Notice how fast the blasted nuclear reactor(s) have vanished from the headlines? This is the New York Times:

Where are the reactors in Libya? Where is the QE? The Duke Nukem updates are stuck at the bottom of the page, down by the ‘Ameritrade’ and diploma mill ads. The Japanese reactors are an inch from catastrophe but time and the news biz marches on with the war spam, right?

The New York Times proposes to charge me $195 a year for the privilege of  reading Michael Lynch insist that Peak Oil is a myth and that I should shut up and stop worrying about it. The Times will graciously allow me 20 articles a month. Currently I consume 20 articles or more per day. I have to grind through that many to find the item or two I can write about. Usually the effort is fruitless but as entertaining as a video game. The Times is taking aim directly @ me.

Apres moi le deluge: When I go I take the house with me!

The subject- object relationship vis. the Times is the hubristic forward lean of Times’ content itself. For $195 a year the Times offers to stuff me with all the ‘valuable information’ I can possibly stand: advertising disguised as kontent about luxury performance sedans, luxury ‘homes’ and lofts, expense- account travel to luxury hotels and spas everywhere in the world, the comings and goings of billionaire betters and trendy celebrities along with the other horrid minutiae of Pop Kulture. The Times aims to uncover hidden fantasies contained within the ‘Secret Me’ that only the Times knows about.

How it proposes to unleash my inner consumer is not stated. Presumably, I am a naif robber baron, brought whole but naked into this world who knows nothing about Piaget watches, Mercedes automobiles or beach rentals in the Hamptons. I need the Times by way of its subsidizers to instruct me about these things: to make me in all ways a better human being!

Where is the Kontent, Baby? Frank Rich is gone. There are good news articles here and there but having to pay $195 a year to ‘access’ corporate shills David Brooks or Tom Friedman is unfair. I can’t think of the last time the Times dug out a big story. It’s been behind the eight ball — or Ben Bernanke — on every event since before the credit crisis. Like Bernanke, it never saw the mortgage loan bubble forming and it was a cheerleader for the house price run up.  It was the publisher, not the source of the Wikileaks cables. It has had little to say about corporate thievery and the incestuous relationship between the lairds of finance and the political establishment outside of the occasional article by Gretchen Morgenson. It’s content is relentlessly pro- big business, pro- monopolist, pro- establishment and generally devoid of any critical thinking; it is the Business Monarchy’s mouthpiece.

We readers are to pay for the privilege of sucking on the fouled teat of Corporate America.

The Wall Street Journal is $100 per year for the first year to $200 the following years. It’s a tout-sheet. You can pick your winners, something ‘not done’ @ the Times.

Occasionally, Financial Times is offered @ $144 per year. I’m occasionally tempted due to Martin Wolf, Gillian Tett, Wolfgang Munchau and others. It is also outside the politically radioactive cauldron that surrounds Wall Street, with its cannibalizing business ‘plan’ that works about as well as the Fuckyoushima Reactor Inc’s Keystone Kops Nuclear Repair Department.

Currently, the Washington Post’s kontent is subsidized by the predatory Kaplan Institute. Keep in mind that all the major media is part of one business monopoly or another and under rising cost pressures … just like all the other businesses! Modern media is the Spawn of Sprawl and subject to all of sprawl’s massive energy waste related costs. Like strip malls and SUV’s the modern media is another dead man walking.

Goodbye, New York Times, you cheap, ugly whore! It was fun while it lasted.

The stupidity at play is that the establishment insists propaganda has value. Maybe it does in the sense that propaganda is a cultural security blanket for those totally immersed in denial. This suggests: that the Times’ content is a Giffen Good where demand for inferior quality rises along with the price.

I doubt it: the cost of information is rising due to increasing costs. This is no different from the cost of imported bananas rising due to the cost of bunker fuel for banana boats.

For years, newspaper companies have been offering Web access free in hope that the online advertising market will cover their costs. But while online advertising has grown, it has not increased quickly enough to make up for the decline in traditional print advertising. Many publications have been looking at ways to make online consumers pay as they do for print.

“This is practically a do-or-die year,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst who studies the economics of the newspaper business. “The financial pressures on newspapers is steady or increasing. They’re in an industry that is still receding. Newspapers are trying to pay down their debt, but they have fewer resources to do it.”

The outcome of the rising costs of NY Times information is going to be identical to the effect of more expensive bananas: the use rate of info will decline. This blog does not earn enough to allow it to support $195 a year or $1.95. I don’t eat bananas anymore. Any business dependent on banana eating or New York Times propaganda will eventually fail. The marginal return on Times propaganda diminishes the same way the return declines on the Federal Reserve’s monetary easing or the ceaseless increase in debt.

This chart is from Real Glitch Dot Com not the NY Times: the increase in public debt has reached the point of diminishing returns. So has the cost of New York Times kontent.

