Can you guys embed video?
I am down at the US Government Run Telegraph Office filing my blog this morning.
That would be the US Government Supported Telegraph Office.
That would be the result of the US Government bail-out of Western Union when the telephone first began to make the telegraph obsolete in 1876.
The Government could see that if the Telegraph Companies went under, thousands of people would lose their jobs. That would be bad in an election year.
Ironically, Western Union had been offered the patents for the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. They turned him down.
That was when the US Government began its taxpayer funded bailout of the Telegraph Companies.
After I finish filing my blog (do you have any idea how many dots and dashes it takes to send a photograph? And don’t talk to me about video!), I am going down to the US Government Bailed Out Tower Records Store where they still sell vinyl discs. Do you know how many people are employed by vinyl disc pressing?
All of this comes to me as a result of an article by David Harsanyi from The Denver Post sent to me by Eric Blumer, who I met on b-roll.net.
Harsanyi is commenting on the FTC’s recent study entitled: “Potential Policy Recommendation to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.” What the FTC proposes, in 35 pages, is nothing less than a Government bailout of the dying newspaper business.
As Harsany writes:
You know what journalism could really use more of? Government participation. Who better, after all, than a gaggle of technocrats and political appointees to guide the industry in matters of entrepreneurship, fairness and coverage?
Newspapers and magazines are dying. And they are dying for a reason. No one wants to read them anymore.
New technologies, most notably the web, have obviated their reason for existing.
Fine.
They had a good run. Now it’s over.
Newspapers may be in trouble, but journalism, on the other hand, has never been healthier. With more than 260 million blogs and 23 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, journalism has finally reached the stage of a true free press. And a true free market.
And the public is not buying what the newspapers are offering.
Fine.
That is the way it is supposed to work.
They were great for 150 years, and not it is over. Just like the local telegraph office was over.
That’s the ebb and flow of capitalism. Old businesses die, new ones are born. 50 years ago, who ever heard (or thought) of Apple? Or Microsoft? or Google?
We like when new, robust companies and technologies arise. What we don’t like is when the old tired ones die.  But this is natural.
What is not natural is trying to prop them up after their sell-by date has expired. What is even less natural (and more annoying) is the government spending my money (yours and mine) to keep these dead animals on life support.
If I choose not to pay for Rupert Murdoch’s paywall for The Wall Street Journal, or I choose not to buy The New York Post, then I have made a reasoned choice I wanted to make. I don’t need the Government second guessing me by taking my income in the form of taxes and feeding it into companies that I have elected not to purchase from. The same goes true for General Motors.
And as Harsanyi quotes Jeff Jarvis – the entire study mention bloggers (260 million strong), once.
But the government likes newspapers. The government likes GM. The government likes the Status Quo.
The US Government is the last place I would look for the cutting edge of anything.
It was, ironically, the Department of Defense that first invented the Internet.
See how well they exploited that opportunity.
Not the people to run a business – or deal with high tech.
1 Comment
Rachelle June 17, 2010
Loved the way you weaved a story with the telegraph as an example. Great point. Who needs to soil your fingers with print when there’s the iPad. *wink*