Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 29: Print Media

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Who comes up with a headline like that? Old people in an underfunded and unappreciated department at 3am, that's who. Today we talk about the rise and decline of print media and how it's affected reporting. (Spoiler: badly) slides: https://youtu.be/qW48CIGuvZE DONATE TO BAIL FUNDS AND ETC AND PROVIDE THE RECEIPT TO US VIA TWITTER OR E-MAIL AND WE WILL SEND YOU THE BONUS EPISODES: https://www.phillybailfund.org/ https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 how the linotype machine actually works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzilaRwoMus our patreon since we're still wokegrifters: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

I had an idea for the cold open here once we're going though. I had an idea for the cold open too although let's go with yours. I was just going to talk about how I liked yours. Oh, no, mine was as you know, I used to work for a newspaper which was at Drexel University right and you know, I was a good, I was the editor in chief for a while, which was fun. We had an exciting time. Our business manager killed a guy and you got to slam your desk and demand pictures of Spider-Man.

Can we, can we, can we say his, no, we don't need to say his name, but yeah, he killed a guy. Yeah, he killed a guy. Yeah. He killed a guy. Yeah. Like on purpose. This is merely speculation, but that guy probably deserved it.

No, that's what I was thinking too is he probably did deserve it. I was like, yeah, this guy was like the one of the nicest guys I ever met. I had no idea he had a concealed carry permit. He's the only one, he's the only one who didn't go around telling everyone because as you know, it's actually legal requirement when you get a concealed carry permit to walk up to every, every person you see and say, Hey, just so you know, I have a concealed carry permit. Have you seen those like fake cot badges they have for like concealed carry holders?

No, I haven't because we're not allowed to get them. I feel like the purpose of a concealed carry is to not tell anyone you have it. Yeah. But I think like the moral of the story is like, don't, don't go fighting people because you don't know who's packing heat, although you probably do because everyone who has a concealed carry permit announces it to everyone. Don't fight a guy with a concealed carry permit, like a t-shirt and like hats, don't do that shit.

I feel like I remember a friend of mine saying, like talking about the shooting and being like, yeah, it was like right outside Sama's in West Philly. And I was like, yeah, but like, again, like it's normally fine. How often is the business manager of the triangle got a, got a Merkha dude? Well, at least once. Yeah, it happened once. And like, you know, I assume, I assume that guy, I mean, if you're good at it, you can like kill multiple people, you know, Richard Kuklinski, another American Polish American

excellence. Robert Policidal. Exactly. Famous Polish American. You are the Richard Kuklinski of podcasts. You just get hundreds of them out of the way, just done and like everybody's incredibly impressed with you. Yes.

Anyway, my cold open idea was that I was going to do the goddamn news theme song and then I was going to be like live from Philadelphia, WTYP Action News. I like that too. You literally do not have to. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll just go fuck myself. Yeah, I guess.

Well, we had several competing cold open ideas. We just do them simultaneously, just layer them over each other. Well, we've been recording the whole time, so we have both of them. Yeah, that's perfect. We can just we just do them both. We'll do a split screen. We'll do like a picture and picture and it's just completely incomprehensible because you get two sets of audio at the same time.

Yes, I always feel bad for Raj just because like one of these days, I'm just going to go absolutely fuck wild with my audio more so than I ever have. I don't know, I'll just talk backwards or something. I'll start backbasking. Shit's going to get real unpleasant. Yeah, the first podcast to be recorded one third in tongues. Yeah, it's about to say speaking in tongues, handling dangerous snakes. Praising the Lord God, God, dear Protestants, must be stopped.

This is a this is a Bible based podcast. But anyway, that is true. Welcome to Well, there's your problem, a podcast about engineering disasters. Hi, I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking. My. Wow, this is an AA meeting now. Great.

No, no, no. Move it on. Not doing that shit again. We're going to have to surrender ourselves to a higher podcasting power. Yes. My pronouns are he and him. OK. Alice called well, Kelly. My pronouns are she and what? I don't get a high Alice.

Nothing Alice. What's up, everybody? Hey, what's up, YouTube? What's up, gamers? What's up, gamers? I'm recovering from alcoholism. Don't listen to Trash Future. It's a very good podcast.

I have decided I've now on Trash Future. Yeah, sure. Just in all spaces. My name is Liam Anderson. I am at Old Man Anderson on Twitter by pronouns are he him? And before we really get underway, I do want to actually talk about what we've been doing for the past week and a half or so. About the bonus episodes.

Yes. So if you aren't aware when you listen to this, I think through the month of June, but we may need to talk about that. If you donate to one of the bail funds or a mutual aid fund or something in that neighborhood and DMS receipts, you get the bonus episodes. And I wanted to say as of this recording, which is June 8th, 2020, you all have raised at least five thousand dollars. That's incredible.

Going through the receipts. Yes, it's probably more than that. That was an absolute quick count. And for your money, which there is no lower ceiling on, like you can like give a dollar, you get every bonus episode from here to eternity, basically, because we'll just put the playlist out. Yes. So you get all the bonus episodes. Yeah, that's what I'm a do.

Like literally, like that's an astoundingly good deal. But the fact that the fact is that people weren't giving like a dollar or five dollars. I got a I got a thing for like, oh, hey, I just sent seven hundred and fifty dollars. To this bail fund to for one thousand. And I want to give a special shout out to the guy who donated six hundred sixty six dollars and sixty six. Hell, yeah, I got that email when I was shitfaced drunk. And I wanted to tell you personally, how much I liked that.

Yeah, no, it's been it's been very wholesome. It's been a very nice time getting all of these messages and thinking that, huh, maybe we can actually do some good with with our podcast when we're not doing a well, there's your problem to Fash pipeline. Yes. Yeah. And if any of you come become fascist, I personally will beat your ass. That's how you know the Patriot. That's the free tier.

I will personally come and beat your ass. All right. So what you see, motherfuckers, what do you see on the screen here is a page from the Philadelphia Inquirer, page eight, twelve, Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020. What you might notice here is a very bad headline. I see that. I do notice that. And a guy wearing a Nick's hat in my fucking city.

Oh, fuck, that's not good. I like the dancer of Jackson. Yeah, I just realized the real disaster here actually is the column flow because it goes down and I'm sure it goes down below that. And it's start. It starts up again up here. Horribly laid out page of the goddamn news. Is about to say Hebrew was bad. So. All right.

So we're not doing the goddamn news today because the subject of today's episode is news. And and this was recently one of the few times we do like a a a contemporary an episode about contemporary subjects, as opposed to something that happened 70 years ago. Right. We're going to talk about how shitty headlines like this make it into the newspaper. Well, how the hell did this happen? So somebody who is like whose dad is important, gets a job and they type some things into a computer and then they send it across to a print

works and a print guy prints the thing onto some paper a bunch of times. And then a bunch of podcasters get very upset. And then this happens slowly shits the road now. Yes. All right. That's the episode next episode. It's on the Tacoma Narrow Spray Disaster. So so this was published last Tuesday. Well, when this comes out, it'll be two Tuesdays ago.

And in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this is from Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic Inga Saffron, who is good, usually. Well, like people don't write the headlines above their comments. Yes. Yes. People people don't write their own headlines. And the actual article, I think it was published a little soon. I think the concept of the article makes sense. You know, buildings can be rebuilt.

Lives can't. But will the buildings actually be rebuilt? And there's some examples from, you know, civil rights era riots and protests where those neighborhoods never really recovered. That's up on like Ridge Avenue and Columbia Avenue. Columbia Avenue is now Cecil B. Moore Avenue. You know, of course, you know, we say like, you know, these these shops are all insured. So the losses basically mean nothing.

I mean, that doesn't necessarily count for smaller businesses. You know, and of course, we've got to start talking about reconstructing some of these areas at some point. You know, bail funds are the start at some point. Some of these neighborhoods are going to need help getting back on their feet. So, you know, as as things continue, you know, we'll discuss, you know, maybe instead of donating to bail funds, you might want to donate to reconstruction funds. We will we will be keeping a close eye on this and we will be harassing

both you and like various num tots online to like throw money into things. I don't think I want to say is actually a shabless plug for Roz, which is your Black Wall Street episode talking about sort of rampant destruction in neighborhoods that never really get a chance to rebuild. Whether you know what is essentially race war, you know, or other means or talk about, you know, as we talked about sort of the destruction of cities in places like New England that were tired entirely along racial lines and absolutely reflective of poor people.

Those cities are still scrambling pretty hard. Oh, yeah. And, you know, there's some there's some commentators out there, especially on Twitter, you know, who might say, you know, the protesters, rioters, looters, whatever you want to call them, you know, they liberated the proletariat from capitalist oppression by looting Ahmed's corner grocery, Hoagie and cold beer store. But, you know, I think, you know, there's folks on that block who probably disagree

because they like having the convenience of having, you know, being able to go down in the corner store and pick up some cold beer, you know, even if Ahmed is like, I don't know, a small business tyrant or whatever. Yeah, a Hoagie Kulak. Yeah, yeah, but like burning down a target is different from like burning down somebody like, yeah, but like, I think that's also a distinction that we saw a lot of people who were rioting make. Oh, yeah.

Like this is these are the businesses that we want. These are the ones that we don't want because like people, people, people can tell people live there. People know what's like what's going to recover, what isn't and what can afford to lose, I don't know, like an Xbox out of the fucking back, as opposed to like a bunch of Hoagies and Hoagie making equipment. What is a Hoagie? A Hoagie is just like this summer.

Yeah, yeah. I will say a hero, a grinder. Also, while we're at it, while those hoagies are bad now and I'm not telling you what to do, but you should probably liberate some delinquent places. This is the thing that finally gets the like FBI to kick your door in. It's inciting violence against war. The fucking sandwiches are bad now.

