We all know the media - print media anyway - is * in trouble.
* For further comment on this word "is," please see "Is the Media, Or Are They Not?" on The Tin Lizard.
We hear it every day. The Washington Post sold out to Jeff Bezos; the New Orleans Times-Picayune is experimenting with publishing a newspaper only three times a week; the National Geographic will become a part of the Rupert Murdoch empire, with unknown results. Many speculate that National Geo may become a National Enquirer clone, focusing on "human interest" stories.
Certainly that's a pool the Washington Post has dabbled its toes in, with pap like today's "Parents Love Their Kids. Why Is Talking About It So Uncool?" wherein New Mother Jennie Yabroff protests that all her cohort joke amongst themselves about "throwing the baby out the window," whereas gee, she l-o-v-e-s her kid. (World to Jennie: It's uncool because although new mothers can't help but discuss their new charges, I suspect, assuming "new mothers" as a class have brains, it's b-o-r-I-n-g to jabber constantly about the obvious.)
But not just print media. Our network television "national" news broadcasts become ever more littered with non-news of the sort that used to be the exclusive province of local media. They open with stories about the weather, continue with stuff about sinkholes or consumer-oriented items on saving you money on your groceries, and even here in Washington D.C., the nation's capital, seldom provide anything beyond headlines on major legislation or our overseas wars. It's not clear this strategy has worked, or whether it just pushes more of us to abandon them.
But I still value the daily newspaper because from time to time, an original thought (original to me, anyway) creeps in.
Thus, by way of this long introduction, I come to praise Hayley Tsukayama's blog post about Apple ad-blocker apps, which I wouldn't have seen had it not been reprinted in the Washington Post. These apps, evidently, are becoming wildly popular. Before describing a few of them, however, the article reminds us that websites are depending on the ads for revenue that they hope will beget a prophet (er ... make that "profit"). So, there is something of a dilemma here for the user. As the writer puts it, "...you have to ask yourself: Are the negative aspects of ads enough to drive you to cut off the revenue for the site you're viewing?"
This is an interesting point. I suppose a lot depends on how intrusive or obnoxious the ad is. Among the add blockers, there doesn't appear to be one that makes that decision for you. I personally despise pop-ups, which get in the way of what you're actually trying to read/view and don't always even disappear when you tell them to, but otherwise I find I pretty much just tolerate ads on websites I use, because I do realize that they're a necessary evil.
Certainly even in the days when newspapers were much more replete with advertisements than they are now, all of us simply learned to ignore them -- pages and pages of them. And I can watch television without even really noticing the ads - although I do wonder whether the rise of ad-skipping on television, in various forms, might not have contributed to the slow dwindling of the television audience. Surely we can learn to ignore commercial messages online, too - because that's the price to be paid, if we want what we claim to want.
I no longer subscribe to any newspapers. I quit about ten years ago when I realized I wasn't bothering to read most of them. They were just soggy wet lumps I fished out of the front yard, or gutter ("on the porch" no longer exists) and threw away. As for electronic media, I've been using ad blockers for years. Recently, though, a lot of pop-ups have been getting through. That's new technology for you. Very annoying. And I'm stuck with the commercial on TV because I don't have a DVR. And they do drive me crazy. I'm convinced there's now more airtime devote to commercials than to the shows they supposedly sponsor.
Posted by: PiedType | October 05, 2015 at 09:50 AM