Let them fail.

The Guardian is downsizing and Gawker is on life support. As if it was not going to happen. Because you have to pay journalists. They are not bloggers.

Bloggers, this writer included, need to write. And bloggers are impatient. We don’t want to deal with editors: we don’t want to think about marketing and demographics: we want to get this out of our heads so we can get on with life. To the stuff that we should be doing.

Which is a reason why most writers have a blog. They can get rid of the raging monsters of the id and allow their trade to work. Because most of us won’t pay good money to be preached at in the guise of entertainment. We want Action. We want romance, We want catharsis. And we want steak.

We don’t want kiddy food. The mashed broccoli can stay on the supermarket shelf.

Stacey McCain is referring to an essay by the late Hunter S Thompson, about writing wrestling press releases for a Cuban guy who promoted himself as a mad Nipponese.

This is exactly right. Action, Color, Speed, Violence — write something the reader enjoys reading. He wants personalities and action, and your job is to find Kazika the Mad Jap, the star of the show. In Gordon County, Georgia, circa 1990, this might have been Timmy Star, power forward for Fairmount High, but in Rome, Georgia, circa 1993, it was a Floyd County commissioner who fought a tooth-and-nail battle over local sales taxes. All that ridiculous Pulitzer-bait eat-your-broccoli five-part-series crap that the ASNE bulletin and the Columbia Journalism Review took so seriously? Readers generally hated that stuff, and I didn’t blame them.

Does anyone remember Bill Kovach? He was Washington bureau chief for the New York Times before the idiots in charge at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hired Kovach to turn their paper into . . .

Well, broccoli. Because broccoli’s Good for Democracy.

Kovach spent two years as editor and damned near ruined the Atlanta papers with his pretentious (but Pulitzer Prize-winning) ideas about publishing broccoli journalism. During his tenure, Kovach not only alienated many readers, he also lost sight of the fact that in Atlanta, the business community expects the local newspaper to act as a publicity agent. Atlanta was famous during the Civil Rights era as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” because civic leaders recognized that racial conflict was bad for business. Cynics observed that, in truth, Atlanta was The City Too Greedy to Care. If Jim Crow was good for business, Atlanta would be segregated, and if Jim Crow proved to be a net liability, Atlanta would integrate peaceably, but either way, what the Chamber of Commerce wanted, the Chamber of Commerce got. Labels like “liberal”and “conservative” didn’t have a damned thing to do with these entirely pragmatic and self-interested calculations. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, the only color that really matters in Atlanta is green.

Well, Mr. Kovach didn’t quite understand this worldview, and he managed to piss off the Chamber of Commerce, and in November 1988, he “resigned,” officially, but everyone knew it was more like he got pushed out the door, and there ensued all kinds of hand-wringing and moaning from the Good for Democracy types.

This drew a sarcastic retort from the newspaper’s most popular columnist, Lewis Grizzard, who wrote that the paper would be better off without Kovach, “with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive series on what’s doing in Africa.” Grizzard’s jab was aimed at Kovach’s nutty idea that because (a) Atlanta had a large black population, therefore (b) the paper should have lots of coverage of news in Africa. This was deemed an enlightened and sophisticated attitude by the Good for Democracy crowd, or you might view it as condescending and vaguely racist.

But brocolli is not for adults.

In the same way the old media chased off its readers with what McCain calls “broccoli journalism”, the new media is chasing off its readers by telling them what they can and cannot say. In both cases, it is because the media wrongly believes it, and not its readers, are in control.

And that is only going to be of benefit to what we might call the next media, or if you prefer, the Alt Right media.

Could not happen to a nicer bunch of guys, anyway. The media has recently specailized in throwing scat, like monkeys, at anyone who opposes them. Let it all fall over.

The correct model now is curation: linkage to the news wires, and commentary. Twitter could have had this business (The Zuckerborg is for grannies and granpas: it is how we see cute pictures of what our genetic inheritance is up to). But they have let the entryists in. The field is wide open, and people like Milo, Breitbart, Drudge and Roosh are exploiting the holes thus made.

The announcement that two anachronistic news conglomerates are significant downsizing should not come as a surprise. Not only is print media struggling in the digital age, the senior staff of many leftist-inclined outlets have continually overestimated the number of people who agree with their political views and are therefore willing to subscribe or buy the products of advertisers. Frauds like rape culture and male privilege simply do not sell to the public at large. Many readers, myself included for a long time, would use these publications to get the gist of news events, always unconsciously screening out the obvious bias in reporting.

This brings me to the “CNN Effect,” the phenomenon where a nominally left-of-center news outlet is bombarded by comments that excoriate the progressive agenda of reporters otherwise pretending to be neutral. Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti is a particularly salient example of this dissonance between journalists and their readers. With comment sections filled with criticisms of Valenti’s toxic diatribes, far too many disillusioned readers were bringing the site zero revenue, refusing to either enter into subscriptions or take advertiser bait. The paper’s overall image suffered more and more, too, with many realizing that other articles by other writers would be biased as well, even if less starkly than Valenti’s pieces.

Once again, the volume of leftwing newspaper readers is loud, but the total number of people behind the noise-making is unimpressive and not enough to save most outlets. This is despite the completely privileged political space within which leftists can and do operate, from journalism itself to many of its subject areas, such as Hollywood. If the senior executives and editors for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and other mastheads were good businessmen, and not ideologues masquerading as truth-tellers, they would have tapped into the needs of disenfranchised, non-SJW potential readers a long time ago.

The times are indeed changing. The old models work no longer. Nor should they.

So do not prop this elite up. Let them fail.