That's that's that's absolutely true. I didn't like that at all. Yeah, we've actually managed to cancel a drop in real time. So, you know, and I mean, with with businesses destroyed, you know, especially in the pandemic, a lot of these places may not be able to easily recover. And that's where, you know, there's an opportunity for capital to consolidate, you know, the Hoagie store becomes 13 stories of ugly condos with a chipotle on

the ground floor, you know, or a bank branch, maybe it's a bank branch. Maybe it's a bank branch. Yeah, exactly. Do you want to know that's another target that burns down? Never reopens, but like the target down the road just sort of increases in loss prevention, intensity, and everybody now lives in a food desert and they have to like travel that much further to get surveyed while they're buying groceries. Exactly. Or like, you know, a bank, the bank branch opens and then suddenly all the mysterious

ATM explosions happen that was that was the single best part. Because like that at the first couple of days of rioting, I was just like smiling nonstop, but particularly the moment where it really struck me was the bit where like some guy, some like security consultant, some polo neck dipshit was like quote, tweeting a thing about people trying to get into the ATMs at a bank and was like, man, unless they're bringing dynamite, they're not going to get anything. And then the next tweet was multiple explosions heard from some kind of a bomb thing.

I don't understand about the Philly explosions, because of course we could hear them here is that, you know, they said it was dynamite from people trying to break into ATMs, but like dynamite is not that regular, right? You know, that was there was a lot of it. There was a lot of it, yeah. And other people said it was L rads. And it's like, no, that's not the sound those make. It's not the sound of that.

Yeah, it's it's it's definitely like none of I think it was mostly fireworks. You know, it's like, you know, the normal like the neighborhood getting paranoid about fireworks, because I assume there's not a lot of police out, you know, to go catch you for setting off fireworks. Right now, you can just do it. It's fine. It doesn't matter. Fireworks Liberation Front. Yes.

I had fireworks. People are like fireworks crazy in the city. I had fireworks shot at me when I was biking down 56. I've had fireworks shot of it. Yeah, but that happens here too, except they shoot them at like the windows of houses. So like, you'll just be minding your own business and boom. And then like all the windows rattle. Cool. Yeah.

I I I got the statue of limitations. It's like I used to go out to a field in York and just light off fireworks, because I knew the guy who owned the farm and he didn't give a fuck what I did. So that was that was a great way for me to release my teenage aggression was just like every, you know, five minutes, just get another one of the fireworks like I had bought or eventually this guy started buying and this was back. This was back when Pennsylvania wouldn't let you buy the good stuff. You are a resident.

So I never asked the questions. But yeah, no, we should we should allow people in cities to have a field where they can just set off fucking fireworks and shit. Yeah, I agree completely. That's how we repurpose the golf courses. Anyway, so. Yeah, this article, you know, I don't think it's bad. I think it was poorly timed, certainly.

But the headline made it very bad. Yeah, again, Inga Saffron is good, especially at that time. She called out Stu, Stu Bikowski at his retirement party for associating with American expats in Thailand who moved there for cheap sex and then printed it in the newspaper. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the time, Inga rules pretty hard.

Yeah. Inga is good. She also pisses off of the urbanist slot, which is fun. So yeah, usually very good. I think this article was poorly timed at the headline is a major problem. Right. So how does a headline like this happen? Right. And obviously, like, you know, one of the answers is systemic racism, right? Well, that's that's that's easy to say.

But, you know, we had to kind of go into that. We got to pick it apart a little bit more. Like, you know, headlines are not chosen by the reporter. Usually they're chosen by people who do layout, especially print layout, right? And that's determined by space constraints. That's determined by style requirements, right? Yeah. And look at what a beautiful layout this they have produced. This like extremely fucked column layout.

The headshot like dividing the column in half on the way down. The caption on the right with a bunch of white space under it. The justification here where it says chestnut, right? And that that's walnut and chestnut right here. This this is an abomination because there's just this whole empty space right here. You could have shoved this up or down. I can't imagine this is like the best they could have done here. But also it's page eight twelve, like no one cared.

So, you know, but for like a long answer is to how do this happen? Right. I think we ought to go into like the history of newspapers and sort of the rise and decline of the print newspaper and the enormous undertaking that it is to produce a print newspaper with a circulation of millions of copies every day. And how much jobs like this happen? Yeah, how the newspaper went from something that started wars and ended wars, but mostly started wars to a collection of the twenty worst accounts you are aware of on Twitter, all having horrible takes at once.

Yes, a few Tom Cotton. So in this episode, we're going to talk mostly about the back end of newspapers, right, as opposed to like, you know, the front end where the journalism happens. Yeah, that or like, yes, yes, sports is the back end, because it's like basically, you know, you turn the newspaper over and then you see the sports there as opposed to it's like a second front page, honestly. That's how we organized it when I worked for the student newspaper.

You know, it's basically a second front page where you can read about the important stuff, sports. So, all right. I mean, the back end of the newspaper does, of course, influence the front end, like how the paper is printed. Sometimes influences the reporting. So I think we should start by going way back as far back as we can to antiquity. Right. Yes, ancient Egyptian newspapers.

Yes. So it's tablets, complaining or room of complaints. Yeah, the first general contractor very quickly followed by an expose by the first journalist. Yes. Well, one of the first like newspapers, what you might call it, was called the ecta diaruna, right? And that's in ancient Rome acts. Yes. And this is like a series of engraved stone or metal tablets that would be posted

in public places in ancient Rome, right? And that he was like the government's official account of the news of the day or the week or whatever, you know, because it took a long time to make these things. Right. Just a guy just hammering out conquest of Cisalpine Gaul, still going great for the fiftieth time in a row. Yes. So in ancient China, they also did.

Ancient China had like something like the printing press well before Europeans did, which is one of the one of the weird narratives of the Gutenberg printing presses. You know, this is like the first printing press is like, now the Chinese figured this out a long time ago, right? You know, they had like similar government newspapers. I'm doing air quotes here. Newspapers. Those were like printed on silk.

Again, they're very limited circulation because these things are fancy. Yes, very fancy. And, you know, so these are these were like limited circulation. This is like it between, you know, zero A.D. And like the 700s, 800s A.D. When these sorts of things are circulating, not much circulation, not a lot of people could read. You know, we don't have like

mass literacy and certainly no mass literature, right? And it's hampered by the difficulty producing lots of newspapers, lots of printing, lots of paper, even. And it's all controlled by the government. Of course, God damn government hate those guys. Those pieces of shit. Yeah, the fucking government. Anyway, so now Gutenberg in I forget the date.

In vents, who care? Who cares? He's a yeah. In olden time, you know, events. He invents the printing press, right? Oh, my God, I got to log out of steam. I keep forgetting to do this. Right. OK, here with a newsman drop.

You're a fucking newsman, John. Can I ever tell you otherwise you punch me in the face? I love that. I just remembered that the show, the newsroom existed right before we started recording. I was like, I have to get the bit where he just like screams incoherently over a Coldplay song about being a goddamn newsman. That's the only Aaron Sorkin show I've actually watched the whole way through.

Really? Yeah. West West Wing is I guess it's a better show. It's the West Wing is a better show and is, I think, essential to understanding why liberals got this way. I've never watched any of the West Wing. And I had a single second.

Maybe I should do that. Well, it's pretty good. Studio 60 is pretty good. But that only lasted a season. For reasons related to being very good. Yeah. Well, NBC kills and eats everything good. Good things are not allowed.

All right. So Gutenberg invents this thing called the printing press, right? And the innovation here is a, you know, you just you just press down on the paper and it creates print. Hence the printing press, right? Yeah, you have a bunch of little blocks with a raised letter on them. You literally that's where we invent like all of the stuff that you think about in terms of typing, like upper and lower case, it's because you keep the

capitals in a case above the thing. Yes. The you have movable type. So you just insert the letters to make the words. You press it on the paper. Boom, you're done, right? As opposed to having to copy everything by hand and making some bullshit. I don't know. Illuminated manuscript.

Just engraving again. Yeah. Yeah. So chumps, you don't want to do it. Yeah. So each each individual letter that's called a sort, right? And they're stored, as Alice mentioned, in cases, the upper case is where you have the big letters, the lower case is where you have the little letters. I actually put that in. I'm sorry. I jumped ahead of you there.

That's why there's a picture of the case here. Oh, we'd probably help if I read the notes as we were doing this. I sent them to you early. Oh, my God. Instead of reading them instead of instead of reading the notes, what I did was I got this. You're a fucking newsman, Don. I ever tell you otherwise you push me in the face.

All right. So the printing press lets you print a lot of, you know, words real quickly. If you are a skilled operator, you get thirty six hundred pages a day out of this thing. Right. Yeah. A lot of Bibles. Oh, yeah. Lots of Bibles. Well, I mean, that's like a couple Bibles a day, which is a lot more than most people could do back in the day.

You know, I can I cannot even produce one Bible a day handwriting. I could probably barely get through Genesis. Yeah, we need to like we need a standardized measurement of like horsepower of how many monks per like how many months per hour. Yeah. It's like, oh, this is a killer monk like. Well, it's not good. Yeah. So.

As such, once we're able to produce a lot more of the written word very quickly, people start getting the idea. Maybe we can print the news. Right. Damn news. God damn news. Yes. So rather than, you know, since so you start seeing in Venice, right? This is in the fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred or so, something called the Gazette being produced, right?

So Gazette is like a government newspaper, again, produced by the God damn government. Right. What's the fucking nose is that? Yeah, exactly. Right. So the God damn government produced official newspaper called it was not initially called a Gazette, but it cost one Gazette, which is a small Venetian coin, right? Oh, so it's like a dime novel.

Yes. Like, OK. Yes. So then, you know, the first. OK, I wrote down the date. The first one's published in 1556, right? And yeah, government bullshit. There's some non-government newspapers that start to begin appearing in Europe in the sixteen hundreds. And these have like weird irregular schedules, right?

You know, sometimes they would say they were weekly, but then they would publish extra editions or they would not publish at all. Or, you know, something like that, you know, sort of like a podcast. Yeah, you just get at some point you invent the idea of yelling extra, extra. And then from there, the news happens. Yes. Yes. I'm just looking. I'm just looking at the like sample you have here.

That's also a shitty headline. Oh, in Congress, July 4th, 1776. A declaration by the Rep. Perpetitives of the United States of America, a general congress ephemeral. Yeah. Dogshit headline doesn't tell me anything about what's going on, other than there's a Congress happening. I do.

Congress. Yeah. But it has this nice drop cap, right? I'm a big fan of drop caps. I like drop caps a lot. So the price is only two coppers. Publifed every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, Saturday evenings. But by reading this, I can actually give myself a lisp. Now, that was the thing.