The $195 does not produce an enhanced propaganda experience. It’s still a video game. There is diminishing difference between the Times and a movie. I haven’t been to a movie in three years. The net content of the Times — subtracting the decent articles from the swill — has zero value, it is worth nothing. The spam remains or expands. The ongoing version is filled with page- blocker ads for a ‘free subscription’ that make the Times almost unreadable. The Times is little more than an upscale ‘shopper’ or coupon pusher salted with the occasional valuable article which, like Waldo, becomes harder and harder to find.

Perhaps the Times should follow the Groupon scam and find ‘investors’ that can raise enough ‘capital’ by way of an IPO scheme.

The dilemma faced by the Times is no different from that of States, Ireland, the auto industry and modernity as a whole.

The modernist’ fantasy of constant growth and profit growth led the establishment to collect earnings from the future by borrowing against the present. The newspaper industry was expected to produce double- digit returns in a single digit business environment. The industry responded to the management demand for returns by cutting editions, staff, bureaus, and numbers of pages. Online services such as Craigslist eliminated classified ad revenues, a large source of income for newspapers. Television, the Internet, cellphone and handheld devices provided platforms for information once restricted to print publishers. The newspapers, with their large fixed investment structures had core costs that made profits vulnerable with the passage of time (from Voltaire Net).

Big newspapers killed by greed and the lure of money

The collapse of the newspaper industry was predicated by its loss of biodiversity. The monopoly model grew to dominate the industry by the middle of the 20th century. In almost every American city, the dominant paper, buoyed by a growing economy of scale, drove its competition out of business. By the end of the century, approximately 98 percent of American cities were one-newspaper towns.

The monopolies threatened democracy, with the dailies often acting as regional news gatekeepers whose spin dominated local politics. Their power put them above reproach; few politicians ever took on the local daily and lived, at least career-wise, to tell about it. And they jacked up advertising prices, sometimes to the point of threatening the very existence of struggling businesses.

With their regional monopolies, newspapers regularly generated double-digit returns for their Wall Street investors, becoming one of the nation’s most profitable industries. The romance of the cub reporter out chasing hot leads, ferreting out corruption, scooping the competition, and saving democracy, however, was dead. Newspapers, as profit generators, more and more were taken over by conglomerates in business not to inform, educate, and agitate, but simply to make money, like any other whore on the street.

The monopoly model gave newspapers a good run financially, but it was short-lived because publishers grew fat and arrogant as they sat on their thumbs, viewing their growing profits more as an entitlement than as something they would have to work to earn. Without competition, they cut staff, even in good financial times, greedily bleeding their papers for ever-increasing profit margins. Generic wire service stories replaced hard-hitting local reporting, and papers lost their significance as sources of local news.

The profit-whore model meant that newspapers avoided biting the hands that fed them. This meant avoiding stories that pissed off advertisers, friends of advertisers, and the folks that advertisers sucked up to. It also meant avoiding any controversy that could in any way upset any party that might one day think of advertising. Between these two censored categories lie most of the stories that make newspapers both necessary and vibrant.

The model killed the story … and the readers

In its more extreme form, the profit-whore model meant not only trying not to offend but actually sucking up to advertisers. Hence, newspapers replaced hard news with soft, advertising-driven fluff stories and entire advertiser-driven sections of the paper.

Think about it. When was the last time you read a story in the auto section critical of a car, or a story in the real estate section critical of irresponsible development patterns?

On the macro level, the “suck up to power and don’t ask questions” mandate to which newspapers adhered left us, for example, with nearly every major newspaper in the United States shamelessly parroting subsequently discredited Bush administration propaganda in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, many media critics now argue that the pro-war bias of American newspapers was a key factor in allowing the Bush administration to lead the nation into war. Alternative news sources, residing mostly in cyberspace, countered this false information with what has proven to be prescient analysis and more accurate information—but they couldn’t counter the misinformation disseminated by newspapers.

In the heyday of newspaper publishing in the early 20th century, a big city like New York had over a dozen general circulation newspapers, but the industry itself had no real competition until radio became widespread. Most people today gain information by way of the Internet. As long as the Internet continues to function the drift away from print newspapers will continue.

Which means shrinking revenues for the newspaper establishment, a drifting away of talent and a decline into senescence. The best will find a place online. The rest will also find a place online. In fact, everyone will be online. We are all reporters, now!

NY Times attempted a paywall a couple of years ago called ‘Times Select’. It cost $50 per year and I was a subscriber. The original version failed because few  bothered to subscribe @ the measly fifty bucks. Times Select 2.0 will meet an identical fate.The paper as it is currently organized as a super- leveraged monopoly will also fail. It’s a dinosaur.

Meanwhile, I will migrate to BBC, national news outlets in other countries or to the source of much of the NY Times’ kontent, Reuters.