Newspaper paywalls

Murdoch’s Times has ~50,000 online pay subscribers. The Guardian has 37 million readers. Interestingly the Times paywall seems to have decreased the number of print subscribers, something Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger didn’t predict:

Well that’s the strange thing that no-one really foresaw coming. I mean I thought that if you switched off other, all other forms of getting The Times and Sunday Times digitally that the print sales would go up but it turns out that in fact The Times figures are sliding faster than anybody else in the quality market, which suggests to me that we overlook the degree to which the digital forms of our journalism act as a kind of sort of marketing device for the newspapers. And that if you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it’s a kind of double whammy.




Jordan’s Moment

MJ’s triumphant Bulls swansong:

A lot of players and coaches can look at film afterward and point their finger at the exact moment when a game slipped away, but Jordan could tell instantly, even as it was happening. It was, Armstrong thought, as if he were in the game playing and yet sitting there studying it and completely distanced from it.

Edit: Video of the final sequence.




George Carlin on the American Dream

George Carlin skewers the American Dream.

Marco Arment describes this excerpt as “the most intelligent 3 minutes and 14 seconds of political commentary spoken in a generation” and then says he can’t fight the system - it’s too stressful. 

In the other corner, Johann Hari in the Independent argues that protest works - eventually. The inertia is hard to overcome. The fruitless million person anti-Iraq-invasion marches in Australia killed my protesting spirit. Which is what they want, of course.

Carlin is right: they don’t want people to think. Why think when the NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL keep us so well entertained, and for so many hours. Drink up.




Dwaal

There’s nothing happening.

I could write about old timers trying to stay relevant (Ferry vs Plant: Fight!). Or a list of those with fully intact egos. Or stupid drama. How good Zero History was (mostly). How complicated Infinite Jest is (and yet). About addiction.

But there’s nothing happening. It’s a dwaal.