Back when we had the long S is like no one could figure out if you had a lisp or not. It was much more inclusive society back then. Anyway. Yeah, it's like, do you have a lisp or do you not know how to read properly? I don't know. Sometimes you do. Yeah, absolutely. This is still a labor intensive process, even with the printing press, right?

Circulation was still restricted for most newspapers and, you know, newsletters, what's so at whatever you call them, right? Again, thirty six hundred pages a day per printing press per guy. They're also usually like one sheet. Like you get a maybe a one sided sheet of paper. Like it'll maybe go on to the other side, but like you don't have like bound or like folded newspapers for a while. Oh, yeah.

And then. But some people still like say, let's try and make a daily newspaper. We can probably do this. This is the modern era. It's like sixteen fifty. We can do whatever we want, right? So there's there was they were a couple daily newspapers produced in the sixteen hundreds.

One of the first serious attempt was in Leipzig. It was called a common day. Zetong, right? Cyton. I mean, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm common. I don't actually know what I in common means, which is I think it's like oncoming news. I think it's oncoming news is what.

Yeah, I think that's what it translates to just getting done with the Leipzig paper. Yeah, I think it's oncoming news. Someone throws like the news boy throws the newspaper like wrapped around a brick through your window. It literally means that. So, yeah, we can only assume that this was delivered by mortar into your house through the roof. That's effective. Yeah, absolutely.

So that was the first serious attempt at a daily newspaper that was in sixteen fifty. Now, seventeen eighty three was when this Pennsylvania Evening Post became like the first daily newspaper in America. You see, this is seventeen seventy six, July six, seventeen seventy six, you know, a little bit after Independence Day, which was just a regular day back then. Publishing the Declaration of Independence. But in 1783, this became a daily newspaper.

And then within a year, they ceased publication because they couldn't keep up. The tale is old as time and like same as it ever was. He said there was a guy who was like had been working in the newspaper for like a year and was like, ah, the death of print media. Yes, we're just going to get done now. You're a god damn noof, man, a noof man, a god damn noof man. I think I think we have to title this video the god damn noofs. We love you, Newfoundland.

Yeah, we do. So all right, so yeah. Yeah, the problem here is that either the time is not right. The technology wasn't there. The manual wooden Gutenberg press just didn't have the capacity to publish a daily newspaper, right? So yeah, you could do pamphlets like it's not like dudes in the eighteenth century would absolutely do like a small run of self published pamphlets that are just like, oh, my sixth letter against the like charges laid against me

by Captain B, who I will not name, but has accused me of being like a common whore monger and stuff. And that was posting for the longest time. That was posting. That was the first golden age of posting before Twitter. Yeah, like Thomas Payne, big accounts, but like and the most famous one and did a lot of pamphlets. But like, no, just anybody could do it and you could just be like, yeah,

my neighbor, my fucking neighbor is a huge piece of shit. I'm going to print this up in like maybe a run of 50 pamphlets and just hand these out. Yeah, Thomas Payne is only famous. Thomas Payne was a good poster because he had good opinions. You know, that's true. This is like the main the main reason he's remembered as a fantastic poster. There were so many posters out there, which is terrible opinions. Yeah, the Federalist Papers, the first Twitter thread.

Yeah, exactly. You already used that joke in Franklin, huh? Yes, I did. Yeah, it's the problem because when I listen to when I watch your other content, I'm just like, oh, that's a good joke. I should use it on my podcast with this guy who doesn't have any relation to this content that I'm listening to right now. What original joke do not steal?

Yeah, do not steal. Yes, like I had another joke about the Federalist Papers, but now I'm not like I have the false memory thing where I'm just like, oh, did you make this one too? And I'm just stealing it and being a piece of shit again. I'm just like opening the Federalist Papers and it like opens with. All right, listen up, y'all. And then brackets one. Oh, my God.

I didn't make that joke explicitly. It sounds about right, though. I mean, fuck. So someone can go back and check and they can yell at me in the comments to see how much I'm stealing from you. So Alexander Hamilton was a bad person. Anyway, Thomas Payne was like the only good founding father. And it's dubious.

John Adams wasn't that bad. All right, John Adams wasn't that bad. It was mostly Abigail's fault. Like she was definitely the better half of that of that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I kind of like Franklin Franklin was cool. Franklin was pretty cool. I mean, he did on Slayers, which is bad, but he also like

stopped owning Slayers, which is good. Yeah, I got a lot of gilfs. Yes, I got to give some room for character development here. So he invented he invented a kind of organ. He invented the lightning rod and he invented the gilf and for this. Yeah, for this, we must be eternally grateful. And unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania was totally wiped out. All the good things about him.

Yes. There's a there's a bench at the University of Pennsylvania. You can go sit on and it has like a statue of like Ben Franklin just sitting there with like his arm out so you can pretend your buds with Ben Franklin. That sounds cool. I'd like to pretend I'd like to get a parasocial relationship with Ben Franklin. Wow, get in line. You and every other pen kid.

All right. So in the early 1800s, they come up with some incredible new technology called the steam press. All right, I got a YouTube video here. Let's see how this works. You have the rotary steam press would let you print huge quantities of newspaper quickly. The deadly looking machine like this. This thing looks like it killed five orphans a day.

It probably did. Like just a belt going around just totally unprotected for that whole long length. It's like is making my teeth itch. Well. So, yes, it killed the camera guy right there. Shit. OK, so the way the way she chuches is we have we have no relation to AVE. Come on, I can't let me let me draw on this.

I can't do it. OK. So we have another casualty. It claims another victim. We have we have this we have this. So we have like pre cut sheets of paper up on top. The drum brings them down. You saw the what we have on the bottom here is a conventional like press sort of thing, right?

You know, it's just type set up backwards, movable type as usual, and that moves forward and backwards as the paper comes down. As the paper comes down and moves forward, it impresses the. Type onto the paper. Then as it comes back, it's reinked for the next sheet, right? And this is all driven by steam, right? So you see these big belts right here. It's being driven by an electric motor, right?

But in reality, it would be driven by something called a line shaft, right? And that also sounds like it mangles some children. Oh, yeah. So your your line shaft. Oh, crap. OK, there we go. Your line shaft system is where you have you don't have electricity yet. So what you do is you have a big stationary steam edge in like this one in the in the corner of the shop, right?

And I'm sure this is like a huge contraption that makes five and a half horsepower. And, you know, well, like seven, if you put the little GCI sticker on there. Yeah, exactly. You got to do you just got to change the governor right here, right? And then that has a belt. The belt goes up to a series of line shafts. That's this thing up here, right?

And then and then you have belts that go down from the line shaft to the machinery. Oh, fuck me. That's like it's a drivetrain with no gearbox. Yeah. It's just a long spinning metal rod with a bunch of belts connected to it under tension. Yes. Oh, OK. So if one of those belts snaps and goes whipping across the the shop floor at head level,

you kind of get parody redacted in Minecraft, right? Well, I think most of these belts had a little bit of slack in them. You can see because they're like twisting and stuff here. I think you could get away with a little bit of slack. I mean, there are a million other ways it could kill you, though. Like you just put your hand in the wrong place. Like suddenly, you know, I don't know. You get you get taken up into the machinery and then like around like 75 times,

you know, you get turned into pasta sauce. So yeah, exactly. Right. So. But yeah, the line shaft system was how we drove machinery before we had electric motors, right? And this steam press, of course, it allows for, you know, basically daily newspapers to exist because you could produce a huge amount of newspapers very quickly, right? So there's stuff like The Guardian, 1821,

the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is the subject of today's episode. That was 1829. You get the Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin, 1841. New York Daily Tribune, that's 1841 as well. The Economist. The New York Daily Tribute. Tribute, yeah. The Economist, that was 1843.

Chicago Tribune, 1847. New York Times, 1851, of course, founded because a lot of rich people were really mad that The Daily Tribune was publishing so many editorials from Karl Marx. I mean, again, same as it ever was. Like, yeah. Oh, man. But there's still at least The Guardian. Like The Guardian was still was still cool at this point.

And like one thing I noticed that all of these have in common is that The Guardians in Manchester, The Times in London, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago. You need that industrial base. Nobody's like publishing a newspaper in Duluth. It's so closely tied to like. Duluth, well known for not being industrial. I'm talking about in 18 fucking like 21. They haven't put in the ore boats yet.

Yeah, they didn't get there till 1869. No one can no one can like conceive of like an Edmund Fitzgerald, you know. Hmm. But yeah, so but this was not, you know, this was a big development that allowed for, you know, wide circulation of daily newspapers. But you still required like that time consuming manual type setting, right? You know, you could you could now print you could print every day, but you were still spending a lot of that day with a whole bunch of guys in like a room with

a bunch of cases of type, you know, trying to find an extra E because they ran out. Can we can we call it? Can we go down to the forge? Can we get another couple E's? We ran out. There's some shit on its side. I'll never notice. Yeah, I love to read the Philadelphia inquire.

So the next innovation, which made publishing the news easier, was called the linotype machine. I know the word linotype from like fonts and stuff. Oh, yeah, I mean, that's like I think the company is still around, but they just make money on fonts. They can't make money on their machines anymore, which is a shame, because I believe this is probably the pinnacle of mechanical engineering. I don't think anyone's built a more complex and convoluted machine than this,

which was practical ever. I don't think it'll ever be done again either. Yeah, it looks like a fucking like typewriter piano. It's incredible. All right. So there's what I'm going to do is I'm going to link in the description a video. It's 30 to 40 minutes long, if I recall. That actually go and watch all of it.

Actually properly explains how this machine works, because I can never do it justice. But in 1866, we developed something called hot metal typography, right? And the first machine that makes this possible is the linotype machine. Linotype is, you know, short for line of type, because that's what we make fun of, like, start up naming conventions today. Really, really, really effective a previous. Yeah, so because that's what it does. Oh, shit, I did the wrong thing.

All right, so how does it work? OK, so down here we have a keyboard, right? And when you type a letter in the keyboard, no shift key on here. You have like uppercase and lowercase or separate. When you type on a keyboard, you release up here what's called a matrix, right? That's these various things stacked up up here. Now, a matrix is the reverse of a sort, right? Sort being, you know, the individual piece of movable type, right?

So your matrix is this right here. You can see it's like an A. It's upside down, right? In this case, I think it has two settings. You have a regular A and italica, depending on what key you press. All right, so this goes down into the shoot, right? And it goes into what's called the assembling elevator, right? Sometimes just called the assembler. I think more commonly just called the assembler.

