"Notes and Quotes"

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. - Elbert Hubbard

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

If they're so damn smart... Why ain't they rich?

05/13/09
by Charles Hakes

Very insightful


IF THEY’RE SO DAMN SMART WHY AIN’T THEY RICH?

Newspapers like the New York Times and others continue on their merry way blithely telling the public, with infinite wisdom, what the public should think and do. And their readers acceptingly say, “Oh … Ok.”

Newspapers are losers. Why would the public take advice from a loser?

The media advises the public on the wonders and benefits of the Obama economy-fixes, and the media has economists and other intellectuals who praise the Obama solutions for America and their ramifications in the world economy. Even if this means that future generations will be chained to debt.

Who are these people who support socialism and persuade the American public to also support it?

Newspapers are the media who were informed by the Newspaper Advertising Bureau in the early 1960’s of the coming of the personal computer during the next 20 years. This brilliant scenario, constructed probably by the late Dr. Leo Bogart, of the NAB, didn’t know what to call the device that became known as the PC, but it predicted what it would do: In-home news, entertainment, and information on demand via a “black box” hooked to the telephone line. It would have a screen like a TV and print-out capabilities. It would retrieve encyclopedia information for the kiddies' homework, and advice for living for mom and pop. It would do banking, get sports scores and allow hard copy data transfer.

The “black box” would deliver news – the first syllable in newspaper.

Newspapers responded to this prognostication by doing – nothing. The scenario told them their world – their competitive environment -- was going to change drastically, and they did nothing. It was clear that what was going to happen to newspapers was the same thing that happened to streetcars when the automobile came on the scene. Still, newspapers did nothing.

In the mid 1970’s the late Herman Kahn of The Hudson Institute forecast that individuals would have pocket-sized, or smaller, personal communications devices that would have telephone and information and entertainment retrieval capabilities and that lots of people would have them by about the year 2000. He didn’t know what to call this thing that we now call the cell phone.

One might ask (and I, for one did ask) why in blazes would anyone want to carry around a newspaper when they could carry around a greater bundle of benefits in a smaller package.

Newspapers responded to this by doing – nothing.

Why did newspapers do nothing? There were four main reasons.

Newspapers were in “cash cow” status. There was no initiative to invest in new technology. Newspaper owners milked them for all they could get.

Newspaper employees were rewarded for “making sure nothing went wrong” rather than taking calculated risks to create new value for customers and better and more profitable business for the papers.

Management turned a blind eye and deaf ear to what was taking place. With a classic example of marketing myopia they considered themselves in the newspaper business when they should have been thinking of themselves as in the information business. They viewed the changes that were coming as problems that they wouldn’t have to deal with because the problems weren’t going to happen on their watch. They should have been looking at the opportunities that these changes were going to bring, and planning to take advantage of the changes.

Newspapers had become institutionalized and didn’t understand marketing. If they needed more money they simply raised their rates. And when customers found alternatives to newspapers they took them.

I was active in the newspaper industry in the 1970’s as the research director of The Detroit News and as president of the Newspaper Research Council. The handwriting was already on the wall. Newspapers were sliding over the tail-end of life cycle maturity and were on the slippery downward slope. One of my “least welcome” industry utterances during this time was: “What’s wrong with newspapers? Look around. Do you think the people running them are the same people who could have started them?”

Now there are two kinds of newspapers – the dead and dying. And these failing companies -- who couldn’t save themselves -- have the audacity to present themselves as qualified to take a stance and advise the public on political – economic issues and politicians that may shape America for generations.

Some newspapers have outlived others. Most have outlived any semblance of responsible journalism.


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"Notes and Quotes" Archive

  • **“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.” – Justice Tom C. Clark (1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949
  • **"If the Constitution no longer matters, then the federal government no longer exists. The same document that restricts the federal government is also the document that created them and gives them their authority. Either it is in effect, or it is not." Gary Henderson
  • **"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in the time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." Dante
  • **“When anyone gets something for nothing, someone else gets nothing for something.” -Anonymous
  • ** "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane" Author unknown
  • ** “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter F. Drucker
  • ** “If getting employer benefits without paying union dues is BAD, why is getting government benefits without paying taxes GOOD?”
  • ** “It's not that ‘the rich’ aren't paying their ‘fair share,’ it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.” - Mark Steyn
  • ** "One of the penalties of not participating in politics is that you will be governed by your inferiors." ~ Plato
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  • **Political correctness is an approved form of censorship.  Based on emotional appeals at the expense of reason, political correctness mandates that inconvenient truths or facts be swept under the carpet.  Or else. Free speech, guaranteed to all Americans under the First Amendment, is on its way to becoming moot.  The political, media, and intellectual elites who control the terms of national debate and the rules of civil society have succeeded in censoring opposing views, limiting debate, and demonizing dissent.  Perception is on its way to becoming our new reality. Nancy Morgan
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  • **"Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove they are insured, but they don't have to prove they are citizens." ~ Ben Stein
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