captainsblog | What we have heah is a failyah to regenerate.... (Reply)

Just a typical afternoon around the home office:

Ray: scans documents, putters round Interwebs, sees breaking nooz story::

Emily: ::walks past::

Ray (calling out the just-breaking news): The doctor offed himself. They just found his body.

Emily: ::looks confused and slightly panicked::

Ray (addressing the former, if not the latter): You know. The surgeon, who shot the nurse at the hospital the other day.

::light goes on::

Emily: Ohhhhh.... I thought you meant Doctor Who.

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We'll be having far fewer of these discussions soon, for that same local newspaper has just announced that it's putting up a paywall as of later this month. Assuming the script kiddies don't figure out a hack for it (as they did for the Old Gray Lady in about three minutes), they're demanding 99 cents for daily access (the paper copy is 75 cents except on Sundays) and $2.49 for a weekly online-only all-access pass.

Yet here's the weird part, taken straight from the pitch about it by Snooze editor Margaret Sullivan:

However, subscribers to the Sunday Buffalo News get the same access along with the highly valuable Sunday paper – an excellent deal at only $2.25 per week or $1.99 Auto Renewal.

As I immediately commented on the AV story about it:

So, basically, Sulli, you're offering to pay me two quarters a week to allow a greasy pressroom full of compositors, and a ridiculously unreliable independent-contract driver, to dump your Sunday paper on the edge of my driveway once a week.

I'm sure it's all about the circulation numbers and keeping Tops and the other old-world advertisers happy. If it weren't, I'm sure they'd have some plan in place where we could direct those useless Sunday paper copies to a nursing home. Or better yet, to Sulli's house. Wonder what would happen if she got flash-mobbed with 1000 copies on her doorstep?

The other best suggestion among the comments was to come up with some kind of Craigslist matchmaker board between people like me who only want online access and old farts who "hates 'new-fangled' things like those fancy word processors all the kids are using these days" and set up logins for them that we can use. I'm sure that'll have the banhammer on it by Monday.