You have a you have a guide at the end that tells you how long the line is, right? So you type one line of text, all those matrices go down. If all in the assembling elevator, then you say you're done with the line. The assembling elevator brings it up, right? And then there's a thing that shoves the type forward. And this is where the hot mold and lead comes in, right? OK, so it took a ton that I was not expecting. Yes, it's called hot metal typography

because it requires hot metal, right? So there's a better metal to use. Then lead, it has a low melting point. Yes, that means it's less dangerous. All right. Don't let your kids like that. Don't let your kids like that. Is operated by adults who know not to eat the molten lead.

Mostly mostly. Yes, so this is shoved over here where the various matrices that form a full line of text are forced, they're like grabbed and forced together, right? Into a sort of a solid mass and then high pressure, molten lead is cast against them. And then there's a rotating doohickey in here so it can cool four lines of text simultaneously before it shoves out the completed line of text, which goes right here. Right. And those are how this works now.

OK, yes, you're literally you're casting your type exactly like line by line. Now, there's another thing in here. I forgot to mention before there's a special thing with the space bar, right? So when you're making these lines of text, they all need to be the same size, right? So the only way they can do that is through justification, right? You increase or decrease the amount of space between the words, right? So when you hit the space bar, it doesn't drop down a matrix, right? There's a wedge that gets shoved in, right?

And then when when you finish the line, those wedges are jammed up as much as they can go to ensure that everything spread apart evenly, it's mechanical justification. That's so smart. Yeah, I see why this is like the apple theosis of mechanical engineering. Yeah, you're like you're manufacturing like instead of hunting around for an extra E or whatever, you just type in the line and you have the casts in place for it to make out of hot lead a an entire line's worth that you then imprint onto the paper.

Yes, that's smart. Fuck. Once the matrices have been used, they're raised up, I believe, through here, right? They're shoved over and then like a big arm brings them up and it brings them up to the top, right? Now, you see right here on the matrix, there is this series. There's like this keyed sort of thing, right? That's so it goes on a rail and it's pushed along by a worm gear, right?

And they're all keyed so they drop into specific places, right? And they're ready for you to be used again. That's incredible. So these these these cast lines of type are called slugs. Here's one down here, right? And this is an incredible piece of machinery. They were first built in 1866. Of course, at that time, they would have also been driven by, you know,

overhead shafts and belts, right? And you would have probably a hot steam line to melt the lead. Just incredible walking new bits. So but they they were built for a long time. This picture right here is a model built in 1965. Yeah. And this was this this is in the Deutsche Museum in Munich. Well, I mean, if it works, why why change?

Exactly, right? You know, so there's also one of the problems with this, of course, is there's no backspace backspace key on a line of type backspace. Yes, there's no backspace key on a line of type machine, right? So, you know, you could go and take the matrices out manually if you wanted to, if you screwed up a line. But more often what operators would do is they would just, you know, finish the line by typing the first letters they could, which was usually.

E T A O I N S H R D L U, right? You know, right right down here. But sometimes they'd forget to discard the line of type. So we see down here an example on local bowling alleys. This was an excellent showing. And it's a on Schertler. And then yeah, this is something that was fairly common in line of type newspapers is like they

just forget and no one would catch it in like, you know, proofing the newspaper, right? But so the line of type machine was incredible because you could suddenly have one guy, you know, all you had to do is type in the article, right? And you would suddenly, you know, rather than having a whole bunch of the guys individually placing in movable type, you could have one guy do a whole shit load in one evening, right? Right. And this just reduced labor costs like this, this incredibly complex and stupid

machine was full of molten lead, full of molten lead. Yeah, that was still cheaper than like, this is still cheaper than doing manual movable type. Yeah, just having a bunch of guys play fucking scrabble with individual letters. Yeah. So but this this meant it was easier to start a high circulation newspaper, right? You replace them with some line of type operators.

And usually there'd be a machinist there in the in the line of type shop to just, you know, machine replacement parts as needed. So I mean, I don't want to think about one of these like presumably what, hundreds, thousands of individual like matrix keys. If one of those doesn't go back on, yeah. Fuck. Yeah, yeah, that's a fun repair. Yeah, it just goes in the wrong spot and the whole whole shop.

It just explodes in a gigantic wave of molten lead. Well, there was there were a couple of safety devices in here, because if you did, if you did a line, if the if a line was the wrong length, right, and you shoved it in the wrong way, it would just squirt a jet of molten lead out. Oh, yeah. So you want to avoid that. So in the sort of line of type era,

in the early era, we could start doing more newspapers, because more people had, you know, it was easier to have a wide, widely circulating newspaper. So like the Boston Globe, that's 1872. Washington Post, 1877. Wall Street Journal, that's 1889. You know, we're all sort of yes, new money showing up. And this means since you have reduced labor costs, right, you can type set the newspaper more quickly.

That means you have an extended deadline, right? You can get news in later in the day, right? You can add more news to the newspaper. You can print a bigger newspaper, right? Now, making a newspaper is still incredibly labor and capital intensive. But it's a little bit easier than it was before. And you can more easily create a larger and fleshed out product as opposed to, you know, a sheet of paper with some news on it, right?

And since there's cheaper printing and layout, it means you can have more newspapers to fill niches, right? And this is this is when we start to see, especially African American newspapers, you know, so this is this picture is actually from the line of type shop of the Chicago Defender, right? This is a this was a black owned newspaper oriented towards black people published in Chicago from 1905 onwards, right? This is also the copies of this

newspaper were surreptitiously and often illegally distributed throughout the South. Well, yeah, yeah, through through a network of Pullman porters. Some of the dots. Yeah, awesome. So, you know, so there's a lot of a lot of black owned newspapers were formed in this era, you know, because the, you know, there's sort of a baseline level of racism in, you know, every newspaper in America, right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, an entirely distant phenomenon. Yeah, exactly, right? No, they got we live in a post racial society. Yeah, this was before it was acceptable to not be racist in polite society. A lot of white people thinking, oh, I don't want to be, but, you know, what are the boys at the office going to think? Exactly, you know, I can I can not be racist in private at home, but I can't do it in public. This is also where you get like a bunch of like foreign language papers, right?

Like New York, you get a bunch of like Yiddish language newspapers or a bunch of German language newspapers or like French or Italian or whatever. We have a custom line of type machine for that, too. You know, that'd be the other thing. Yeah, like a lot of times there'd be like special line of type machines on the floor for different fonts, you know, that's what that's one of the reasons why like you say font foundry as opposed to like, you know, the fonts were like, you know, this is not just, you know, the shape of letters, you know, on a computer

file, this was like an actual set of pieces of metal they sent you. Yeah, and in lead, so it used to be a much deadlier proposition. Well, certainly once you had line of type machines, they sent you the matrices. They wouldn't send you, you know, the the the leads types. Yeah. So beginning to understand though, why it took so long for Russia to get Russian language newspapers and I was like, oh, yeah, because you have to do an entirely an entirely separate alphabet let alone font. Cool.

Oh, yeah. So so one of the first African American newspapers of this kind was our own boy is the Philadelphia Tribune. That was 1884, right? But obviously and obviously you don't go out and you just buy a line of type machine at this point, right? These are still incredibly expensive machines, incredibly complex machines that require a lot of technical know how to run.

But scaling up production once you had enough money to have a consistent market share was much, much cheaper thanks to the line of type machine. And this led to, you know, the sort of rise of, you know, the large daily newspaper. And here here is a cross section that was published in the Washington Evening Star in 1922. The Evening Tar. The Evening Tar. Yeah. Go Heels.

Yeah. The Evening Tar, 11th and Pencilver. Yes. This building's still still there, actually, right here. You can see the Evening Star is dead. They also added this weird postmodern addition to it, which I don't know. Yeah. So. But anyway, you can see like this is, you know, journalism at the time was it's, you know, it's sort of, you know, journalism writing, you know, literary, blah,

blah, blah, but it's also like heavy industry as well. So you can see like we'll go down from the ninth floor down. You know, we had a cafeteria on the ninth floor. That's very nice. You get a nice view. You know, you have a you have a stock ticker. That's probably a one of those teletype machines, right? I love those. Then we have right here.

This whole room is line of type machines. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And all of this stuff is co-located too. You don't get the thing that a modern newspaper has where the printing just happens off site somewhere. Oh, yeah. You have proofreaders over here to make sure that the line of type guys didn't screw up. You got a club room. I don't know. I don't know if everyone was allowed in here.

I hope they were. No, this is this is this is where like four guys smokes a guy. I was like, yeah, we should start a war with Cuba. Remember the main your editor-in-chief here, you got your associate editor, you got a lobby, you got editorial writers. Over here, you have a library, right? Because you don't have the internet.

You have to go consult the newspaper's library to find information or you can go down to the public library, of course, you can also do that. But you would try and consult the one in the building first. They have an interview room. Wow. You have this this city room for like local news. There's all these other editors over here. They got a whole room for sports illustrations.

Wow. They get the cartoon literally like, how do you do illustrations? Like, how do you get this one published? The guy has to like ink all of those. And then like, fuck, how do you even transfer that to print it? I have no idea about that part. And maybe someone can sound off in the comments. I don't know how you did that in the 20s.

You got like a cartoonist over here. You have the photo department, you have the Sunday department. They just don't show up most days. They got a really good union. Now, they rented out a bunch of the space in here. There's like offices of the Consolidated Press Association, Washington Board of Trade, blah, blah, blah. As you go further down, we get more

better business bureau. That's in quotes, though. You know, they're skeptical. Just sarcastically, like the better business bureau. Yeah. Well, we go down here. We see like the printing rooms, right? A lot of this, some of this is underground. You can see that the circulation department here.

There's the printing presses are, you know, just these gigantic pieces of kit right here. And those go up to the circulation department where they sort of assemble the newspaper and it goes down a chute and they load it into trucks, right? And down at the bottom, they got like paper storage. They got like all this industrial equipment. They got a boiler room because it's all steam powered. Of course. Yeah.

Well, and then they got they got dynamos and shit like. And then you got a nice lobby. They had a nice lobby down here, right? Which is very, very nice open to the public where people can go in and submit classified ads, which is the bread and butter of any newspaper was. I was supposed to unclassified ads. I teach you to tell you to meet at a location on 9th Street. Bring a pistol. You're going to need it.

