaper! (And, in theLAT's case, a newspaper that could barely be bothered to cover Los Angeles, because the job of the j-school tools was, obviously, to chase Pulitzer Prizes, and call each other "scribe" without irony. Ugh.)

And now, these terrible people who spent the past eight years looking the other way while actualmurdering criminalsran the White House as 100-page real-estate sections promoting animmoral liedelayed the newspaper industry's death by a few years, they want a bailout. And if that fails, well they will just take their ball and go home.

Go on, scram. And stop quoting Thomas Jefferson or whatever, likethat'sgot anything to do with you lamers upset because your shitty column was killed.