- New York Times: Nutrition Label Gets a Design Overhaul
Some of the ideas to overhaul food nutrition labels are pretty clever. - New York Times: After Aiding Republicans, Business Groups Press Them on Debt Ceiling
The Chamber of Commerce threw the full weight of their support behind getting Democrats replaced by Republicans in last year's congressional election. Now those very Republican Congressmen are refusing to raise the debt ceiling—or support anything that Democrats or the president would agree to—and that's making the chamber crazy. (Businesses know it's essential to raise the debt ceiling.) The chamber has nobody to blame but themselves. - The Brads: This is Why Your Newspaper is Dying
Nine examples of obvious mistakes that nearly every newspaper is making online. And, no, "paywalls" are not on the list.
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“Now those very Republican Congressmen are refusing to raise the debt ceiling”
Um, the House (GOP) has already passed one bill that raises the debt ceiling, and will (almost assuredly) pass another one today. It’s not like the majority of the GOP won’t ever vote to raise it.
RE Newspapers: More: The Daily Progress’ deleting the entire archive. Also, newspapers that post an article, then change the url a little while later. So annoying.
I wasn’t referring to all Republicans, but rather the group of far-right freshman Republicans who flat-out refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Some of those folks were supported by the Chamber, which provides some pretty rich irony here.
This is why I left the Republican Party 40 years ago, there was Nixon foolishly swaggering about the Whitehouse talking to portraits about his Silent Majority. Bob Dole had to go aboard with a cadre of party officials and tell him it was over.
The ‘pub political ethos IS fantasy. They’re starring in their own make believe movie, alongside actors George C. Scott and John Wayne. This is the root of the Reagan worship. He lived a fantasy. It was, and is an embarrassment to the real heroes who carved out America.
Obama put entitlements on the table. Freakin’ Liberal gold. Medicare, Medicaid, SS…Third rail shit…And the rightwing walked away, choosing to DEMAND cuts to discretionary funding over 10 years. Piddly stuff that they could easily negotiate in appropriations a few months from now. They could have bargained for the big stuff, the New Deal covenants they love to hate. But in the end it was just too intoxicating to go with the fantasy and Stick it to tha’ man. Losers, willing to take America to Loserville. I’ve never been more proud to call myself a Democrat.
The “Your Content Takes Up Less Than 20% Of The Page” image on that dying-newspapers post illustrates yet another problem with the business: taking generic, network-served ads that yield depressingly little income–and, in the case of the “tiny belly” ad you see there, also happen to be a scam.
Rob, that’s an important point often discussed in media circles but, now that you mention it, I think gets rarely considered elsewhere. So much online ad space is unsold (by the media outlet) that it gets passed off to be filled by Google et al for cut-rate unsold space fees, leaving those news sites full of useless, scammy advertising. The Deck is an example of how advertising can actually be really useful. I read a bunch of Deck member sites (Daring Fireball, Kottke, and Metafilter, in particular), and I’m happy to see those ads, because they’re quite likely to apply to me. Likewise, those member sites are happy to run those ads, because they’re both useful to their readers and not embarrassing. I don’t know how publishers can be proud of their websites with these embarrassing ads showing up.
Not incidentally, I followed your link to the scam article, which displayed an ad with a scantily-clad woman, leaning back, hair falling over one eye, and looking straight at the camera. Below her, apropos of nothing, was the text “Obey This Weird Trick To Stay Asleep All Night.” Adjacent to that is a terribly photoshopped image of the head of a man in his sixties on the grotesquely muscled body of a twenty-something, with the caption “Breaking: How to Build Muscle When You’re Older.” Yes, within an article about how these ads are scams, the Post is running the very scam ads about which they’re warning. Nobody at the paper decided to run those ads—they’ve just handed over their unsold inventory to their ad network, and that’s the crap that’s running for a hundredth of a penny per view.
“Now those very Republican Congressmen are refusing to raise the debt ceiling—or support anything that Democrats or the president would agree to”
And Obama & the rest of the Democrats are refusing to support anything that the House will agree to. Amazing how that works, huh?
It’s called politics, and it’s funny how bent out of shape the Left gets when Republicans don’t give in to their demands. Suddenly, it’s only one side that is being unreasonable.
? We’re talking about the Chamber of Commerce here. They’re the ones are are upset.
Thanks to the ever-rightward-moving standards of Republicans in the US, the Chamber of Commerce have now been declared left-wing socialists.