Well, I do I do like how many, how much like spying off the period was just like classified ads and shit like that. But that appeals to me immensely. I think I could say this. My mother actually was did not. This was many years ago, folks, I did want to say this. My mom once answered a classified ad that turned out to be CIA recruitment. Huh.

And showed up at the CIA headquarters in beautiful Langley, Virginia. For her interview, I was just scared shitless. But yeah, the CIA used to just, you know, hey, guys, want to come do some imperialism? Yeah, come down to the building that we call a highway department building. But everyone knows it's not. Yeah, everybody's next left. Yeah, you got to you got to start a podcast if you want to do that shit now.

My dad's yearly company picnic was always on. There's a park across the street from the CIA building. That's where it was. It was like to not look very, very, very secret. Do not look. Yeah. I mean, you just see it like everyone knows the CIA. They claimed it wasn't. It was the CIA.

Like you go look at it like it's just there. We know we know for a fact it's not a highway department building. It's CIA says like CIA on it. Yeah, I don't see it on the off ramp. It does. No, it doesn't. That's the NSA. The NSA. Right. The NSA has the label offering.

Yeah, literally, it's just secret government shenanigans next right. Yes. So. Anyway, this is one of the smaller newspapers because Washington, D.C. was not a large place in 1922. I think they moved out of here at some point because they needed a larger printing area, right? And they they also moved out of there because they were kind of on the decline.

The evening stars out of business now. The decline of print media. Yes, difficult. But I will be saying this about every single era that we encounter. If you have like a big newspaper like the Philadelphia Enquirer, here's the building right here. This is built in the early 1900s, right? So you have you had on site printing.

Have you had a big paper with lots of circulation? That meant you needed a big printing building. So the offices of the newspaper were in this tower here. And the rest of this was devoted exclusively to printing the newspaper. Right. Wow. Yeah. And, you know, you had these if you're running a big city paper, you need it to be very close to, well, in this case, center city. Otherwise, I would say downtown,

which meant that, you know, you're looking at what you also need a huge quantity of paper, right? So you essentially need rail delivery. And this is why the Redding Railroad City branch was built. That goes right through here, mostly underground. Well, in this in this part underground. And they would just, you know, drop off like six or seven box car loads of newsprint every day so they could print the newspaper because you couldn't bring trucks in.

There's just so much you needed, right? They kept that up until the 1980s until, you know, eventually they were like, yeah, yeah, we're going to we're going to move the printing somewhere else because we're lame. You can't just, yeah, because we're too we're too boring to run a massive freight train full of paper and ink through the middle of a city anymore. I mean, the right of way is still there. You could still run a freight train there.

Yeah, I can run that and reopen that shit immediately. That's that's that's our campaign after after burned down all the police precinct and after fund all of the like the bail funds and the reconstruction funds is re open newsprint delivery by rail into Santa City. But that's complex, though, because the inquire is just moved out of this building. They're now somewhere over here. We'll talk about that later.

And this building was vacant for a couple of decades, I believe. They're now renovating it into the new police headquarters. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So if you burn down once again, if you put down the police headquarters, the market wasn't good enough for them. That was what you're telling me. What you're telling me is that the new police station of a police department that has just been on video brutalizing people has an open but largely unknown

railroad going directly underneath and into it. Oh, yeah. Well, it's not. Have you read V for Vendetta? Something something deeply that makes me kind of laugh a little darkly is that the inquirer one of the Pulitzer in the 70s was reporting on police brutality, I believe, under Mayor Rizzo, whose statue is now hopefully in hell. And now the cops are going to move into that building because nothing we can't have anything nice.

Can't have anything nice. Well, they were going to move to West Valley. And then they fully renovated that building for the police to move in and they decided they didn't want to do it, but millions of dollars to do it. I would love to have the privilege to be as choosy a tenant as the cops seem to get to be. Just like I go to my landlord and I'm like, yeah, and I'm not really feeling it. You know, maybe if you do some more improvements.

They they didn't want to take the L to work, I believe, was the thing. They didn't want to potentially go to bed that you have to like be around. There's a goddamn Lambo in their parking lot every fucking day. Take the goddamn L. There is a Lamborghini Urus. There's a there's a yellow Lamborghini Urus in the in the Philly Police Department's parking lot. You can see it with your own two eyes.

Once again, you know, dismantle the police. If you know, once again, I don't have a Lambo and they reminded of the fact that American police sees more in civil asset forfeiture than Americans lose in burglary every year by a wide margin. Yes. So. This was the reason why you need a huge printing building right there in the center downtown and all these like all these like infrastructure to support it is just because you couldn't like

electronically transmit the paper somewhere else to be printed like in Lancaster County or somewhere like that. Right. The printing had to be absolutely had to be co-located with the rest of the journalism operations. Right. So as we move into the 20th century, the latter half, we see improvements in printing technology, one of which is something called offset printing.

Right. So we're rather than hot metal type setting. We can now do things in such a way that I don't know what the interim method was. I know there was one, but at some point you could do a lot of stuff electronically and you could sort of print onto a big metal plate, which you could then use to print a shitload of newspapers at once. You can see this is a big offset printer and the newsprint has gone so fast. It's a blur. Right. Yeah, like that's where you get the like montage of the like spinning newspaper.

Yeah. Yeah. Which actually you don't want in this if newspapers are spinning directly at you and there's something has gone badly wrong. If you put your finger in the wrong place here, you get a real nasty paper cut. Yeah, you're losing a whole bunch of stuff. Oh, yeah, you got a paper cut that takes off your whole arm. It's all efficiency. It's just like opening up the paper and being like, huh, says here in the paper,

blood. No, it's like a real nice, clean cut. There's no blood whatsoever. The paper's gone so fast, it cotterizes the wound. You don't even notice that your arm is gone until you go to like smoke a cigarette or something. They call it the printer's arm. So all right. So you can now do like a newspaper layout without, you know, hot metal type setting.

Newspaper production, again, becomes cheaper. It becomes less labor intensive, right? Deadline can just pay out for you or people for like jets of molten lead to the face related injuries. Yeah. But you can also like you can print more news this way because the deadline is longer. Decisions happen later in the night. Printing happens later in the morning like foreshadowing. You know, you can just cram more news and you can print more news.

Like overall, you've you've and you're still like charging money for a physical newspaper. Right. And journalists, which like journalists by this point is like an actual profession with like good pay and things of that nature mostly. And so they can they're quite pleased at the like longer deadlines because they can like do day drinking longer. This is true. Yes. And the other thing is like, I don't think you actually like laid off a lot of,

you know, folks who did like the actual production of the newspaper through this process, circulation was still going up and up and up and up. Like infamously in Britain, even after they moved everything off site to Darklands, Princes famously were very well organized. I mean, they did bust that eventually thanks to Rupert Murdoch, billionaire Australian tyrant. But right up until like right through the 80s, I remember like Docklands, print workers were like thoroughly unionized.

And so it was very difficult to fire people. Yeah. I mean, you know, you need you need a lot of, you know, these are good. You need these work, good union jobs. They still are good union jobs to an extent. And, you know, running heavy machinery, you know, it's a good way to get a union job. If you can get into it. But then, you know, so we get into like the 1990s, right? Which is sort of the the peak of print journalism.

Yeah, it was so good that you could print joke newspapers. The onion. I used to pick up the onion in print like every week when I was in high school. It came out on Friday. It was wonderful. You just had a print edition of the onion. The AV club was in the back. It's great.

This is actually, they didn't have the comment section. So. Oh, God. So it was better. It was better. The section where the stage. Don't do something awful. Yeah. So in the 1990s, you know, local newspapers, they're just gigantic behemoths, right?

Some of some of them are printing out like they're putting out multiple editions of the newspaper each day, right? Sometimes there's multiple editions for different geographic regions. Sometimes there's newspapers in different languages. They got all this kind of stuff, right? You know, they have massive, massive, labor-intensive, huge departments with lots of people devoted to like specific subjects, you know, especially local reporting, right? Your local newspaper is going to tell you all about what your council

person is doing, like all this kind of crap. Generally horrible shit the cops are doing. Yeah, like that's that's why we have Pulitzer's or local reporting. Yeah, like pay a guy enough to sit through every fucking city council meeting. And eventually some news falls out because in like item twenty seven of the city budget is just like, I don't know, like the hush fund for like corrupt cops or something.

Yes. And that's the Boston Globe winning its Pulitzer supply, Pulitzer for whatever their special news team, basically, lies, having having the ability to fund shit like that. And I remember it kind of as an aside back when old, old gocker, not even gocker, but back with the old dead spin, they moved to like a they had a special, you know, reporting unit and now that's dead because of as we'll get into

private equity money and media consolidation. So like your local newspaper, you know, especially in a place like Philly, probably won a couple of Pulitzer's and is instrumental in the idea of kind of keeping, keeping people accountable for what that means in 2020, I suppose. Yeah. And you had jobs that were not precarious. So like local journalists was a career track that you could do. And you could like develop the skills to like and the contacts that you need in

journalism, to be able to write about like a city's politics or like a town's politics, much more effectively than if you're just like some guy who's just out of journalism school, who's going to get fired or laid off the next year. Right. Or even, you know, extending it just to sports coverage, you know, one of the things like reading ESPN sucks. And one of the things that, you know, local journalism is really good for, although it might not seem as meaningful is local sports coverage, because, you know, a team and, you know,

there are arguments against that, like access and favoritism. But if you've got a guy who's been with a team for, you know, 25, 30 years, they might, you might get a more honest look as opposed to just ESPN running four stories, all featuring like LeBar ballers and shit. Yeah, everything like I would rather, I would much rather like read a well crafted piece of sports writing than a listicle about like, oh, it's like the top 20 draft picks or whatever. It's like who gives a shit?

Yeah. And again, going back to like even in a place like like York, Pennsylvania, you know, we actually have two newspapers still, which is goofy as all hell, but they're able to provide coverage in a midsize city that may not get the attention that it normally would. And one of the reasons they can do that. And those newspapers are actually so a bit of an aside here, York, Pennsylvania had a white supremacist for a mayor. His name was Charlie Robertson.

