Internet subscriptions should come with an additional cost for… not subscribing to a newspaper…? I don’t make this shit up, honestly. A government committee has (possibly googled) this conclusion together.
Clearly the Internet is to blame for the drop in newspaper sales. Just like TV would be the death of the newspaper a mere few decades ago. And yet your cat can still do its dirty work on the printed word. So the newspaper isn’t gone yet. Good. I like newspapers. Even if they’re a 1 time read more often then not. They’re good for keeping people off the seat next to you on trains. So is peeling an orange, but I digress.
The downfall of newspapers has come and gone several times. We’ve seen the rise of free newspapers, and not just the local rags. I don’t have anything against the free papers as such. They read well enough, all be it a bit full of advertising but hey, that’s why they’re free. I am not too fond of their public transport distribution, bunch of people stuffing free papers in your hands like you want them. But wouldn’t the free paper be the competition of a subscription paper? Sure the Internet has some impact, but why should every Internet user pay for something they don’t use? Do you charge pedestrians road taxes? And besides, if the Internet is your nemesis, use it! Be a better news site, you have the damned sources already, so in stead of going to print… let’s see if you can guess what I’m going to say next… oh yeah I remember… put them online. Oh but wait, you already are. So you’re competing with yourself and blaming yourself for it. Shit, I lost my train of thought now… but I’m sure you can see the random droplet of amusement here.
The grand scheme behind this is, apparently, conserving the diversity of the Dutch press. Which seems to me like all sorts of media. Word, image and sound. Fuck me, but I think the Internet combines those perfectly? Oh my gawd, the Internet is a medium too! That makes it part of the diversity and besides, the word and its meaning doesn’t change just because it’s no longer printed on paper. The only change is that you now have to put sheets of printed out bleached A4 paper in your parakeet’s cage! They’re not nearly as absorbant as newspaper, that’s for sure.
On top of all that, we could really do with a lot less newspapers. Is it really worth it to hang on to the lemmings of newspapers? To each their own paper, but I find a lot of the daily newspapers really hard to read. Not because they’re writting in a certain way or printed in a wonky font, but because they’re so good god damned full of advertisements and every page is complete and utter chaos. Half the pages look like the aftermath of a suicide terrorist clown after having bombed a paint store… but that’s just my 2 cents.