I mean, this is York, so, you know, comes from the territory. But he murdered a black woman, allegedly murdered a black woman named Lily Bell Allen in the 60s during a race riots in York when he was a cop. And the reason that that story and he was actually tried much later, it was I remember reading about it as a kid. What are the reasons he was tried? What are the reasons he was, you know, even they got to that point was because the York newspapers kind of never let the shit go.

It didn't just get buried somewhere. They never let the shit go. And, you know, he was acquitted. But I think, you know, if York didn't have those newspapers, we just had our fucking Fox affiliate, that shit would never have happened. Yeah, absolutely. You need you need a local newspaper. If if for no other reason than if it doesn't irritate the shit out of the mayor

and the chief of police and whoever else, it's also going to have, like, a fucking weird ass name. And that's the important thing to me is, like, I want to be able to read, like, a the name of town, Mercury Picayune or something. There's also the shit. Stephen Reed, who is absolutely one of the funniest, because Harrisburg is hell and I cannot I cannot say this enough. But one of the reasons Stephen Reed ended up getting charged with, like,

500 counts of theft, fraud and corruption after his 20 years as mayor. And one of the reasons was, again, local news just kept their foot on it. Do not underestimate the might of the local Times Post intelligence. Yes. Oh, yeah. All three of those together. Got to be all three of those together. Yeah. Like, obviously, like, you know, these these institutions, like these these papers with, like, you know, there are problems with, like, access journalism, even back then and still today.

But, you know, again, having a well funded local newspaper is probably better than not having that. And one of the reasons why these newspapers were so well funded. Is because of advertising, right? As well as being able to sell a physical paper, right? So. One of the things about advertising in a physical newspaper as opposed to advertising online is that the costs make more sense, right?

So let's say I take out a full page ad. You know, this is the whole newspaper, I take out a full page ad. I'm expected to pay for the cost of printing that page and the cost of adding an extra page to the newspaper, right? Plus a fee, plus extra if I want the ad in color, right? And if I have a circulation of a couple million, like if I'm a big newspaper, that's a chunk of change. Well, so, you know, even when when I worked at, again,

our Rinky Dink student newspaper, the triangle at Drexel, even even back when print journalism was on the decline, this is like 2000. 2014, 15, 14, something like that. You were paying $1,100 for a full page ad in our in our Rinky Dink paper, right? And then you get classifies to classifies were charged per letter. And that was even better than like a full page commercial C, I and A. Yes.

And newspapers had a monopoly on classified ad for a while, you know, and per per column inch, those made a lot of money. Column inches like you have you have one column in the newspaper and then there's like one, one inch. Right. That's a column inch. And they made a shitload of money doing this just between commercial advertising, you know, classifies Donald Trump taking out editorials as advertisements, saying Central Park five should be, I don't know,

hung, drawn and quartered hang. Yeah. Excuse me. Not all good. Yeah, not all good, but, you know, brings in money for the newspaper, whatever. Obviously. So, you know, these these newspapers, especially in the 90s, they were printing money almost as fast as they were printing newspapers. Well, yeah, because you've got the machines right there. You just like, yeah.

And, you know, advertising, people that you were making so much money off of advertising that like it was relatively practical to put out like a free newspaper. Right. So, you know, there were like commuter papers, I remember, which was really good. The Washington Post Express I used to pick up every day. You had like alternative weeklies, the city papers, some stuff like that. Yeah, which again, land of contrasts. Yes, you get like The Stranger in Seattle, which launches the career of Dan Savage and also does a bunch of turf shit,

like, relatedly, or you can get like a good alternative weekly. It's an it's entirely variable. And then you had the onion print edition pictured here. This is the last issue, December 12th, 2013. Volume 49 issue 50, which was very, very sad. I have a I have a copy of this somewhere back at home because I was very unhappy when it was like the onions going away.

Oh, God, I mean, obviously, it's still around. It's just online, but there's something nice about being able to pick up the onion outside of King Street Metro, you know? Yeah, this is like this tracks so neatly to like a movie plot. This is the bit where the like the drug kingpin is like we were making so much money, we didn't know what to do with it. And you just have like a montage of like guys putting like stacks of cash into oil barrels and stuff.

All right, losing losing whatever 10 million a year to just rats eating it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the Fed does that all the time. All right, Liam, put in a slide. I yield my time. Is it my slide? Yeah, you put in Nixon. Oh, I did put in Nixon.

You want me to put like the notes on the screen for you? Oh, I know I'm good. Oh, I don't have a Nixon slide. Oh, OK. Well, yeah, don't put up the next is the next bag on. All right, yeah, so here's Nixon. Great. So I kind of wanted to talk about, you know, especially with the decline

of print journalism, sort of the consolidation of media, the fact that like these institutions can be like they are powerful and be can be used for good. Like the fact that the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers. I don't know if we want to get into the whole issue of that. But basically Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study that became known as the Pentagon Papers by 1969, realized that the war was essentially unwinnable and released portions of the papers

to the New York Times who published them front page detailing the Johnson administration's massive expansion of the war, how poorly they've been going. And as well as Nixon's incursion into Cambodia. Go ahead. As a yardstick for like the freedom of the press and like the assertiveness of the press, compare that to the treatment that Chelsea Manningot or Reality Winner got or John Kiriaka got. Exactly. And that's kind of what I wanted to illustrate.

Like, do you fucking think the New York Times and Washington Post would run the Pentagon Papers today? No, no. And they no one ran the Panama Papers. No, they were in the Guardian for a little bit. And you could like search the day space and then nothing happened. I think everybody involved knew that nothing would happen. And so nobody was that stressed about it, apart from that one Maltese journalist. You got mysteriously killed with a car bomb right after.

But like, yeah, no, it's this is the problem. Everybody like everybody glorifies Woodward and Bernstein for good reason. But like you can trace the effects and the decline of print media in the careers of Bob Woodward and Robert Bernstein, because like like what they're what they're up to now, like that I think it's Woodward who has the like inside the Trump White House book, but for like years and years, he was like fully on board with like the Iraq war and with the Bush administration. And it just like it felt like you wanted to be like, are you the same guy who did

the what happened, man? Yeah, I mean, this is Woodward. It was it's such a damn shame because Woodward, you know, went on CNN and defended the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq, and which, of course, there weren't. And like, that's one of the things that I also kind of wanted to loop into. It was like, I don't like not the big news, you know, freedom eagle dot one Hillary criminal dot C.K. dot US shit. But one of the things is like you should you should, as we've said on this

podcast numerous times, be skeptical of big institutions. Why would the New York Times run an op-ed by Tom Cotton and they can hide behind the sort of insane bullshit of both sides is and that sort of thing. But like if you think media, especially now, doesn't have bias, it doesn't have an agenda, you need to read more, essentially, and you need to learn more and you need to understand that like Jeff fucking Bezos has a vested interest in keeping things away from you. Democracy dies in darkness.

I mean, like even if like one or two times they produce an article that's like critical to Jeff Bezos, you know, like for all the casual journalism, like, Jeff Bezos, he's a pretty great guy. Yeah, I mean, have you seen the like videos that people put together of this is TV rather than print, but all of the Sinclair affiliated. Yep, that's been put that out. Yeah, well, like they will like have a package that they'll just ship to affiliates prescripted and then they'll run it.

And so you can put all of these side by side and you can have like 50 different anchors all saying in absolute unison, this is a threat to our democracy. It rules. There's been an absolute like withering away of the if there ever was independence of the press, there's been like a tightening of that leash. Yes, capital has around it. Yes. And that's one of the things is like when, you know,

dead spin got bought out by whatever the PE firm was. Great Hill partners or some shit. Like dead spin was writing stories and doing things that nobody else was fucking doing and nobody would write. And like that's that's one of the things is like, you know, it's it's important to understand the value, I think, of people who do exist sort of outside either this like grift, you know, especially right when grifter space, so to speak, as we all get canceled.

The grift accuracy. It's important to look at sources and news outside of that. I'd like, you know, like there's a reason why Peter Teal had to destroy Gorka, right? And it's not just because they outed him. And it's like, I'm not going to I'm not going to sit here and defend everything that Gorka did or the attitude with which they went into that. Where they went into a Florida courtroom and like this smug dipshit was like they put the like associate editor of Gorka on the stand and one of one of

Peter Teal indirectly, one of one of Hulk Hogan's lawyers asked, you know, if you if you had a sex tape, would would you run it if it was newsworthy? And he said, yeah. And the next question was how like how young would the people in that sex tape have to be before you would not run it? And the guy like jokingly, he did an irony. He did a bit. He was like, oh, oh, no, like 11. And yeah, this went over exactly as well as you would expect.

And now the Gorka doesn't exist anymore. So I don't know. It's any kind of like even even that land of contrasts as outlet provided too much of a threat to be to be allowed to continue to publish. Exactly. Alice, the way you said Gawker sounds like Sebastian Sebastian Gorka. Gorka. Yeah. Greetings, Mr. Chappell. Pop on down to the White House.

Tell me, Mr. Chappell, would you consider a surface level series of tattoos to be indicative of an allegiance? Got. All right, all right. Now we are that we are the we are the podcast of batches of pipeline. Sorry. Unfortunately, it's happening now. Sorry, guys. But, you know, so all right. So all these newspapers are making a shitload of money.

Then what happens? I have a sound bite for this as you transition into the next thing. It's yeah. No, the fucking doesn't drink that in. Yes. It's nostalgia. I feel like we should have had this this this slide come in line by line. Just loads like very slowly.

You get the like dead image thumbnail a couple of times. You've got mail. You've got mail. Thank you. Thank you. So this thing happens called Internet, right? Internet happens. People start going on the computer.

They start going on the computer. One of the greatest things is great. We're a new state and they ruined the new state. So yeah. So after the 90s, like, you know, I think we all know what sort of happened is, you know, more and more people get the news online rather than in print. You know, newspapers start putting articles up online, right?

And the online, of course, had the potential to revolutionize reporting. News could get to more people than ever before, right? This could reduce overhead for newspapers again. They could probably, you know, invest that money into better reporting. They could, you know, overall improve everything for everyone, right? You know, this this this was a revolutionary moment. Now, let me just anything could have happened. Let me just check whether that happened.

I've got to like log into my AOL account. You've got mail. Yeah, no, they didn't do that. No. Line goes down. Let's talk about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. I think it's been more and more, you know, it's being recognized more and more. People are people are talking about it more and more.

And there are many such cases. And we're looking into this very strongly that there's a tendency. Look, I've spoken to a lot of economists and they say is bullshit. But one of those economists is not the Economist magazine. So, yeah, one of the problems with online news is that the advertising does not bring in anywhere close to the amount of revenue that print advertising did just because print advertising was based on something concrete and online advertising is, you know, I don't know, based on like very dust and, you know,

you know, it's also like it's an effect of other monopolies, which is quite funny, like to see print media, which has been incredibly monopolistic at times being murdered at the hands of like all of you advertising money just goes into Google AdSense and like a black box auctions for like what keywords get put up. You know, online advertising fees, right? They're not proportional at all to print advertising fees. I mean, you know, OK, so think about like the cost of printing the newspaper, right? If I were to add another line to this, you know, the cost of printing the newspaper

eats up a significant amount of this advertising revenue, right? And also, it's probably probably cost more to print the newspaper than the advertising revenue right now, which I'm sure is another problem. But this whole space right here, you know, if we're going to go ahead and integrate that gives you a lot of room to have like really high quality reporting. You know, you have a nice some, you know, you have a nice building. You have a big news team. You have all this kind of nice stuff.

You have a lot of wiggle room there. Yeah, but you're running a business with a lot of fat and you can use that fat to do quality reporting, you can do all this sort of shit that now. You can't really do. No, you can't even have your clubroom with the cigars on the top floor of the building so much, which why would you have a newspaper if you can't do that? Yeah, that's the entire point of this racket is to be able to sit there with William Randolph Hearst and just like pick out on a globe where where you're

going to like intervene against next. And even if your cost of, you know, online is much lower than your cost of printing, the the delta between your revenue and your costs is still so much lower than what print media got you. But also, like we should say that like media as an industry, print media has been remarkably slow to adapt to the internet. Even still, largely because it became so so fatty and so ossified that like because you could have a whole career in journalism at one paper,

you could then become the guy who makes these decisions and like be dealing with the advent of the internet and just be a how do I rotate PDF guy? You could be like, do I know what a JPEG is? I mean, there's that. But I suppose I shouldn't have said like fat, right? Because a lot of this is not fat. This is muscle. Yeah, this is what makes the newspaper run.

And like this is the difference between being, you know, I don't know. You you can't run the same kind of operation with this much wiggle room as you can with this much wiggle room, right? You can't, you know, have the one guy who works six months at a time on one story and like he breaks it and it sells a million newspapers. You can't you can't really do that anymore when you have just this amount of space to work with. I mean, it's it's a totally different environment.

And this is like because because of both like print advertising, like folks don't want to do that anymore. They want to do online because it's cheaper. It doesn't work as well. What it works about the same because all advertising works the same amount, which is it doesn't work. But print advertising doesn't work, but it's also cheap. Excuse me.

Online advertising doesn't work, but it's also cheaper. You know, you may be getting your message out to. Ten times as many people as you did when you were a print operation. But you're making ten times less income. Right. And also the advertising is much more annoying and like hinders the news experience much more because you're trying to read the article and like a little gif of a Toyota RAV4 fucking drives across your screen.

Yeah, or you have like an auto play ad or like there's a whole like there's a there's like an ad that takes up the whole screen. There's a reason for that. And that's because. These operations can't. They're they're they're seeking they're eking out as much revenue as they can. Because they know it's not enough to maintain the amount of reporting that they could do like like ten years ago.

I mean, this this drop right here, that's like 2005 to like 2009. That's not just like the like the economic recession. This this is a catastrophe. If you run a print newspaper, this is that you had to lay off so many people, you had to like contract your your newsroom to the point where it's a shell of its former self, like there's like there's nothing left. And with with that blood in the water, you then get the

you attract the sharks of private equity, which is a business model that only starts existing and becoming profitable in like pretty much the 2000s. Yeah. But where your business model is that you take over a company that has often a large amount of like sustainable assets and a large amount of stuff and like a large pension fund often and you strip all the copper wiring out of the walls, fire everybody, pay yourself a massive paycheck and bounce. And you can get very, very rich doing this.

Like you can make a billion dollars doing this. What you also can do doing this is kill a bunch of newspapers that people you know, maybe have sentimental attachments to. But more importantly, people may have, I don't know, pensions from or health care from or jobs that and those no longer exist because you needed to buy another yacht that you could go to Little Saint James Island on. But it's OK because Mitt Romney said Black Lives Matter. So yeah, yeah, exactly.

But like my example here is like that was a mindfuck. That was a mindfuck. Just opening Twitter being like, how are the fucking Democrats getting flinted by Mitt Romney? Yeah, fucking. Mitt's Mitt throw those molotovs fam. I don't care, Romney. I look forward to Willard's continued radicalization and expect him to just go. I don't know, like full like anarchist Black Cross.

It's going to be Tim and Jeb just in a couple of hoodies. They're over the fence at the White House. Writing a Soviet tank in the water. Yeah, I thought it was over at the folder gap. Didn't you? So as as you see this massive decline in revenue, just enormous, you start having to shed, shed resources, right? And that's like, you know, you're printing less newspapers.

I guess that reduces some of your costs. But you're also like your revenues going down so quickly, you get sloppy. You know, you get rid of people like Willie Nilly. You get rid of whole departments like local news or something like that. You get rid of your office space, you sell your building. That was one of the things that happened to the inquirer. In the I don't know exactly when it happened. They sold their building

to, I believe, Bart Blatstein, the worst person on earth. Not the worst person on earth, but really bad person. He's not quite Ori Finebush. He's at least more entertaining. Don't be anti-Semitic. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. I can't I can't criticize Ori Finebush or I'm anti-Semitic. Urban PHA said so.

I can't, can't criticize Ori Finebush. It's like you have a diplomatic immunity. Yeah, yeah, that was my favorite thing with someone being like your anti-Semitic and being like, no, no, he's not. I'm right here because someone burned down. Someone burned down one of Ori Finebush's condos. This was like four years ago. Gettification.

And I posted I posted in the Urban PHA Facebook group, which is like the local urbanist Facebook group, I posted a reply to the thread, which is just a Photoshop version of, you know, that show, Win Ben Stein's Money. Yes, I just Photoshopped that into Win Ori Finebush's Money because it was offering a reward for information. And then like people dogpiled me and said I was anti-Semitic for doing this. I didn't even know Ori Finebush was Jewish. I also didn't know Ben Stein was Jewish.

I just didn't get a lot of it. No, I get the fact that he really did not. I was like, Ben Stein's Jewish. And Ross was like, is he? And I was like, yeah, he is. I cannot overstate the extent to which ignorance is like a perfect defense to anti-Semitism. You're just like, yeah, you were doing tropes about these two guys.

And you're just like, I was doing what about the wife? Yeah. Who? What? No. So anyway, start on page one. What's Jews? I don't know. What are Jews? What are we? Just don't know. All right.

So because you have so much less revenue to operate these newspapers, you're laying off people willy nilly, you're laying off whole departments. You might have to focus more on national news just so people will still try to buy the newspaper, right? Because if it's exclusively local news, they're not going to find out 9-11-1.5 or something, right? Yeah. And like also that means that your national journalists are going to be people like there's no more up and coming.

It's entirely like the guys who have that access and they're like totally sclerotic now. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's like no there's no new talent coming in. And that's a huge Barry Weiser ratio. And there's this problem is not just in reporting. It's also in the people who like put together the print edition, right? No one like I can't imagine right now trying to go in and trying to get a job in laying out print newspapers, you're like, yeah, I'm really fucking good at

Adobe InDesign, pay me seventy five thousand dollars a year. Like, no, you can't do that anymore. No, everybody's a freelancer now. Yeah. And it sucks. Badly, it's resolved at least at least every like major newspaper has is still completely unwilling to cut the like upper middle class to upper class welfare program that is the op ed section. And so you you'll still get like, oh, we had to pay this absolute shithead.

There's this dumb ass who comes up with the worst takes imaginable. Yeah, we have to pay that guy like five million dollars a year. All right, we're back to Stu Baikavsky. Yes. Well, like this is this is international. Like it's not just like we paid we paid Tom Friedman to like go to Mumbai and talk to a cab driver allegedly. It's also like in the UK.

It's like all of these like nice white feminists who went to all of the same universities being like writing the same five columns about how trans people are some existential threat is that that's that's not making anybody a lot of money. But it's got to go in every time because it's pure ideology. Yes. I used to run an op ed section. I can tell you for a fact, it's all fiction. None of it's real.

I wrote op eds. None of it's real. It's all fake. People say they do dead things and it just didn't happen. There's so yeah, anything you see in an op ed page is fiction. So all right. So as a result of this, like lots of newspapers like merge or they fold entirely, especially like alternative weeklies, like free newspapers, especially.

And that includes a lot of stuff that reported exclusively on local issues. Right. And, you know, since news is online, a lot of a lot of like views like traffic is devoted to big newspapers that can attract a lot of people and they report on most national issues. So yeah, and those big papers will get bought out by like billionaires who can afford to have a lost leader in like The Times or The Washington Post. Yeah. The Jeff Bezos Washington Post. Yes. Yeah.

They can't lose enough money on that that it will make them that it will outweigh the benefits of having this soapbox. And so like often you will see like Murdoch Murdoch had a bunch of free papers. Still might do as far as I know, just because it like by that point, not because they were making so much money that they could afford to, but that like money was fake at that point. It didn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything.

Yeah. The collapse had been so total that you could just throw money into this into this pettif of etiology and and just publish whatever you wanted. Yeah. I mean, there's it's just a completely different environment now. And it's funny, like the like lib idea, the dream of the printing press, the Gutenberg printing press is that like, oh, just anybody can print whatever they want and nobody can stop them and it's total freedom. And it turns out we did end up doing that.

But just for like three guys. Yeah, it turned out to not work that good. Yeah, works fine for them. Yeah, they can they can do whatever they want. So this brings us back around to our subject. So how does this all relate to publishing this fucking headline? God, I'd almost forgotten about it in all of the confusion. Almost almost so you're let's say you're in the Enquirer layout department, right?

The Enquirer, I believe, is still a nominally print first publication. That means whatever the headline is determined by the layout guys. And that also goes up online. They did try and correct this a couple of times online. They should around for a bit. Yeah, because it's gone through three headlines now. So but if you think about it like, OK, who's right in this headline?

You got a bunch of old heads in layout department. You know, they've been around for 30 years or something like that. And they're all they're making all the decisions. They haven't changed their ways in that much time. You know, because there's no young people. You're a fucking newsman, Don. I ever tell you otherwise, you punch me in the face. Those guys, God damn, God damn newsman.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's no young people going into the dynamic and exciting world of print layout. And it's hard to change a culture without new people coming in. This article is on page A 12. No one gives a shit about A 12. Like the biggest shit they gave was they remembered to do the drop cap. Which, of course, like that makes a difference in a paper online,

though, where you can just put it on Twitter and be like, is this headline actually building's matter, too? Yeah. Also, like I just realized this is this this is a one sentence paragraph. There's like one there's one line underneath the drop cap. I assume they had to like alter the size of this photo like intensely to just get one line under the drop cap. Anyway.

So, you know, this is like this is a department which is neglected. It's full of old people who like ate everything. You know, there's a combination of carelessness, inertia, hollowed out a shell of a layout department. And it was probably 3 a.m. in the morning when they put this thing together. Like whoever did this probably didn't think it was like a big deal.

They're like, this is a punchy headline. This is going to be great. We're everyone's going to love us. And it turned out, no, they sure did. They sure did. Yeah, the scene in the layout department after they punched that one in. Just a news man. Don, I ever tell you what the right thing to do that.

No, this is a bad headline. This is a really bad headline, guys. Like it sucks. It sucks shit. It's a god of a headline. And and so all of the all of the all of the staff of the inquirer who were black the next day, they did like a sick out. The executive editor, the paper had to resign.

And a lot of that going around like the New York Times, lost James Bennett over the Tom Cotton editorial. There was another couple of resignations. Yeah, it's been a big week. It has been a good way and shame. Yeah. And like there this is. These are, you know, our paper is a national laughing stock right now because like someone published this shit, this fucking headline.

And I mean, you know, it's it's very bad on its face. I feel like it's more of a symptom of a deeper institutional rot, which is just everywhere and just keeps getting worse. Like rising damp in the building, you know. The sick building syndrome that affects all American institutions. Leaks, is it leaks? Yeah. And. I don't know, I feel like it's I feel like this is only going to get worse.

Oh, yeah, anecdotally, I think so. I mean, I think there's, you know, there's positive things coming and at least people saw consequences for this. Thank God. But I mean, all right. So anecdotally, my uncle works for the Roanoke Times in Roanoke, Virginia, which I assume all the East Coast elitists assume is like one one shack next to the railroad line.

No, it's like it's nice. It's a big city. Yeah, it's like nice. There's a couple breweries. Virginia Museum of Transportation. You can go down there. You can see we used to be able to see 611. You can't anymore because they've moved it to South Carolina, I think.

You know, you go see some steam locomotives. Norfolk Southern just moved out, which is stupid as hell. But they just shut down the engine shop too. Again, stupid as hell. That's a lot of union jobs gone. Anyway, so my uncle works for the Roanoke Times and a company that owns the Roanoke Times, which is the most ethical company run by the most ethical capitalist. Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett.

Yeah, I have. I have a Warren Buffett drop from the Trash Future episode we did about him, where he is like American magic, American magic, American magic, just an elderly, elderly man saying the words American magic, American magic, American magic, the funny rules. When I went up to do a little thing with the the Kingston Tenets Union and Kingston, New York, they were going to do a showing of my power planning and politics episode about gentrification.

And the biggest landlord in that town is Warren Buffett's son, I believe. I don't know if it's his son or like how he's maybe in his nephew or something. And he showed up. And watch the watch the power planning and politics episode about gentrification with all the Mao jokes. That was funny as hell. That's nice, baby. Yeah.

All right. So anyway, so Berkshire Hathaway owns the Roanoke paper where my uncle works. And he works in layout. You know, he goes out and he does the he works in layout from like second dish, third shift, you know, sometimes he doesn't come back for a long as time, you know, because until the paper is done is when the shift ends. And their intention, as I understand it, is they're going to move the layout operations of the Roanoke times as well as several other local

newspapers they own to Madison, Wisconsin. How fucking guess. Yeah, well over being near Roanoke, Virginia. Yeah, no, absolutely no problems about this whatsoever. We'll still get the same quality for sure. Yeah, you don't need to know how to spell any of the like street names or anything. You don't know how you don't need to know any local culture. You don't need to know anything.

I just get to give it all to Jan Jansen. And that's, you know, that's from Warren Buffett, ethical billionaire. You know, so American magic. American magic, American magic, American magic. And you know, I guess this is where we are with journalism now. No one cares. No one gives a shit about anything. There's no way to make money doing it anymore.

There's no way to like have enough money coming in to do journalism properly. And when you do do it right, you know, like if you're you're doing like dead spin or something. I'll just kill you. They'll just kill you. Yeah. And I mean, either figuratively in court or if you're a Maltese journalist who looks too deeply into the Panama papers, literally. I mean, this is the part where I get to talk about Tronk, which is my favorite part. Yes.

So so Tronk is was part of this consolidation resulted in a company called Tribune Publishing. And for a while, I think 2008 to maybe 2013, they rebranded all of their shit as Tronk, T-R-O-N-C, Tronk, all lower case, I believe. And this in theory stood for Tribune online content. Tronk. Tronk, Tronk, yeah. And what Tronk did was like it was going to try to like do the private equity model

where you buy up the newsroom and like asset strip it. But instead of asset stripping it just for like a personal payday, they were going to try to like negotiate their way out of the end of print by pivoting everything to video. Yeah. So it meant that like you would collect your like like a newsroom full of crusty, goddamn newsmen and you'd be like, yeah, you're you're a vine guy now. And this this worked exactly as well as you could imagine. It's the same like basically it was like if you if you consumed media at this time

between 2000, 19, 2013, you were aware of this because all of a sudden everything was acting like Buzzfeed and like your newspaper would be like doing listicles or be doing quick hits like that. And it was just an insanely weird time. It didn't work. A lot of papers went bankrupt. They were probably going to do that anyway. But I think Tronk did them no favors. Yeah. Oh, God.

Like, just just give me the private equity guy instead, who's just going to like strip all of the copper wiring out of the walls, like carry off the the fucking the water cooler stick. Tell everyone to stick to sports. Yeah, give me that guy instead of like, we're going to do tiktoks. Do you know how to do a Harlem shake? No, no, this is this is like Zynga. This is like Paul McChurnalism.

He's been working here for 60 years. Go make a tiktok. It's just a pacemaker sadly going in the background. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Well, here we are. The Tennessee of the Red Prophet of all has

you know, done what it did. This is all like what disruption is. That's what startups do. I mean, Uber is proved that the rate of profit can fall below zero and capitalism can just keep going. It doesn't matter. Yeah, the only the only way that you can now make media like this, now make written media is either you are like an Instagram influencer who has like a newsletter or you're in you are like

enmeshed in the patronage web of some fucking Latter Day Borgia or you're a tech company and then you like you can value yourself at like 18 trillion dollars and you can also try putting up a paywall and see where that gets you. That's the like last gasp at the Alamo here of print media is like, oh, what if we make the words fade out? Surely then people will pay money per month to to read more about how Transphobia is actually good. I have I have an inquire or subscription.

I mean, that's like I will give it to them. I won't give it to anyone else now. Unspare. But it's also like online, baby. Well, speaking of patronage webs, feel free to subscribe to our Patreon for bonus episodes. Our next episode will be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's going to happen. It's real. It's not a recurring joke. No. God. Feel like we've ended on like a more depressing note than usual. It's it's fine. What I'll do is if Liam, if you want to like if you have anything to plug,

you do that now, I'll play us off with like I have I have a musical drop to play us off with. Yeah, real quick. I just wanted to say again, thank you for giving your money to people who can use it a lot more than we do right now. And please continue to do that. Like I said, one of the things I'm going to do this week is probably talent thrill, how much has actually been donated. I just wanted to say I'm very proud of the people who have donated,

very proud of our listeners, the problematic. And actually, I wanted to say that Ross has talked to Union Pete and we know nothing. I did. Well, yeah, we were both day drunk at the same time. We decided to regroup later, which we haven't done yet. I'll do that tomorrow, I guess. No, I'm going to edit the episode tomorrow. It'll be up on Wednesday, which at some point will be in the future.

Who's listening to this? At some point in the future, we will have a shirt which you will be able to buy. If capitalism has not collapsed entirely. If it has by then, we have a shirt that you will be able to get for free. Baby, I'll stencil some shit on. Yeah, absolutely. We will like what we need to do is we need to like liberate the Eagles t-shirt cannon. And sixes, they've got to have that storage.

I'll see if I'll write an email and see if I can borrow it. Yeah. And we'll just do some indirect fire shit like the Iron Command at Sightung. You'll just like you'll buy the shirt and then we'll just like indirect fire. We'll just like the shirt will come through your roof. Yes. We will we will mortar your house with t-shirts. We will, depending on how, depending on how far away you are, I mean,

we have two bases of operations, Philadelphia and Glasgow. We have mortars, we have howitzers, we have regular large port guns. If need be, we will invest in intercontinental ballistic t-shirt missiles. Baby, that's right. She's tossing t-shirts out the back. Yeah. I think that leads us to playing out with like to try and now that we've restored some optimism, a musical salute to print media.

It was often dog shit. It's now dead. Kind of sad, but whatever. Bye, everybody. No, feet is in. Yeah, I was like 50 50 on you either doing that or like that. That last episode of the newsroom where they did that's how I got to Memphis. Oh, yeah, no, it's like Shannon Doa, isn't it?

Yeah. Oh, fuck, no. Shannon Doa is the one where the like the dude just like fucking strokes out and like falls and cracks his head. Yes. And it's the funniest shit in the world because it's just like it's not played. It's played completely straight. And then he's just like,

the donk. Yes, Shannon. Yeah, no, rules. Oh, my God, Aaron Sorkin has a brain disease. Anyway, all right. It's the end of the podcast. We're done. It's over.

I'm calling it. All right, go home. Bye, everyone. Go home. It's over. Why are you still here? Go home. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Yes.